This made me think of two critical elements that can help shape our happiness and success.The first is proactively looking at what it is we actually want in life. The second is looking at a key element that can help prime our minds toward the happiness and success we are looking for.

So here we are, in this moment right now, a space of awareness and choice to intentionally reflect on these 4 very important questions to help give you the support to making the change you’re most interested in.

1. Think back to when this year started — what were your expectations?  What did you want/hope for? Have any of those begun to manifest?
2. In this past week, what are you grateful for?
3. What are your intentions for the rest of the year, how would you like to be (e.g., more calm, a better listener, more focused, kinder to yourself and others, more present to friends and family?)
4. Looking forward, what are you wishing for yourself (e.g., health, feeling safe, free from fear, happiness, a sense of peace)?

Take this into the hours, days, weeks and months ahead. Making change stick is about setting an intention and repeatedly coming back to review that intention as if it was a doctor’s appointment. Repeatedly coming back and reviewing your intentions is an important thing to do to ensure making the changes you want to make.

BUT, there is something potentially even more important and that is controlling the environment you live in to maximize opportunity to make that change.

What does that mean?

Who do you surround yourself with? Is there a way to put people in your life who are supportive to the changes you want to make? That will maximize your potential.

This is exactly why I created The Now Effect Community, a free resources to support you with daily now moment reminders, a weekly support letter and a free live online monthly call where I and other special guests (i.e., Rick Hanson, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, and more) share a teaching and interact with you live to answer your important questions. You can register now for free, first call is with me starting Wednesday at 12pm PST. You don’t need to have all levels of support, just customize it and choose the one you want.

The factors included in making change truly happen are your intention, effort, strategy and controlling your environment. The latter is key to priming your mind toward success.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from. 

People meditating photo available from Shutterstock.

If you guessed the jack hammer, you’re right. But why is it that our brains are drawn toward what’s annoying or negative more than what’s pleasant and positive? And how can we rebalance this automatic nature of our minds?

This is a tricky one. It’s been well established that our brains have an automatic negativity bias. In the animal kingdom the magic rule was, as author of Just One Thing Rick Hanson puts it, “Every day, eat lunch, but don’t be lunch.” Those people whose minds were not primed to immediately target danger didn’t pass their genes on through the evolutionary chain. So our brains, over time, became more deeply ingrained with the bias toward focusing on threats and negativity.

An awareness of this bias alone can help you with the old adage “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Simply the knowledge that your thoughts are more inclined toward the negative primes your mind to begin to question these thoughts as they come. For example, in a moment you find your mind swirling on negative details you may start to also have a thought arise, “my mind has a bias toward the negative.” This thought pops you into a mindful space, a moment of clarity and choice that I call The Now Effect.

In this space you will have the awareness to ask the question “Is this thought true? What evidence do I have for this thought? Is there another way I can see this situation?” This opens the door to see opportunities and possibilities you never knew existed.

As we intentionally practice and repeat having these experiences they get stored as implicit memories. These are the memories that influence our immediate snap judgments and decision making from moment-to-moment.

So imagine a time where you get caught in a swirl of automatic negative thinking about the future, yourself, or the past and seconds later an awareness comes over you like a moment of grace allowing you to break free from this cycle and into a space of choice to be your own best friend in that moment instead of a reactive enemy.

The truth is, just reading this right now has already primed your mind to see these moments of choice to break free from the confines and unhealthy habitual patterns in the mind and into a space of choice, possibility and freedom.  As intentionally practice this, you’ll literally retrain the auto-pilot of the mind toward healthier and more effective ways of responding to life, this is one of the greatest gifts of the Now Effect.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates  a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Man with jackhammer photo available from Shutterstock.

For example, if I were to get pulled over by the police for speeding I might think “the world is out to get me” or “I need to slow down.” I may miss the possibility that this may have saved me from an upcoming accident. Some people say life is like a blank canvas, go ahead and paint your masterpiece.

The problem with that statement is that life is not like a blank canvas because we bring all of our past experiences, woundings, traumas, and triumphs with us to the seat. These inform that immediate snap judgment that occurs beneath our awareness in any given moment.

If you were abused as a child that is going to have an instant effect on how you view and interpret relationships and the world. If you are a veteran who has just come back from war and saw some of your friends wounded or killed, that is going to affect how you make meaning of many different things in life. Many different forms of therapy ask us to shift the way we seeing things, have a different outlook on life.

It’s not so easy.

However, it’s also important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, says that people can survive any experience if they learn to make a more positive meaning out of it. He says, “even the worst circumstance can be transformed by our minds.”  We do walk around the world shaped by our experiences and the meaning we give to events can have a dramatic effect on how we feel emotionally and physically.

Here’s a sign that makes this point:

The fact is the moment we are aware of the meaning we are giving events is the moment we have stepped out of auto-pilot and into a space of clarity and have experience the Now Effect. To begin to train this to happen more often and cultivate a flexible mind, practice being on the lookout for the meaning you are giving events. Think of your initial interpretation as one slice of a pie and then from this space of awareness asking, “what’s another way I can see this?”

Notice your initial responses to these and then consider the other:

• When the boss walks down the hall and doesn’t say hello does that mean that s/he is mad at you or that s/he is stressed?
• Does showing your emotions mean a sign of weakness or a sign of courage?
• If you get turned down by a job, does that mean that it’s the end of the world, or potentially giving you the opportunity to land a job that you would like better?
• If you’ve just been laid off, does it mean life is over or a new start?
• If s/he’s not calling you back, does that mean s/he just isn’t that into you or that s/he is just busy?

What did you notice with your interpretations? There are all kinds of examples like this that come to us on a daily basis. When we’re feeling particularly anxious, depressed, or panicky during the day it seems almost impossible to perceive things any other way than with negative or crisis-oriented judgment. The truth is, an event could almost mean anything. See if you can try and practice seeing other pieces of the pie and then you be the judge as to how that shifts the way you feel.

As always, please share our thoughts and comments below, your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Ecstatic woman photo available from Shutterstock

Even though we believe our thoughts represent reality, the truth is, our thoughts are not facts. A lot of us live without an awareness of this, operating mostly from a state of auto-pilot, sleepwalking through life.  The good news is we can train our minds to become more aware of this automaticity, get perspective and tune into what really matters.

Here’s an example I often do with my own patients to illustrate why we don’t need to believe everything we think:

Scenario one:

You’re walking down the street feeling particularly depressed, heavy, and hopeless one day and see a friend walking by. The friend looks up at you, but just continues walking without saying hello.

What thoughts come to mind? How do you feel now?

Scenario two:

You’re walking down the street and feeling pretty well, you’re feeling light on your toes, warm, with a smile on your face. A friend walks down the street and looks up at you without saying hello.

What thoughts come to mind now?

Most people I do this with usually respond to the first scenario with some self-blame or self-judgment. “What did I do,” “He hates me,”  or “I’m no good.” Most people respond to the second scenario with a curiosity about what is going on with the other person. “Is he having a bad day,” “that was strange,” or “I hope he’ll be ok.”

The fact is thoughts are temporary and fleeting and when we’re not feeling well, our minds become a magnet for negative thoughts and skewed interpretations of what is going on. When we start thinking and ruminating on these thoughts, they tend to create a snowball effect on the rest of our constitution. If we cling to exaggerated negative thoughts in our minds, (e.g., “he didn’t look at me, that’s because I’m fat, nobody likes me and nobody ever will”), this will certainly have an effect on how our bodies feel, bring on emotions of anxiety, sadness, anger, or others, make us feel like isolating and before we know it, we are either in a full blown depressed mood, a panic attack, or both.

You might say, “Well, I can’t help it, this just happens and I feel I have no control.” I would say that in that moment, you might feel that way because you are unaware of the cycle that is hijacking you. You are caught in the future worrying about the terrible things that could be, or caught in the past with memories and regrets of things you wish would have been different.

There might really be feelings of sadness, anger, or shame there.  The moment you notice this is the moment you are sitting in that space between stimulus and response, a space of clarity and choice and that is The Now Effect. The more the now effect occurs, the more often you’ll start noticing it like moments of grace throughout the day.

In this space of awareness we can apply some mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness means to acknowledge the feelings that are there, not judge them as good or bad, but let them be. This may bring up healing feelings of self-compassion and calm as you realize how much you are suffering in the moment. When you notice self-judgments arise, you can label them as such, and gently bring your mind back to just being with the feelings that are there.

There is a more gentle, compassionate and healing nature to this approach than the usual cycle of self judgment and critical mind that we’ve been used to for so long. This is not to say don’t ever have judgment or think about the past or future, but to do it on your watch rather than letting your mind run off with it and deepening your suffering.

Here are 4 steps to increase your chances of breaking free from a downward spiral and experiencing the Now Effect:

1. Intentionally be on the lookout for the mind snowballing or when you’re in a low mood. This will prime your mind to pop out of it more often.
2. Bring awareness in that moment to how you are feeling. Name the feelings if possible.
3. Think about how your interpretation of the situation may be influenced by the mood you are in.
4. If you are feeling an uncomfortable emotion or pain, apply some self-compassion and do something pleasurable or kind for you that day. This will send the message internally that you care for yourself and allow for the discomfort to come and go quicker as it naturally would.

As you practice and repeat this with intention, like all things, it will start to become more automatic. In other words, rewiring a healthier and more mindful auto-pilot.

As always, please feel free to share your own stories, comments, or questions below. Your additions here provide a living wisdom for all of us to benefit from.

Man walking photo available from Shutterstock

“May we all recognize in this New Year that the moments of our lives are rare and precious. Open to them, Bask in them, We are alive.”

The reality is we often hold things that are rare in our world to be precious. These rare things are held to a high value, whether it’s gold, an unbroken sand dollar on a beach, or the short time that a baby is a baby before growing up.

If you peel the lens back for a moment you can see our lives in this very same way. We’re a blip in time in relation to the life of this planet we stand on and this Universe we live in.  All the moments of our lives are rare and precious and it’s incredibly important to bring that awareness back to our lives.

What happens when we start seeing our time on this planet as rare and precious?

The small stuff that makes up the majority of our sticky worries tend to slide off us and our minds open up to what really matters. We begin to notice more compassion for ourselves and others and we begin to play. We gain a sense of humility and perhaps begin to recognize that what is most important is who you love and how you love them.

Try taking this quote into the New Year and see what happens.

May this New Year be filled with a sense of the preciousness and value of your life and the lives of all people,

Elisha Goldstein

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Butterfly photo available from Shutterstock.

In 2005, I conducted a national study in an effort to see if people could in fact cultivate what I called “sacred moments” and see what effect that had on their stress and well-being. Lo and behold, in practicing 5 minutes a day for 5 days a week, for 3 weeks, there was a significant positive effect in stress reduction and well-being. What was so fascinating to me was that for many it allowed them to touch a sense of spirituality when they felt they had never been able to do this before.

A quote from one participant:

“[I experienced sacred moments] through this process. I never noticed any Spiritual moments before this. [The words] unique holy and worthy of reverence was not within the scope of my intellectual reaction of things. To be able to pray was something that I was not willing to [do]. What I like about [the sacred moment practice] is it allowed me to explore spirituality in a nonthreatening manner and for me that was special and unique.”

If you want to give it a spin, here were the same instructions the participants were given:

1. Choose an object - This object should represent something special, precious, or sacred to them. Almost anything can be sanctified and considered a sacred thing. According to Emile Durkheim (1915), known as one of the originators of modern sociology, “By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word anything can be sacred” (p. 52).
2. Mindful Check-In - Begin each practice by taking a few moment to be conscious of the breath and then slowly bring attention to the physical body, thoughts and feelings, hearing, seeing, tasting, and smelling. Just be aware of whatever you notice.
3. The Sacred Object - After the mindful check-in, gently shift attention to the sacred object and being open to what was sacred in the moment. There was no maximum time specified for this exercise. Instructions to participants permitted them to go longer than the suggested 5 minutes and asked them to simply make a log of the time.

Cultivating this practice is a very personal experience and at the same time sacred moments are shared by millions around the world.

As always, don’t take my word for it; go into this practice with a beginner’s mind, letting your judgments reside at bay, and just noticing whatever arises for you in the moment.

Please share your thoughts, emotions, and stories below. You interactions provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Stones photo available from Shutterstock.

Some people call this a mid-life crisis, but it can happen at all different times of life. What’s missing?

Albert Einstein once said:

“Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value.”

Today we’re driving our kids more than ever to be “successful.” But what does this really mean? Somewhere along the line we’ve become confused as a culture and lost sight of what really matters. The test is simple, what makes us feel good? Not in a hedonistic way, but more in line with the Greek term eudaimonia. This can be translated more as a meaningful happiness.

So what’s missing? An understanding of personal values. The key question is: What do you believe is important in life? Is it helping other people, being honest, working hard, being compassionate, spending time with family or people in your community, or maybe being mindful?

This isn’t just a cursory question, it’s one to take seriously and then take an inventory of your life seeing where it lives and where it’s missing.

What would your life look like if you were actually living in accordance with what you valued? Visualize this and let it be your guide toward a happier life.

Sometimes life can truly be that simple.

Sometimes you’re living your values and not even taking a moment to be mindful of it. Think about where in your day to day you are actually living in the way you think is most important.

Right now, stop what you’re doing and take a minute to look forward toward the rest of the day. Where are you living your values? Where is an opportunity to stop in line with them more?

Take this moment to live as if it mattered.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Einstein’s formula photo available from Shutterstock

Studies have now found that the more often a person experiences depression, the more likely they will be to experience it again (70-80% chance of relapse for people who have suffered two or more episodes). Depression doesn’t usually occur alone and is often mixed with other issues such as anxiety and panic. So what do we do, medicate, meditate, both?

The Psychiatric field has found medications that increase the flow of certain neurotransmitters in the brain that can help relieve these feelings of depression. However, because of the relapse rate, the American Psychiatric Administration had to come up with three phases of treatment with medications: acute, continuation, and maintenance.

Acute medication treatment was aimed at relieving symptoms during a depressive episode. Continuation treatment was for prescribing medication for 6 months after the episode had passed and maintenance was to prescribe for up to 3 years. So what’s the problem here? What happens after 3 years? What about the people whom medication doesn’t agree with or unable to take?

Medication was not meant to be a permanent solution to mental health issues because they don’t target the supposed causes of the episode itself, but more to help relieve symptoms for a period of time so people who are suffering could cultivate the stability and skills to support themselves moving forward. Medication can be a wonderful support; however, it’s important to also cultivate the skills to work with the potential relapse of depression moving forward. This is a more effective long term strategy.

Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)  for depressive relapse. Teachers of this program support participants in cultivating mindfulness meditation skills to foster the ability to be more nonjudgmentally present to thoughts, feelings, and sensations in daily life. In doing this, people learn a new way of relating to their distress; rather than avoiding it they learn to approach it and live in the midst of it. This has profound consequences for what follows.

When we spend our time hating and cursing our distress it’s as if we are sending negative energy into a blob of negative energy. What happens? The negativity we’re sending is food for that blob and it only grows. We don’t realize that the way we are relating to our depression, adds to it. It’s difficult to grasp this concept if we’re in the depression and that is why this approach is best when the episode is lifting or has lifted. Here is where medication can be supportive.

Working with mindfulness and meditation in this way is only one approach toward depression that is showing encouraging results  in studies for preventing depressive relapse. However, there may be other ways that are supportive to you. If you are in interested in mindfullness and mental health, you may also want to check out author and blog writer Therese Borchard’s popular Mindful Monday blog every Monday in Beyond Blue.

Please share your thoughts and stories below as your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Woman meditating photo available from Shutterstock.

I’m not saying that being straddled with large student loans and the inability to get a job isn’t a real stressor. But today more parents are finding themselves wondering if they made a mistake in not focusing more on the non-achievement oriented things in life that lead to simple pleasures and happiness.

If we take a step back we might see that some of our happiest times are those where we slow down and become mindful of the simple things in life. As we pay attention to our bodies, we can be grateful for the ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch (or for most of these if one is missing). Some of my happiest moments are those where my family and I didn’t leave our house at all and played together, ate together and rested together.

Becoming mindful of the life around us is completely free and can help you regulate emotions during difficult times, create more flexibility and creativity in decision making, cultivate resilient feelings like gratitude, empathy and compassion and open you up to things that you can enjoy in life.

I’m not advocating for getting rid of achievement or ditching any ideals or efforts to get hired, but more to open the mind to the idea that we are active participants in our own health and well-being despite the more difficult conditions.

This may be a lesson to the rest of us whose kids are not yet in college that making achievement in school the primary focus may be something to reconsider. In what ways may it be important to broaden the scope of what really matters in life to be finding value in the simple things?

In the words of the late Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff–and it’s all small stuff  “Be grateful for the good times and graceful during the more difficult times.”

A little mindfulness can help us during these times and bring our kids up to realize this piece of wisdom.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Young woman photo available from Shuterstock.

A number of people continue to write in with stories. If you have a story, continue writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a wonderful story that teaches us the wisdom of being present in the transitory moments of life by Stuart Frazer:

My wife is an outdoor photographer and I recently began sometimes accompanying her on shoots.  I carry equipment, help scout out shots and provide companionship.  The sun was shining this past Sunday and we went for an early morning visit to a beautiful old neighborhood in our city.  As we walked I found myself looking closely at buildings, boats, birds and other people.  Most importantly, I focused on sun and light.

We turned down a street and my wife took a series of shots of a wonderful old home dating back to the 1800s.  The house was in shade, but she noticed a small area unexpectedly bathed in natural light.  The light could not be direct.  Where was it coming from?  I repositioned myself and saw it was sunlight reflecting off an upstairs window in the house across the street. The closed white draperies hanging behind the window glass intensified the reflection. The light we were trying to capture resulted from a complicated, fleeting set of conditions: the angle of the sun in fall, the time of day and the color of the window drapery.  It would certainly be gone in a few minutes.

As we later walked I made a connection. Good photographs capture unique moments, transitory arrangements of the world.  Finding those moments means filtering out noise and being attuned to the environment around us.  You may not capture the moment with the camera, but that’s beside the point.  This exercise reinforced how interesting it can be to take a break from past and future, and to just go with what the eye sees in a short, fragmentary moment.

As Frank said, we can take this as a metaphor for how we pay attention to life. What are the wondrous subtleties that we miss out on because we are living on auto-pilot constantly rehashing the past or rehearsing the future?

It’s through connecting to what’s here through our given lenses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound that we connect to the life we are given.

Find a time today to just stop, take a breath and attune to your environment. You may just find an entire life that you’ve been missing out on.

Thanks for the gift Stuart.

If you have a story of a mindful moment in your life, please email it to elisha@drsgoldstein.com and allow it to be a gift that we can all learn from.

Camera photo available from Shutterstock.