I was thinking about how easy it is to go from positive to negative thoughts. It’s almost like a default with me. Everything coming up roses? Focus on the dirt. I am actually training myself to think in a positive manner, by doing some brain exercises at work. We are implementing My Brain Solutions and I am the test subject. Hopefully I won’t break it…
It seems like a miracle I still have a brain to provide solutions for. But according to the Harm Reduction Network, current research shows that “Unless there has been brain damage as a result of liver failure or thiamine deficiency, the majority of brain cells of heavy drinkers are intact even though the brain has shrunk…a long period of abstinence or moderate drinking tends to restore the volume of heavy drinker’s brains back to normal.”
Yay.
Practicing Memory and Positivity…
The work I am doing on my brain, involves fun exercises where you quickly, pick “happy little bubble people” out of a crowd and pop them. Or there are timed matching exercises, where you uncover a box with a picture of an electric green brain or a question mark and match them with the same picture under other boxes. (You keep expanding the playing field until it is a big, fat blur of red dummy heads and pink earphones and transparent hearts.) There are shooting games to increase “targeting” and face building exercises where you make cheerful milieus out of mismatched parts.
The solutions are personalized, and for me they target memory and positive thinking. I’ve been doing these exercises every night, and at the very least it made me think this morning, that I needed to remember my happy thoughts. I was out of coffee and everything, including moving cherry pits from the daybed where I had eaten them sprawled like Caligula, to the kitchen garbage seemed too hard.
I was listening to a Ted Talk yesterday about the benefits of positivity and how happy people are more productive at work. The speaker, Shawn Achor said that if we can learn to be positive in the present, it turns on the learning centers in the brain and there is no end to what we can accomplish.
Now when I get home, if I can just keep a positive attitude about crawling around and finding the cherry pits I dropped and scattered under heavy furniture this morning.
And what about coffee? My Brain Solutions; and being positive in the present; and popping happy little images of people in bubbles; and productivity at the office; and coffee. Is that too much to ask for after all my brain cells seem to be plumping up nicely?
Just a big cup of java in the morning?
