Focusing On Positivity Changed My Life

(mouse click) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (bird cawing) Hi, I'm Dora, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday. So most mornings, I have a rising ritual or a few things that I like to do to really help set the tone for my day. Since I've started working at Headspace, I've started to meditate way more. And as a way to deepen my own personal practice, I've stopped using music or any guidance in my meditations. I simply focus on the sounds in my immediate space. I start by closing my eyes, then letting my focus rest on whatever I notice first. Normally it starts with the low humming of my fridge. Then I begin to notice the sounds of cars driving by outside my house, and then it drifts to the birds just outside my window. The more that I focus, the more aware I become of the interesting sounds and things around me. It reminded me of this phenomenon that I learned while in university called the Reticular Activation System. The RAS is a part of the brain that helps us focus on more important information and discard everything else. Think of it as a nightclub bouncer for our brains, where it's in charge of filtering all the sensory information that we perceive every single day. It filters sounds, taste, colors, and images, helping us to focus on just the right amount of information. And we've all used this before. For example, if you're thinking about buying a new car and then all of a sudden, you start to see that car everywhere, that's the RAS in action. And this mechanism had me thinking about if it was possible to train ourselves to see the good in everything, knowing that this selective focus is actually an innate part of our being. How can we get back to that, being more intentional with our focus? So something that I've been practicing as a way to train myself is going a few days or weeks without complaining. Because complaining essentially is hyper-focused on the more negative aspects of life. Growing up, I watched how complaining and gossiping was a way to create connection. And now that I'm older, I'm learning that this creates a false sense of community with others. Not only that, but it doesn't feel good in my mind and body to complain. And what's interesting is that there's science behind complaining. There's certain chemicals and neurotransmitters at fire when we complain, and there's also a temporary endorphin boost that we get, which is why we can get so caught up in focusing on what's not going right. Initially, when I started to challenge myself to complain less, it was actually really hard because complaining has just become so much a part of my normal dialogue. Sometimes I wouldn't even be aware that I was complaining. But in the last year, what I've realized is that by meeting complaints with a sense of curiosity and compassion, I found...