By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience — even the comfort in a single breath — you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.

Every time you take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, you stimulate responsive circuits in your brain.

Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it’s personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.

Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.

What we need to do is to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive. In doing this, we gradually acquire the habit of affirmative thinking.

Third, you can increase the positive — whatever is enjoyable or beneficial — by creating, growing, or preserving it. You could breathe more quickly to lift your energy, remember times with friends that make you feel happy, have realistic and useful thoughts about a situation at work, or motivate yourself by imagining how good it will feel to eat healthy foods.

The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences — and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.

Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.

you can do small things inside your mind that will lead to big changes in your brain and your experience of living.

when you know that your practices are actually changing your brain, you’re more likely to keep doing them.

As you become a happier person, the left frontal region of your brain becomes more active (Davidson 2004). What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better — which will benefit your whole being, and every other person whose life you touch.

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law” — the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.

It is your responsibility to make sure that positive emotions constitute the dominating influence of your mind.

with practice, you’ll learn to light up the neural circuits of positive states even when you’re rattled or upset, like reaching through clutter to get the tool you need.