How to Be Succesful: Rewiring Your Brain to Be Happy in 5 Steps.

Yet another Life-Hack TED talk from Netflix. This one is Shawn Achor's talk about The Happy Secret to Better Work. Watch the video here:

Shawn's premise is this: You can't become happy by achieving success, but must instead be happy in order to achieve success. If you define happiness by your successes you will always push your definition of success one step higher, and therefor happiness will always be on the horizon. Instead, train yourself to become happy, and you will have an easier time at school, work and in your social life. This will lead to success.

This video hits hard for me. I've been know to be negative about the future, and Shawn is right if you base happiness on successes you will always be hunting for the next slightly bigger, slightly better success to hang your happiness on.

Shawn claims that you can rewire your brain by doing 5 things for at least 21 days. Here are those five things.

1. Write down three Gratitudes - Find three things that you are grateful for each day. Finding three new things each day will train your brain to find the positives in life. We often focus on the negatives; which lead to stress and disappointment.

2. Journal about good thing that happened to you in the past 24 hours. Once again, journaling will help you focus on the positive.

3. Exercise - Increases the efficiency of your circulatory and respiratory system which feed your brain all the nutrients and oxygen it needs. It also causes your brain to release positive feeling chemicals.

4. Meditate- In our go go go society it is important to train your brain to focus. Find a quiet space and do nothing for a short period of time. I have seen articles and talks suggest a minimum of 10 minutes. I will expand upon this in a future blog post.

5. Random Acts of Kindness - Each day write a letter or e-mail to someone in your social group praising them or letting them know how much they mean to you.

If you do this for at least 21 days Sahwn believes your brain will begin to adapt and feel happier, and a happy brain means increased motivation and activity. Give it a try.

PS: Even though my 30 days of creation challenge is done, I am going  to continue to blog once or twice a day for the duration of the summer. Tomorrow I will start two new challenges. Challenge one: 21 days of happiness (adapted from Mr. Achor's talk). Challenge two: 30 days of organization.

So, I will see you all tomorrow. Build those cathedrals.

-P