Best ways to turn on happiness

Consider your happiness as a series of switches. Throw enough of the switches and you flip over into another state. The devil being in the details, which switches are you throwing now?

Epigenetics is a theory in biological science that our DNA code has a level of dynamic responsiveness that goes beyond just the code itself. Your genes can express themselves in different ways under different circumstances. Drink enough alcohol and you may trigger a predilection for alcoholism. Become a long distance runner and you may activate gene expression for endurance.

Seeing your happiness being entirely set in genetics is a falsehood. Your every choice has consequences. Choose to get enough sleep tonight and your health is maintained or improved. Choose to eat sugary junk food and your health may decline. If enough of your switches are thrown to negative outcomes for a long enough time, it begins to reset the hardware to function in support of that.

Even the environment of your gut biota begins to alter to support whatever you choose to eat day in and day out. Choosing junk food over healthy food encourages an internal biology that craves more of the same.

Your mental state, thoughts, frameworks and self-image play a huge role in this equation. Your habituated thought patterns begin to create grooves and wired brain circuits supporting and adding energy to your outlook.

Your thinking and feeling state can interact so one supports the other — think a negative, scary, or depressing thought and your body reacts…think enough of these and your body is in a state of reaction all the time, which then begins to affect epigenetic switches, which begins to affect your overall functioning at the cellular level.

So, bottom line is not to focus on the negative, but to focus on ways to turn those switches to their positive, beneficial effect.

There are places throughout your life where your ability to interact with the circumstances of your life could be improved. Information is increasingly limitless on how to make your life better.

Your essential choice is what processes do you choose to optimize your life, to move your switches to the positive beneficial side of the equation.

Your personal script is the internalized set of ideas, associations and self-talk you use to navigate your life and sometimes to negate or undermine your own experience through thought, action or non action.

Let’s examine the script a bit. The script at root is designed to protect you. Even when it’s shouting in your mind that things suck, that people suck, that life sucks, that things are NOT the way you want them to be, the root reasoning for the script’s existence is to protect you.

We are scripted in a lot of what we do. Habitual actions, cultural programs, language, technology…..scripting underlies all that we do on some level. Rather than reject the script’s negative messages outright, you might ask what the script is seeking to protect you from. Uncomfortable or unacknowledged feelings, perhaps outcomes that seem like they might detract from your well-being, status, or identity. At some level, much of what we protest against is a perceived attack against our identity, which is a virtual construct, a trained concept drilled into us over time by other people, parents, friends, society.

We also have powerful biological drives that underlie all our actions. These drives are manipulated by cultural forces in order to drive behavior. Shame, guilt, sexual desire and pleasure, status seeking, need for acceptance and community. It’s easy to see the actions of marketing and social influence throughout our lives. We live in communities and are bound to friends and family through love and connection. These bonds and needs can also used to influence and drive messages.

Our script run continuously in our heads, commenting, creating virtual realities in our heads about good, bad, important, irrelevant, acceptable, shameful, and on and on and on.

As reasonable actors in the parade of life, it’s not so much we want to defeat the script. It’s part of us. We want to skillfully use the script, listening to its guidance where it adds to the quality of our lives, ignoring it when it threatens to upset our equilibrium, self-worth or well-being. As a reasonable being, having a toolkit to use when the script gets out of control is helpful and recommended.

Some of these tools might be:

Everything you can do to clean up, clear up, empower and bring your attention and awareness to the present moment in a mindful, conscious and loving way improves the experience of your life in an immediate and powerful fashion. After all, your life happens in every now moment. Not in the future, not in the past, not in your memory or your projections of the future (good or bad). Right NOW!

Being present is a powerful state of being. The more you practice this, the more wonderful your life tends to be, if only because looking at the world around you in a state of conscious appreciation is simply so much fun.

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