Welcome to 2025! May the year bring you joy, fulfilment and the best of health. As it turns out, joy and fulfilment are in fact the greatest contributors to good health.
When we feel positive emotions such as joy, fulfilment, love, optimism, gratitude, enthusiasm, curiosity, awe and wonder, we set off a cascade of chemical reactions in our brain and body that strengthen our immune system, reduce production of the stress hormone cortisol, lower inflammation, and sharpen our thinking. Positivity increases our creativity, resilience and problem-solving capacity. When we feel better, everything in our brain and body works better.
The outdated view of the human body as nothing more than a machine, has given way to the understanding that our health and wellbeing are influenced by everything we do, think, feel and believe. The better we feel emotionally, the better we function physically.
However, this is not about forcing ourselves to be positive when we’re facing a sad or distressing situation. It’s about learning to develop the habit of focusing on what’s going right, rather than wrong — in our lives, our relationships and our world. There are plenty of things we could feel stressed and devastated about whenever we hear the news, or recall traumatic events in our past. But all our experiences — the joys and the hardships — have made us the person we are today. The good times strengthen our brain and body in one way; the challenges strengthen us in other ways. Often it’s our greatest adversities that connect us more deeply to other people, that reveal courage and skills we didn’t know we had, and that bring more meaning and purpose to our lives. To this end, curiosity is one of our most underestimated resources. When something doesn’t turn out as planned, or when I find myself in a difficult or unwanted situation, I ask myself:
How can I turn this into a WIN rather than a WHINGE?
In other words, how can I become a better person through this experience?
What can I learn from this?
What does this remind me to be grateful for?
If the issue is health-related, I then focus on what I want, rather than on what I don’t want. I visualise the healing and the ideal outcome, and I play it over and over in my mind. This process actually drives healing because visualising desired outcomes prompts our body to autocorrect, and programs our brain to provide the answers we need. The same neurotransmitters are released, and the same regions of our brain are activated, when we imagine something, as when we experience it in our external reality. Visualising positive results not only gives us hope, it opens our mind to possibilities we might otherwise not have thought of.
Please share this Health-e-Byte to all the whingers in your life! But delete this line first 😉
