Reframe

Feeling crabby lately? Need better sleep? Troubled by an open memory or a past unpleasant experience? You might consider trying the strategy of "reframe" on how you think about the memory using the language of thankfulness. 

Gratitude helps us reframe memories of unpleasant events in a way that decreases their unpleasant emotional impact i.e. to look at them in a different way - to assign a fresh perspective. Psychologists call this technique reframing.

Grateful people sleep better. No pills necessary. This is because Gratitude protects against negative pre-sleep mental activities that impair sleep, and facilitates positive pre-sleep mental activities leading to quality sleep. Spend just 15 minutes jotting down a few grateful sentiments before zzzzzzz, and you will sleep better and longer. Study has showed that Gratitude predicted greater sleep quality and sleep duration, and less sleep latency and daytime dysfunction.

Note that the goal of reframing isn't to change the emotion itself but how you relate to it. As the name suggests, reframing is like putting a new frame around an old picture. In reframing, you look for the meaning, opportunity, or benefit from the feeling, even when the feeling is negative. In this way, you raise the likelihood that you'll make insight-driven decisions.

This implies that grateful coping entails looking for positive consequences of negative events. For example, grateful coping might involve seeing how a stressful event has shaped who we are today and has prompted us to reevaluate what is really important in life.

The unpleasant experiences in our lives don’t have to be of the traumatic variety in order for us to gratefully benefit from them. Whether it is a large or small event, here are some additional questions to ask yourself:

• What lessons did the experience teach me?
• Can I find ways to be thankful for what happened to me now even though I was not at the time it happened?
• What ability did the experience draw out of me that surprised me?
• How am I now more the person I want to be because of it? Have my negative feelings about the experience limited or prevented my ability to feel gratitude in the time since it occurred?
• Has the experience removed a personal obstacle that previously prevented me from feeling grateful?

Remember, your goal is not to relive the experience but rather to get a new perspective on it. Simply rehearsing an upsetting event makes us feel worse about it. That is why catharsis has rarely been effective. Emotional venting without accompanying insight does not produce change. No amount of writing about the event will help unless you are able to take a fresh, redemptive perspective on it. This is an advantage that grateful people have—and it is a skill that anyone can learn.

Listening is what makes you memorable.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.

A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Unfortunately, listening is a skill that not many people master; most people would rather talk. When you're talking, you're in control. You don't have to hear anything you're not interested in. You are the center of attention. You can bolster your own identity.

The other reason we’d rather talk is because it’s easy to get distracted when we listen. The average person talks at about 225 words per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words (...notice your mind begins to wander...). We go to our thoughts about what's for dinner, or how we can fix the other person's problem, or how many ways they could have done that differently.

It takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. The irony of being a good conversationalist is that talking isn’t the most important piece; listening is what makes you memorable. 

We live in a culture of perfectionism where our idealized selves become our social currency, the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Usually when you tried to tell your story people often interrupted you to tell you that they once had something just like that happen to them. Subtly your pain became a story about themselves. Eventually you stopped talking to most people. It was just too lonely. We connect through listening. When we interrupt what someone is saying to let them know that we understand, we move the focus of attention to ourselves. When we listen, they know we care.

When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the dining table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience. 

Listening - really listening - takes practice.

And presence.

Mindfulness.

You can even practice it alone.  

Set a stopwatch. For 15 seconds, stay quiet and listen. What do you hear? Try it again and see if you can hear more this time. What new sounds were there?

Listening is the art of closing one's mouth and opening one's ears and heart. Get connected.

Create meaning - not product.

The art of living is closely tied to our ability to recognize meaning in the lives that we are already leading. 'Meaning' offers us satisfaction and fulfillment no matter what our lives are. Meaning has this power - not by changing our lives - but by changing our experience of our lives.

Imagine you are looking at a team of stone-cutters building a church - people would bring to them a rock which they would expertly cut into a block. The people would then remove the block and bring to them another rock. After a few minutes you asked the first cutter, 'What are you doing?'

He turned around with great hostility,"Idiot! Use your eyes! I have been doing this since I was able to work and I will be doing this till the day I died! Why are you asking such a stupid question?!"

You asked the next man the same question and he said,"Ah! I am earning a living for my beloved family."

To the third man, you asked the same question and he turned a face towards you that is absolutely radiant and replied,"Oh. I am building a great church - a holy lighthouse that will stand as a beacon for a people that is lost and frightened and alone in the dark and it will stand for a thousand years!"

Now, all the men are doing exactly the same work but finding a sense of meaning in the most routine and ordinary tasks open up these tasks to the experience of satisfaction and joy. Even a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to do this work. 

Focus on the meaning of your work. Ensure that what you do has significance for yourself and, therefore, for others. 

One bad chapter doesn't mean your story's over.

Embrace uncertainty. If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn. Water flows around all obstacles, eventually shaping rocks and river banks.

No matter how our circumstances might wear us down, wreaking havoc in small and large ways, every bit of the experience can be transformative. Challenges deepen our ability to feel empathy, to connect with others and to open our hearts.

In surfing, there’s a moment on a wave known as “the drop.” It’s the moment when either our hopes are crushed or our hard work comes to fruition. It’s also the most uncertain moment of a wave. A wave’s shape is in constant flux and the surfer must adjust accordingly. But the shape also has a tendency to disappear or “close out,” meaning that a seemingly perfect wave can crumble into whitewater, leaving a surfer scrambling.

Nothing in life is guaranteed and living your life according to a predetermined formula is not a guarantee of success. You can’t predict your company will succeed, your art will fly off gallery walls, or your love will be returned. You have to embrace the uncertainty of it all and remember that the more waves you go for, the more you’ll catch.

What's in you is stronger than what's in your way.

How to restrain the wind or to grasp oil in one’s right hand.

Life is like the ocean: sometimes it’s stormy, choppy, and a complete mess. Other times it’s calm and perfect. In today’s tough, tuned-in, plugged-in world - thanks to a slew of amazing technological advances - people are now always in the know on war, natural disasters, economic trouble, social problems and crime. 

This 24/7 access is causing a kind of collective anxiety and helplessness.

Anxiety comes from clinging to the illusion of control. We want power and authority over our futures. We want to feel that we have a say in how things will go for us. When we perceive that our actions will make an outcome likely, we feel optimistic and secure. When we don’t, we feel insecure. We feel like victims. 

But the tighter you cling to the idea of controlling uncontrollable events, the greater your anxiety — because you inevitably fail.

For a surfer, every time he gets in the water it’s a risk, every time he paddles for a wave it’s a risk, and every time he catches wave it’s a risk. Surfing is completely unpredictable (which keeps the surfer constantly coming back for more). 

There’s a strong correlation between your success and your tolerance for risks in both the ocean and life – and both require the same approach and process : it’s important to separate out the things you can control from the things you can’t. 

In other words, the all-too-true motto: The only thing you have control over is yourself.

The ocean doesn’t care about you. It is a force of nature that existed long before you were born and that will be around long after you turn to dust.

When a big wave knocks you over and holds you underwater, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to get mad at it, right? But really, we operate that way all the time, fighting forces of life that are as unavoidable as the strength and immensity of the ocean.

Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s a waste of time, and a waste of energy. We operate under the illusion of control when so many of the most important things in life aren’t even close to the realm of our control. But this doesn’t have to be a terrifying concept.

When you release yourself from the illusion of control, you can relax. You can put in your best effort but let things turn out how they’ll turn out. You can find moments of joy in the most simple things.

Like surfing, it's all about capitalizing on the situation at hand because it’s totally different every time. Ride the ups and downs and conditioned yourself to keep changing.