Category: The positive perspective

The reality we come to accept as our life is made up of several elements. Some are perceived as good, some bad, and some neutral.

What we don’t realize is that the way we perceive life situations through our five senses actually sculpts our brain which is the ultimate master of our body.
This is a simplified view of a complex process known as neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our brain to re-organize itself— chemically, physically, and structurally— in order for us to change the way our body and ourselves respond to life situations.

The use of imaging techniques in the field of neuroscience has lent us much knowledge on the way our brain behaves in the face of negative and positive experiences. We now know that when we focus on the negative aspects of an experience, our brain engages our resources to confront a threat. For example, a tiger is approaching. This in turn draws all of our metabolic energy from the executive function part of our brain and from our vital functions and processes, and directs that energy to our large muscle groups. Now we can run from the tiger. But this energy shift places us in a temporary state of cognitive and emotional impairment.

On the contrary, when we focus on positive aspects of any experience, we operate from the space of a balanced nervous system, which has been proven to provide many benefits. We feel better, find more creative solutions to problems, experience less cardiovascular diseases, improve our immune function, and reduce anxiety, depression and overall symptoms of stress.

Our brain evolved with a strong negative bias that has kept us alive and ahead of the tigers for millions of years. Now, that negative bias is more harmful than helpful.

What can we do, little by little, to change the neural pathways of our brain, so that we can use it to tap into our most valuable resources and experience life from our best self?

The great big fall

Fall is my favorite season!

There is something special about the smell of the earth after the first raindrops of the season. I am enamored by the way the foliage gets washed away by the rain to make space for new beginnings. The temperature drops, inviting us to make a fire and snuggle up to our favorite person while eating slow-cooker delicacies.

But I also love fall because it reminds me of an undeniable part of our human experience: the regular and never-ending points in our journey when things “fall” apart in our life, and we experience a significant amount of discomfort and suffering. Our automatic response is to think that “when such and such a thing happens, when we arrive to a certain outcome, when we realize a specific goal, then we will no longer suffer.”

However, the truth is: we cannot go through life unless we experience a significant amount of suffering. After all, there are many things in life that we cannot control that impact the fiber of our life and experience.

The question then becomes, what do we do when things fall apart?

  1. What if we temporarily make friends with pain and let it tell us its’ secrets?

One of the human choices that often leads to things falling apart in life is betrayal. In its simplest form, as our dear Brene Brown says, betrayal is “to choose to not connect with someone when the opportunity is there.” The secret the pain of betrayal opens us up to is that betrayal is the mutual choice between two people to feed a lie. We humans can only behave based on our level of consciousness at a given time. It’s nothing personal. But we too, play an active role in any betrayal in our lives. If we focus on what is within our control, we can use a betrayal as an opportunity to address and question what it is deep down that we were afraid of. We can look at what it is that we wanted that compelled us to play a part in this story. Although betrayal leads us to doubt ourselves and our choices, it is a great opportunity to identify illusions. When we use painful experiences of betrayal to uncover what it is that we were truly afraid of, we slowly but surely learn to neutralize our fear, harvest its pearls of wisdom, and open up to the possibility of learning to trust in ourselves again.

2. Challenge yourself to identify the little things that give you comfort during difficult times.

When things fall apart, we tend to hide our pain in ways that are not conducive to our wellbeing. We tend to withdraw, get down on ourselves, maybe drink an extra glass of wine, or lose sleep by mulling over the specifics of the disaster we encountered. It is important to keep an ongoing list of things, situations, and people that provide us with a sense of goodness for when difficult times show up in our lives.

This could be a walk in nature; listening to a positive Ted Talk; cooking your favorite, wholesome meal; creating a little piece of art; or committing to a daily, loving kindness meditation.

But most importantly, during difficult times, we need to resist the urge to stay isolated, and instead connect with people that make us feel cared for. Social connection is one of the most compelling antidotes to the toxicity of discomfort and one that is abundantly available to us, as long as we are willing to nurture it.

  1. Focus on taking just the very next step.

When things fall apart, our automatic response is to feel helpless and let our internal resources be used toward imagining a catastrophe! We don’t consciously realize the power of our mind to hi-jack our nervous system and shut down our ability to access the executive part of our brain. For example, studies show that rejection and toothache both activate the exact same region of our brain (anterior cingulate). If we focus on simply determining what is the very next step we can take to turn a situation around, we can slowly but surely disengage from operating from a threatened, defensive state and turn on our executive part of our brain, activating the reward centers through action (pre-frontal cortex). Mastery is the result of consistent small steps daily. Don’t worry about the imaginary disasters that could come, but focus on the very one thing you can do now to move you toward the direction that will bring you back to balance.

  1. Remember the impermanence of everything, and practice being comfortable in discomfort.

Whether you pay attention to the changes of colors in the trees around you, the challenges you have already overcome, or a memory from childhood, everything in life is a temporary perspective.

Nothing lasts forever. Regardless of how challenging an experience may be, simply remembering that nothing lasts forever can be just the ticket to calm our nervous system down and feel comfort at times of discomfort. A realistic outcome to shoot for to ensure that the trajectory of our life remains positive is looking for growth in discomfort. Breakdowns in life can be profound moments of breakthroughs, much like the seed that has to break through the earth to bring forth beautiful blossoms in spring.

  1. Accept that some days will be dreadful no matter what we do.

We can do all the right things, take all the right steps, incorporate powerful daily practices, and yet we will never be able to avoid experiencing moments of ultimate disappointment and dread. We could get laid off, lose someone we love, or experience an ultimate betrayal from someone who we thought was our number one confidant. Life is an incredible adventure of never-ending highs and lows. Embrace the fact that some days will be a complete disaster no matter what we do.

I can’t say that the series of victories and unfortunate events don’t leave a lasting mark on our life experience. Yet the miracle always happens.

Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise again, the school bus will show up in time to pick up the kids for school, and you will encounter your neighbor’s good morning wish as you take your dog for a walk.

Despite how bad a great fall may seem, every new day gives us the opportunity to start over and change our life—one decision, one choice, and one step at a time—bringing along fresh perspectives and ingredients: new leaves on the trees, new loves, new joys, new sensations.

What is a healthy relationship?

Love has been the nucleus and heart of human experience throughout the history of mankind. Wars and battles have unraveled under its spell!

Love has touched the souls of many artists, poets, and geniuses, as well as all of us mere folk, who today have established that having a “healthy love relationship” is the number one goal of existence, beyond financial and professional success!

In fact, George Vaillant, the director of the longest longitudinal study of human development, which was designed to uncover the parameters that allow people to live happy and healthy lives, summarized the conclusion of the seventy-five year study with three simple words: “Happiness is love.” (Vaillant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.)

Love appears to be so important, yet only a small percentage of us have succeeded in cultivating long-lasting, healthy relationships.

Why are we having such a hard time arriving at successful outcomes in love relationships? What are the real obstacles in the way of grasping the powerful force of healthy relationships? What does a healthy relationship look like?

Here is what I learned from reviewing the most substantiated, evidence-based research and from my own humble experience when it comes to what healthy love is all about.

  1. A healthy relationship involves seeing things for what they really are.

We seem to have this conditioned notion that someday someone will come along that will be our perfect “match.” This person will know just what to say and how to say it with the magical ability to speak our “love language.” This someone will never disappoint us or let us down. This unreasonable expectation can be a real culprit to a healthy relationship, because when we meet really wonderful people that have a lot to offer, they cannot possibly fulfill this unrealistic standard. Then we tend to blame them for our needs not being met.

The end result is rupture of the relationship and an endless search for the phantom “perfect one.” If we look at the definition of the word relate in the dictionary, we will find that “to relate” actually means “to make a connection between two different things.” A healthy relationship involves committing to the practice of becoming better and better at making a connection between our differences with another. If we want a healthy relationship, it’s time we let go of the search for the phantom “perfect one” and turn toward the real people who are here and now willing to hold our hand through the everyday challenges of life.

  1. A healthy relationship requires honoring and embracing how powerful a love connection truly is.

In the aftermath of every failed relationship, we have the tendency to blame love (along with the actual failed relationship or the person) and minimize the importance of love in our life, coming to the conclusion that we are better off without it!

The latest findings in biology and neuroscience clearly confirm that we are hard- wired for connection and that our interactions with loved ones act as regulators in the brain priming our emotions. The more strongly connected we are with someone, the stronger the mutual force. Healthy, positive relationships seem to have a tremendous impact on our nervous system. They contribute to a well- documented diminished-threat-related activation in our brain in the face of a situation that is perceived as stressful, which is linked to powerful benefits in cardiovascular and overall health. In order to be able to cultivate a healthy relationship, we must embrace the power of a secure attachment, recognizing it as the primary drive it truly is and the role it plays in our happiness and health.

  1. A healthy relationship is willingness and commitment to growth. There is no better mirror to our beauty and our unresolved baggage than a love relationship. It is easy to go through life alone, maintaining the facade we have built of who we want the world to think we are. When we choose to be seen for who we really are it can be unnerving and scary.

The opportunity for growth can be found in truly understanding that we are reflexive beings driven by memory. This means that anytime a life situation that is perceived through our five senses awakens negative memories from the past and triggers the emotion of fear, events will start happening without our permission in such a way that we ourselves sabotage a positive outcome of the situation.

A love relationship where the stakes are so high is a potent trigger to past experiences that did not turn out well and resulted in pain. When parts of unresolved trauma are activated, what’s called implicit memory generates negative emotions. Because emotions are so powerfully contagious, if someone talks to you in the way that a parent used to talk to you, it can trigger a reaction in you as though what happened back then is actually happening now.

An example can be shared using capable, intelligent, educated adults that were victims of abuse in childhood. It is well-documented in literature that adult victims of childhood abuse that have not made a coherent story of what happened to them, when depending on another, will have a difficult time regulating their negative emotions and without much cognitive awareness will employ deactivating strategies to take away the felt internal turmoil. That means that even if we are lucky enough to meet a person who has proven their loyalty to us and has done enough to earn our trust, debilitating fears from the past can drive our behavior in the present, in order to sabotage our relationship with them. If we want a healthy relationship, we must be ready to face and understand how our past still keeps us hostage and acts as an insidious culprit to our ability to relate to another in a healthy way.

  1. If we want to have a healthy relationship with another, we must first choose to have a healthy relationship with ourselves.

We all want to profess how healthy we are, and we have a hard time recognizing any parts of us that are actually unhealthy. We want to avoid feeling pain, and it is understandable that we have developed certain patterns of behavior to maintain a sense of internal safety, including being in denial about the things we do that are unhealthy.

But when we are finally motivated to make positive change based on the unhappy results we are getting from our current behavior, we can clearly see what it is that we do that is a true obstacle to all we ever want in life and love.

One great area of fertile ground is our own incongruences—when our words and behavior conflict. This can show up in subtle ways, like when we declare one person is the most important one in our microcosm and then we choose to not connect with them when the opportunity shows up. But it can also show up in more direct ways, for example, in the form of actual, conflicting messages we give to the people we love and who love us, like telling them how important the relationship is to us and that they are our ideal partner, but when they are willing to commit to us, we bolt!

Our own contradictions that stand out like bad weeds cause a lot of unnecessary suffering for us and the few people that truly love us. FMRI scans of people that are promised something sweet and instead get something sour reflect a tremendous energy drain in the person’s brain who is burdened with having to close the gap of the palpable contradictions presented to them. Not to mention that these contradictions are an incredible obstacle to what it is that we truly want.

A healthy relationship is not something that happens organically to a select, lucky few. It is a principled way of being that we agree to cultivate with another that is based on goodwill, sensitivity, and trust, as the ultimate way to reinforce our sense of safety and weather the ups and downs of life. It is a commitment we make that provides a safety net that keeps our nervous system calm and gives us access to the executive functioning part of our brain, allowing us to focus on both our everyday and our higher purpose in life.

There are well-substantiated, evidenced-based methods to realizing the noble and powerful universal goal of healthy love, which is hardwired into our DNA. I have two that are my personal favorites.

  • The Gottman Institute’s simple seven step formula on how to make relationships work is backed up with three decades of research and can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy. The art and science of love workshops the Gottman institute offers, is a powerful weekend workshop to practice the seven steps in real life.
  • Sue Johnson’s model of emotionally-focused therapy (EFT), which defines a secure attachment as simply when each partner is accessible, responsive, and

emotionally attentive, is also backed up with substantial research. Completing the seven steps of EFT (with a certified EFT clinician), has been proven to yield a staggering 75% positive result in overcoming past injuries in relationships and 95% improvement rates.

So, yes, we can take practical approaches to fill the emotional bank of the person we love by turning toward them with acts of caring and goodwill in every opportunity we have, or we can even commit and complete powerful, Emotionally-Focused Therapy couples sessions to repair past indiscretions in our current relationship.

But in all fairness, nothing will ever truly reverse the trajectory of our relational health until we win the battle with the most inconspicuous culprit of all—ourselves.

We are all capable of mastery in every area of our lives, including love relationships. The most significant decision we will ever make in our lives is to choose to invest in work on ourselves that allows our own mastery and our best self to resurface.

At that point, and only at that point, will we be able to truly understand how to support a healthy relationship and how we can accomplish the noble outcome of a healthy love relationship which is within our control.

What is emotional intelligence?

What on earth is emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goldman, psychologist and best-selling author of the masterpiece Emotional Intelligence, defines emotional intelligence as the ability to read our own and others’ emotions and use this to our advantage. 

The statistics on the importance of cultivating emotional intelligence are compelling: studies show that emotional intelligence far surpasses the importance of IQ and experience and has been proven to be 85% responsible for financial success.

But do we know, in a practical sense, how to harness its power?

I know I did not!

The environment I grew up in (albeit my norm) was often fueled with contradictions, alternating highs and lows, and frequent “emotional hi-jacks.” Sometimes it was others that would lose their ability to act in an emotionally-intelligent way and, often, it was me. In the old country Greek household that I grew up in, little was known about consciousness, or healthy expression of emotions and needs. My beautiful, charismatic, “salt of the earth” parents grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, and concepts like self-awareness and emotional intelligence were foreign concepts not aligned with their survival needs.

Hence, I too, adopted their approach. Whenever negative feelings would surface, I would handle them with a dose of confrontation, an ounce of criticism, two pounds of defensiveness, and several door slams and silent treatments.

Emotional intelligence, although part of popular culture today, remains a foreign concept to many of us. However, I finally recognized the impact of not being able to make intelligent use of my own emotions. When I became a mother, I invested quite a bit of time in understanding emotional intelligence and how I could cultivate it, in order to improve my relationships and, hence, my life.

Here are the biggest ideas I dissected from the experts on the topic and from my humble personal experience.

  1. What drives our emotions is often hidden deep in the unconscious part of ourselves, until we choose to bring to the surface experiences we have swept under the rug into the light. Until then, we will act on impulse, without quite knowing why we sometimes “put our foot in our mouth!”
  2. When an experience in the present moment touches a “raw spot” from a past experience (although often outside of the realm of our awareness) it will trigger a cascade of events, wherein our nervous system will work with several other body systems to protect us from the perceived threat. This is our fight or flight response at work, known as “an emotional hi-jack.”
  3. When our fight or flight response gets triggered, the executive-functioning part of our brain switches off, and we operate from a temporary cognitive and perceptual impairment.
  4. Our behavior is driven by our emotions. It does not matter how high our IQ is, how many degrees we have, how well we have done in life, or how successful we are. Our behavior will not be effective unless we figure out what we feel, why we feel the way we do, and then actively use our resources to intercept the cataclysmic impact of negative feelings. The great thing is that we have the power to do this!

The next time you find yourself in a situation when you feel that your emotions are getting the best of you, you can ask yourself my favorite step-by-step list of questions to ensure you are making intelligent use of your emotions:

  1. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling?”

The key here is to make sure you use feelings only. When we are emotionally charged because a situation has triggered a negative experience from our implicit memory, we tend to attach the words “I feel” to what is really a story. For example, “I feel that my spouse is lying,” or “I feel that I do not deserve this.” Stories keep us and our nervous system hostage and use our valuable resources for defense and not for healthy growth and restoration. There are four basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Understanding which descriptive feelings are triggered in us is extremely valuable in our ability to choose our own state and, therefore, our chosen behavior, like our ability to make a connection with another in spite of our differences.

  1. Then ask yourself, “What about this situation makes me feel this way?”

I find that in order to answer this question, I need data that only the executive part of my brain, (the pre-frontal cortex,) has access to.

When we get emotionally hi-jacked, our metabolic energy gets redirected from our thinking brain to the large muscle groups which shut down essential functions. Therefore, by asking this question, we are able to turn our executive brain back on, redirecting our metabolic energy to where we really need it to be.

Whatever negative data our brain has dug up relating to the experience we are having in the present moment, this negative experience is not in the here and now.

But it is important to honor and bring to light whatever past experiences are still showing up for us in our present as a positive step towards letting them go.

  1. The next question is: “How much of this is the truth and how much of it is a story?”

Most of the time, our pain and suffering come from the narrative we lend to life situations and not the situations themselves. Has a friend or significant other ever stood you up? In such instances, most of the time there is a legitimate reason why someone was not able to keep their commitment to us. What gets us upset and unable to process the event in a way that keeps us in the state we need to be in to make good decisions is when we translate an event such as this into the idea that “we are obviously not important to that person.” Deciphering truths from stories is a powerful technique to regain control of our emotions so we can make an intelligent decision on how we want to handle the situation.

  1. The next question is: “What is within my control to do about this situation?”

Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop when someone does something that rubs us the wrong way, we have the option of focusing on where our power can be found, which is in what is within our control.

Knowing what we feel, why, and what we need from the other person and explaining that in a calm and factual manner allows us to move in a positive trajectory in any important relationship in our life.

  1. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “What have I learned about myself because of this situation and what will I do differently in the future?”

For energy conservation, most of our responses to life situations are automatic. Negative emotions are just part of life. Pausing, assessing the reason why we got triggered in the first place, and choosing the pearls of wisdom any challenging experience gave us, actually helps us cut out weeds from experiences of the past and cultivate new flowers in the garden we call our life experience.

A fellow Greek by the name of Plato said it best: “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”

We have no control over how and where we were raised, what tools we garnered from our early years, or how our brain was sculpted by our experiences up until this moment.

The greatest part about emotional intelligence is that cultivating it is 100% within our control.

All it takes is a commitment to the diligent practice of seeing our emotions for what they are and taking the powerful stance of befriending them as a potent antidote to the toxic impact of fear and pain that is the biggest obstacle to the complete well-being of our species.