Shift your set point

Just came back from a terrific conference on health coaching sponsored by Harvard Medical School and found it to be exhilarating.

Can’t share it all with you (although I’d love to) and still honor my commitment to keep my weekly post short and sweet, but today I’ll pass along one of the many nuggets that was a great takeaway from the conference.

Until recently, our level of happiness was generally considered to be much like a thermostat and our ‘set point’ tended not to fluctuate much over our lifetime.

Thanks to science, we now know differently. In fact, there are many things we can do in the course of our day (yes, even at work) which can help shift our energy in a positive direction and set in motion a cascade of neurochemicals which have the effect of raising our spirits.

Some of the latest research is showing that certain activities such as practicing kindness and gratitude, visualizing one’s best possible self, expressing optimism, and the use of digital apps have the potential to liberate us from our predisposition toward negativity.

With the increased awareness you’re experiencing from practicing mindful meditation (you did read last week’s post, right?), you’ve created some space for new ways to expand your well-being in measurable ways.

And it can be done by adding a couple of simple exercises to your daily repertoire.

In the following section I talk about a specific program (it doesn’t cost anything) which provides you with some of these happiness boosting techniques.

Moving up the happiness scale