How to Train Your Brain to Focus on the Positive

If you are an excessive worrier, like me, it means you are highly skilled at spotting potential threats in your environment. This ability could keep you alive if you lived in the middle of a warzone, but under normal conditions it prevents you from getting the most out of life. The good news is you can train your brain to focus on the positive.

The Amazing Results of Training My Brain to Focus on the Positive

My tendency to focus on the negative has prevented me from reaching my potential. This is why for the last few weeks, I’ve been taking concrete steps to retrain my brain. I’m already enjoying some real benefits from this effort including:

• I’m dealing much better with problems – I take action instead of just worrying.
• My sense of humor is returning because I’m not worried all the time.
• I feel far more creative
• I’m getting more work done – I’ve increased my productivity by about fifty per cent.
• I feel great because I’m achieving so much instead of complaining about my lack of opportunities.
• I’m far less self-absorbed – this means I’m not ignoring my wife and son.
• I appreciate my life like I’ve never done in the past
• It is such a great relief to feel back on the right path again
• I’m no longer worried about depression descending like a black cloud and swallowing me up.

My new positive outlook had its first major challenge last Thursday. This turned out to be a horrible day with one thing going wrong after another – the type of day where I’d normally just give up, batten down the hatches, and wait for things to get better.

This time I didn’t give up because things weren’t going my way. I not only managed to get a lot of work done, but I also created an action plan for dealing with bad days in the future. I made time to laugh with my wife and son, and I didn’t move around the house like Mr. Misery. Instead of going to bed feeling like a loser, I felt proud of getting so much from a day that seemed to be offering so little.

How I’m Training My Brain to Focus on the Positive

In a post on here last week, I talked about my new ritual for increasing my motivation. This is something I do twice a day, and it involves thinking about all the great things in my life as well as re-living my proudest moments. I then mentally picture achieving my goals in the future.

I’ve added a new training device this week, and it is already producing some impressive results. It is similar to mindfulness but instead of just trying to focus on what’s happening right now, I focus on what’s positive right now. I’m training my mind to seek out the positive and not the negative.

I can do this positive-focus exercise anywhere. I just did it a few minutes ago when I went to pick up my son from school. There are a lot of crazy drivers here in Thailand, and I’m usually fuming by the time I get to my son’s school. Today I just kept looking for positive things as I drove (e.g. the attractive temples and people smiling). I not only kept my cool, but it made me a more careful driver.

I’ve also been experimenting with a game developed by the Baldwin Social Cognition Lab at McGill University (click on the highlighted text to try it out). I found out about this when watching the BBC Horizon documentary ‘The Truth about Personality’.

The game is very simple – you just have to pick out the smiling face from a bunch of frowning faces. The goal is to train your brain to get better at focusing on the positive. I’ve only just started experimenting with this game, but it seems like a great idea.

Can You Train Your Brain to Be Positive

I don’t agree we should just learn to live with our limitations – that’s just self-defeatist bullshit. If I followed crappy advice like that, I would have died from alcoholism years ago. Anyone who accepts excessive worry as ‘just the way I am’ is selling themselves short.

We can retrain our brains to focus on the positive – the only question is if we are willing to put in the effort to do this. The life of an excessive worrier is almost as limited as that of drunk, so I’m not going to accept this limitation – what about you?