Hardwiring Happiness

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About

A book on simple practical tools for wiring the brain towards increased happiness.

Core method

  • On one side there is having a nourishing positive feelings. The healing part is when you start to have positive feelings about negatives. That is displacing negative life sapping energies with positives - that is the true nature of healing trauma
  • Linking positive to negative. To do this practice, you need to know both what the negative material is that you are trying to ease and heal, and what its positive antidote is.
  • Developing one's memory allows one to create vivid experiences in the mind and to remember them these could be the positive feelings that are used in the wiring of happiness. Thus, developing memory tools can help with positive mental wiring.

More

  • Liking involves enjoying, appreciating, and relishing. By wanting, I mean drivenness, insistence, compulsion, pressure, grasping after, getting attached to, craving, and clinging. I iking and wanting are different things. Wanting is different from inspiration, aspiration, commitment, intention, ambition, or passion. P86

Questions

When you hold positive thoughts prominent but allow negative associations to come in, why does the positive overwhelm the negative? Thus heal.

If you neglect negatives, they get worse. They fester. Denial is a short term solution, typically, as it will limit you later. Negatives will in fact create vulnerability for you, overreaction, unclarity. Up to stressing you, even to a shorter life! So there's clear motivation for cleaning house.

Simply, negatives put you in reactive mode.

How is the negative activated and stored? Understanding the neural mechanism reveals a solution for how to actually clear these negatives.

It does not seem that positive overwhelms negative it's just that you add positive associations which makes everything better. You can cope instead of going into a downward spiral.

What is the difference between positive thinking and hard wiring happiness

Beyond thinking, you must experience. Experience gets hard wired. Thoughts do not?

What are the key techniques for erasing or healing bad experience

How do you convert any bad feeling to a source of growth

What is the negativity bias and how did it originate

What does the acronym HEAL stand for

What is missing from this book IE what other ideas would be in the sequel

If one were to create a more sophisticated tool for sublimation and not just happiness what would that tool look like? What is the shortcoming of these methods to addressing real problem solving?

What is the length of this work to the concept of abundance?

This is answered directly in the epilogue. The author states that right now we have a world of abundance quite different than the $90 million years of human evolution 99% of that. That means right now we've got a Neanderthal mind with nuclear weapons and remaining scarcity thinking. It's going to take some time to get to an understanding that we have abundance. But the quicker we make this transition the better and that's exactly where the work of OSE lies.

What other techniques produce happiness and sublimation?

  1. Abundance Numeracy sublimation - similar techniques pursued through the rational mind where a clear understanding of the quantities of resources is enough to become extremely optimistic about the potential of humanity