Combining mindfulness and positive psychology

Mark Williamson from Action for Happiness explores how the central ideas of mindfulness and positive psychology can be combined to transform our experience of life. www.actionforhappiness.org

[@BernadetteMcFadden]

Feeling very inspired....would love to plant an orchard in my community....

[@Patricia-ok1cd]

Congratulations on the Dala Lama agreeing to be a participant in the Action for Happiness. Very enjoyable and fulfilling to listen to and watch. Thank you .

[@maggieadams8600]

Thanks for a very inspiring talk! :)

[@mettatations3036]

check out Mettatations - it's a new practice that I discovered and developed that combines Positive Psychology with Meditation, and adds in the Power of Touch, Movement, Yoga, and Breath work.

[@ajmarr5671]

Quick Motivational Procedure that you never heard of involving the management of positive affect. Want to make popcorn taste better? Then eat popcorn while watching an exciting movie. We ‘know’ this non-consciously when we buy the stuff for the latest Tom Cruise movie. The reason? Opioid-dopamine interactions. Opioid and dopamine systems are comprised of clusters of brain cells or ‘nuclei’ in the midbrain that adjoin each other. Opioids cause pleasure or ‘liking’ and are activated in sex, eating, resting, etc., and dopamine systems cause attentive arousal or ‘wanting’ and are activated by the perception or anticipation of novel and positive means-end expectancies, like that Tom Cruise movie. These two systems interact, thus if we do something pleasurable, we get attentive, and if we get attentive our pleasures increase. This also happens when we follow a resting protocol such as mindfulness, and alternate it with the anticipation and performance of meaningful behavior which may be defined by the virtual perception of novel and positive mean-end expectancies (writing your great novel or just making the bed). So just get rested and alternate with doing meaningful behavior, and you will have such ‘flow’ like experiences and find that motivation becomes pleasurable, and thus much easier. More on this on the web site of the distinguished affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan who thought much of this stuff up, all of whose research articles are available for download. A more formal explanation based on Berridge’s research (or a neurologically grounded theory of learning) is provided on pp. 5-6, and 44-51 in a little open-source book on the psychology of rest linked below. (‘flow’ discussed on pp.82-87) www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing Berridge Lab, University of Michigan sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/