Automating Positive Emotions

It’s very much like someone who pumps iron and makes a big bicep. The body is constantly being told to put more muscle cells right here while the brain does the same thing. If the owner says, “Pay attention to Tetris”, then more and more, there’s going to be neural pathways put down so that the brain owner can play Tetris very, very well.

So if you look back at this original picture, you can imagine Dan Z., our Tetris player, having amazing neural connections that have built up over time because he repeatedly paid attention to the same stimulus. He repeatedly paid attention to Tetris, and as he did it over and over and over again, he began to automate his ability to play that game.

You can imagine as the pieces are coming down on the screen, Dan Z. isn’t going, “What should I do with that funny L-shaped P? Should I move it over one and a couple of times over this way and then…” No, he’s just playing; it’s just happening automatically. He doesn’t have to think hardly at all, and the Tetris pieces just fall down and he moves them and he succeeds in the game. Can you all relate to that?

Are there things in your life you do that you automate? Those of you who drive a lot, it’s scary sometimes. I have a 17-year-old son who I’m teaching to drive. There are not many neural connections there. In fact, I think I can see the neural connections firing one by one; it’s frightening. But after just about 30 years of driving, for me, I can get in my car and pretty much navigate from one place in my city to another, and only when I arrive go, “How did I get here?” I was hardly aware of driving, and yet I did this very complicated, important task without changing lanes or going through red lights or making any mistakes. I could do this really complex task automatically because I trained my brain to automate the task. Are you following me? Does this make sense?

In my business, we say this, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Neurons that fire together, wire together. Which simply means that as we do more and more of the same thing, our brains get stronger and stronger at doing them. Now, the reason why I’ve told you all this is because if we can automate positive emotions into our lives, then we get that success that I talked about earlier. If we can lay down enough good neural pathways so that happiness comes more readily to us, then we will simply be happy more automatically. Does it make sense? Yeah, awesome. Okay, so it should be easy from here, right?