Live Each Day

by Jim McCarthy

  After your commute back from work, meditate for a few minutes before you walk into your home. This is an excellent way to unwind from the stress of the day and be at your best for time with your loved ones. Many people meditate right before going to sleep. I’ve found that focusing on my breath is an excellent way to get back to sleep if I’ve woken up in the middle of the night.

  Do I have to meditate alone? I enjoy meditating by myself, but many people like to meditate with others. If you’re trying to establish a new meditation habit, it’s great to have a buddy who is equally committed. Some people love the feeling of group meditation, often found in a community such as a Buddhist sangha. You may find group meditations in your local Buddhist or Hindu communities, and there are also contemplative practice groups for other spiritual traditions. Many meditation groups have no religious affiliation at all. If you do choose to seek out a community, I encourage you to keep exploring until you find a group that feels right for you.

  What kind of posture should I have when I meditate? Given the diversity of meditation practices, there is also a diversity of opinions of what posture you should have. Many teachers suggest that you sit upright, with a sense of dignity. I like to be lying down, flat on my back, with my hands at my sides. Other teachers have told me that you can sit, stand, lie down, curl up, or lounge about however you want when you meditate.

  Do I need silence in order to meditate? No, you don’t. Listening meditations ask that you simply notice whatever sounds you are hearing — so you can do this just fine at a basketball game, or in an airport terminal. I tend to like silence when I’m doing a mindfulness meditation, but my wife strongly prefers to hear atmospheric, New Age-y background music when she meditates. (As a music snob, I get very judgmental whenever I hear any music, so that can interfere with my attempts to notice without judgment.)

  Is meditation just about “mindfulness”? No. There are various forms of meditation, and they can address various issues. For example, an internet search will yield “meditation for anxiety and panic attacks,” “meditation for stress relief,” “meditation for depression,” and “meditation for loss of a loved one,” not to mention “meditation for losing weight” — which I address in the next chapter on Affirmations. If you’re having trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, then go ahead and try out meditations for insomnia. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz …

  How can I get access to additional guided meditations? Even though I’ve been meditating for decades, I really enjoy being “guided” by an instructor who speaks every minute or two and helps me return to the here and now when my mind starts wandering. Technology makes it easier than ever to have access to expert meditation teachers, no matter where you are:

  •YouTube — has thousands of different types of meditations. Try out different ones and see which you like.

  •Spotify — I like the meditations by Mark Williams, emeritus professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford.24

  •iTunes — lots here, too.

  •Smartphone apps — Headspace or Calm. (These kinds of apps tend to have a “freemium” hybrid free/paid model.) Andy Puddicombe’s Headspace has become extremely popular. As a business guy, I’m delighted to see the success of anybody bringing meditation to the masses!

  •Internet sites, CDs, podcasts, and streaming — these options offer a variety of instruction and guided meditation from well-known teachers such as Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, Marianne Williamson, Jack Kornfield, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra.

  Is meditation all I need to get through life? Probably not. Meditation is a powerful practice that offers substantial benefits and possibly a different outlook on life. But it is not a cure-all. Even if we do meditate regularly, most of us still need to run a household or earn an income. Most of us need to be proactive, define goals, and work to achieve them. Most of us need to have the courage to change the things we cannot accept. To do all of these things as well as we can, we need not only meditation, but also affirmations.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Affirmations: How to Train

  Your Brain for Success

  The desire to quiet the mind, or at least observe its workings, arises, in part, out of an understanding that we are always thinking …

  There! I caught you thinking right now!

  Now, how many of your thoughts do you suppose are negative, on average?

  According to Stanford University’s Dr. Luskin, “Most of us don’t realize how much negativity we generate. And there is some research that shows that left to [their] own devices, most people’s minds generate negativity 75% to 80% of the time.”1

  For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call it 80 percent. So that’s your mind, thinking: “Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Good. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Good. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Good …” all day long.

  (It’s worse, of course, for pessimists!)

  Your “Negativity Bias”

  There are good biological reasons why we have this “negativity bias.”

  Many many years ago, our early human ancestors were more vulnerable than we are now to the many predators — lions, snakes, hyenas — who lived among them. They had to always be on guard for the next threat from their immediate environment.2

  Humans who failed to maintain sufficient alertness would become some other animal’s dinner. Those people would not live long enough to grow older, procreate, and propagate their genes. Over time, those ill-prepared humans got eaten a lot.

  At the same time there were humans who tended to be more paranoid and cautious. They were downright scared when they ventured across the savanna. They were more likely to remember that animals tended to attack from behind those boulders. They developed weapons to defend themselves. They steered clear of the rocks, avoided being eaten, and lived for another day. Perhaps best of all, they survived long enough to procreate and extend their genes to future generations — eventually to you and me.

  Charles Darwin called this “natural selection” — “a process by which species of animals and plants that are best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce, while those that are less well adapted die out.”3

  Writing in Slate, Rob Dunn notes, “Many traits that influenced our ability to spot predators or flee from them have been under strong natural selection for much of the past 40 million years of primate evolution and even before then. (We have been prey essentially since the beginning.)”4

  Over time, the negative humans who remembered bad things tended to survive. The positive humans who forgot bad things tended to get killed. There was a big evolutionary advantage to being a pessimist.

  Researchers call this our “negativity bias.” In his excellent book Just One Thing, neuropsychologist Rick Hanson writes, “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.”5 This is why you remember the person at Starbucks who was a jerk this morning more than the person who was really nice this morning. This is why you remember traumatic experiences with amazing clarity, while wonderful experiences tend to fade in your memory.

  Until about 40,000 years ago, most humans died before they reached age 30.6 Stone Age humans did not live long enough to suffer from stress-related diseases.

  But today, we’re living much longer. The threat is not from cave bears. The threat is from a huge range of stress-related illnesses: heart disease, asthma, obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal problems, and Alzheimer’s disease, to name a few.7

  So being negative in the 21st century is not good for your health. It’s not good for other aspects of your life, either. If you think negatively 80 percent of the time, you probably are not the best employee, manager, or leader you could be. It’s hard to imagine being a visionary entrepreneur if you expect bad results four out of five tries. And your negativity bias will not help you be the most loving, kind person you can be.

  Do you really w
ant to think negative thoughts 80 percent of the time?

  How Do You Overcome Your Negativity Bias?

  With affirmations!

  Affirmations are specific, positive statements in the first person present tense of what you currently love about yourself, or what you want to love about yourself. It’s a way for you to visualize and focus on your aspirations and goals (such as your “Purpose” from PART ONE) and then repeatedly think about or speak that desire.

  Some examples:

  “I have killed the tiny little cancer cells in my body.”

  “I choose a positive attitude in every moment.”

  “I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” (The Serenity Prayer)

  “I deserve to do work that is meaningful and helps others.”

  “I forgive Mom, I accept Mom, I like Mom, I love Mom.”

  If you’re old enough, you may be rolling your eyes, thinking of the hilarious 1990s Saturday Night Live skit, “Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley,” which satirized self-help programs. The character, played by Al Franken, was famous for his affirmation, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”8

  Ironically, at the same time I was laughing at Stuart Smalley, I was hearing about “self-talk” and how important it was for salespeople to develop and maintain a positive attitude. I was selling phone systems door-to-door to businesses in the San Francisco East Bay. I was facing a ton of rejection every day. I was frustrated. And because I was initially lousy at sales, I was making very little money.

  One day, a seasoned colleague said to me, “Jim, you’ve really got to listen to these sales training cassettes. They’ll help you develop a positive focus.” I was initially very skeptical, and thought this stuff was hokey. Cheesy. Corny. But soon I began to devour cassettes from Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, and Brian Tracy as I drove my Buick from office park to office park, knocking on doors and wearing my navy blue suit in 100-degree weather.

  I started saying affirmations such as “I’m a great salesman,” “I’m closing this sale today,” and “I’m excellent at understanding and solving my customers’ needs.” It took a while, but over time I started feeling more confident, relaxed, and successful. I heard the phrase “Fake it ’til you make it,” which was exactly what I was doing. I used these new positive thinking skills to get much better at sales, which led to a better sales job at AT&T.

  I used affirmations to tell myself that I could somehow get into Stanford for business school. On the top of my clunky Dell desktop computer, I pasted a picture of Stanford’s gorgeous campus. I looked at it throughout the day, imagining myself among the eucalyptus and palm trees, and proclaimed, “I’m a student at Stanford!”

  My affirmations worked! Yes, I had had a lifetime of caring parents, privilege, good luck, studies, career choices, GMAT tests, and essays, all of which led to my admission to one of the top MBA programs in the world. But on top of all that, I had to believe that I could get admitted, or else I never would have tried. My affirmations helped me believe. My affirmations helped me overcome my well-evolved negativity bias.

  Enduring Insights Meet the Latest Neuroscience

  Now, you can say, “I don’t buy into any of this California New Age-y hippie BS.” I understand. And that could have been a legitimate objection to affirmations back in the early 1990s, when so many people were laughing at Stuart Smalley. But common wisdom, dating back millennia, has recognized the power of positive thinking.

  Some 2,400 years ago, the Buddha said, “We are what we think. Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.”9

  Paradise Lost author John Milton (1608 – 1674) wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”10

  In 1905, American poet Walter D. Wintle wrote, in Thinking:

  If you think you are beaten, you are;

  If you think you dare not, you don’t …

  Life’s battles don’t always go

  To the stronger or faster man;

  But soon or late the man who wins

  Is the one who thinks he can.11

  In the years since these statements were made, the field of neuroscience has given us proof that affirmations really do work.

  How, you may ask?

  Different parts of the brain have different functions, including processing emotions.

  Thanks to advancements in imaging and computing power, these days we have a fairly well-developed map of where emotions and responses to stimuli are processed. One study used 3D imaging to examine 20 unique regions of the brain. It found, among other things, that the medial prefrontal cortex dealt with emotional processing; the amygdala addressed fear; sadness was found in the subcallosal cingulate; while the occipital cortex and the amygdala handled visual stimuli.12

  Another example, described in The New York Times: “The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.” 13

  It’s remarkable that modern science has been able to discover these various functions in the human brain. It’s even more remarkable to understand the degree of control you have over your own brain — and your own mind.

  Dr. Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University in New York City. In his acclaimed book, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, he explains that for hundreds of years, scientists had believed that once you passed childhood, your brain anatomy could only change for the worse, as you got older and your mental faculties declined. But by the early 1970s, neuroscientists had discovered that “the brain changed its very structure with each different activity it performed, perfecting its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. If certain ‘parts’ failed, then other parts could sometimes take over … They began to call this fundamental brain property ‘neuroplasticity.’”14

  Columbia University Professor Eric Kandel is a pioneer in the study of neuroplasticity, and his early work while at New York University garnered the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine. As Doidge explains, “Kandel was the first to show that as we learn, our individual neurons alter their structure and strengthen the synaptic connections between them. He was also the first to demonstrate that when we form long-term memories, neurons change their anatomical shape and increase the number of synaptic connections they have to other neurons.”15

  What’s more, Kandel’s research found that learning could “trigger” the transcription function that expresses a gene. As Doidge notes, “Most people assume that our genes shape us — our behavior and our brain anatomy. Kandel’s work shows that when we learn our minds also affect which genes in our neurons are transcribed. Thus we can shape our genes, which in turn shape our brain’s microscopic anatomy.”16

  In other words, as Rick Hanson writes in Just One Thing, “as your brain changes, your mind changes; and as your mind changes, your brain changes … what you pay attention to, what you think and feel and want, and how you work with your reactions to things all sculpt your brain in multiple ways … Neurons that fire together, wire together.”17

  Should you care which of the neurons in your brain are firing and wiring, and which ones are not?

  Yes!

  “The brain takes the shape the mind rests upon,” writes Dr. Hanson. “For instance, you regularly rest your mind upon worries, self-criticism, and anger, then your brain will gradually take the shape — will develop neural structures and dynamics — of anxiety, low sense of worth, and prickly reactivity to others. On the other hand, if you regularl
y rest your mind upon, for example, noticing you’re all right right now, seeing the good in yourself, and letting go … then your brain will gradually take the shape of calm strength, self-confidence, and inner peace.”18

  Indeed, as Professors Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford and David K. Sherman of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found in an exhaustive review of the benefits of “self-affirmations,” “Timely affirmations have been shown to improve education, health, and relationship outcomes, with benefits that sometimes persist for months and years. Like other interventions and experiences, self-affirmations can have lasting benefits when they touch off a cycle of adaptive potential, a positive feedback loop between the self-system and the social system that propagates adaptive outcomes over time.”19

  You can use affirmations as a “brain hack,” thanks to the neuroplasticity that we all have. Affirmations are a direct, practical way to rewire your brain for happiness and success. In my keynotes, I often start by saying that “Happiness is a skill that you can develop!”

  This is great news — as long as you focus on thinking positively. As Dr. Hanson says, “How you use your mind changes your brain — for better or worse.”20

  So, if you wake up every morning and say to yourself, “I’m ugly. I’m always sick. I’m stupid. People don’t like me. My colleagues hate me. My boss is a jerk. I hate this bus system. This city sucks. The system is rigged …,” then, as a result of neuroplasticity, your brain circuits will connect, strengthen, and speed up to reinforce these messages. Your brain will physically transform over time in response to those thoughts. You will become a very negative person. (Do you know any people like this? Are you one of them?)