Priscilla Xu

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Our almightly prefrontal cortex’s function is to make decisions. It mentally frames the context of a situation, and how we interpret reality determines our personal well-being. Since a standard operation process does not exist to achieve happiness, what does psychology say about joy?

In a psychological literature review, the researchers concluded that practicing mindfulness can increase happiness and decrease emotional reactivity to aversive events.

What is even more surprising?!?

Mindfulness for years can increase your prefrontal cortex thickness. So researchers recruited twenty participants who were non monks and were practicing meditation for 9.1 ± 7.1 years and practiced 6.2 ± 4.0 h per week!

This article is not telling you to start meditating an hour a day like those meditation experts did in the research. Instead, I encourage you to taste the wonders of mindfulness first.

I consulted the psychologist Jon Kabat Jinn, who introduced mindfulness to the western world.

He defined mindfulness with seven attitudes. After cultivating the mindsets, we can bring this into our life and be mindfully productive.

1. Non-judging

Judging is ingrained in human nature. For example, in the book Think Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman described human thinking in systems 1 and 2.

System 1 is intuition, effortless, feeling-oriented, but mostly inaccurate. System 2 is analyzed and deliberately builds thoughts but requires more mental effort and is slower.

Since the brain is the most energy-consuming organ, humans must conserve energy for survival. Thus, humans tend to use system 1 to label events with stereotypes to quickly judge.

Cultivating the non-judging attitude will help us to not fall into the inaccuracy of System 1.

2. Beginner’s mind

The richness of present-moment experience is the richness of life itself.

Full Catastophe Living

If we want to feel the power of now, we will cultivate the beginner’s mind.

Beginner’s mind gives us more possibilities and trains us to be more open-minded. We can see opportunities that we have never seen before. This mindset can be difficult because most people are unwilling to start from zero. However, the great creator has this skill of completely starting from scratch even at an older age. Starting from zero gives us the strength to feel clear truth.

Think of your life as a series of experiments; it opens your eyes.

3. Patience

When I was a kid, I thought that patience was wasting time. When a plane was delayed for 4 hours, waiting was a painful chore. Why should I be patient? No one has ever explained what being patient meant. I had to figure it out myself.

I came across a change that changed my perspective. There is a phrase saying, “slow down to speed up.” The term sounds highly counterintuitive.

I reversed psychology and did a thought experiment. For example, if I do have a child in the future. I cannot force the child to grow into an adult in just two weeks. I need to nurture and teach them. If the process is rushed, it can be detrimental to its development. Kids are annoying at first, but they take time to learn, and it cannot be hurried.

I have to be patient to cultivate a loving relationship with myself. It does not come overnight. Self-work is very invisible. The self-love journey is seeing the mind as another person, and I can converse with it, but at a distance.

When the flight was delayed again, I enjoyed the art of doing nothing and feeling the richness of life.

4. Trust

I was once a person who got anxious very quickly. I find it challenging to build trust with people. I constantly second guess other people’s behavior and words. The process is very mentally consuming.

However, once I started to trust my feelings and thought. It became easier to accept my emotions. After building trust with myself, I begin to take responsibility for my choices, accept the consequences, and carry better acts of self-care.

If I am jealous of someone else, I will ask myself, “Do you want to switch life with them?”. If the answer is no, then I will trust my own life. I only have one life to live, and every moment passed will not come back. This idea is so simple, but I find myself forgetting it.

So, I will be gentle and remind myself that it’s okay and trust with the self is built over time.

5. Non-striving

Humans love goals and purposes. So then, we built a plan to strive for it. I can easily fall into the confirmation bias and remain consistent even if the current strategy does not achieve the intended results.

When I strive to progress more, I turn a motor spinning at the exact location, and I want to give up. Adding more analysis of the decision to give up or not fuels my negative emotion. I catch myself going down a spiral after unconsciously fueling a thought.

Non-striving means being patient and curious about what’s happening next and inviting myself to onboard the process.

6. Acceptance

Acceptance is not the same thing as agreeing or approval.

The opposite of acceptance is denial and resisting. It takes a lot of mental effort to block off those memories or devastating new facts, such as letting go of a loved one or receiving a diagnosis of a severe illness. Acceptance does not mean that you are passive in life. I will still consciously put effort into achieving things I want, but not urge the concept of how things should be term out.

Acceptance means that you see the feeling, thought, or event as to how it is. There are no judgments of the label to the event itself. A fact is just a fact, and a feeling is just a feeling. It is as simple as that. I heal myself through the acceptance mindset.

The empowerment of acceptance comes when I accept my emotions and do not run away or judge them. Before I want to change, I must admit to the current situations and thoughts. Then, I will most likely know how to make the best decision.

7. Letting go

Is being clingy a natural human tendency? Letting go of something that our mind tricks us into that it is valuable or essential to survival is the main reason that it took three years for me to face remorse after letting go of a relationship.

The concept of letting go can also be applied to facing emotions and happiness. I am not my emotions and thoughts. I am myself. I can let go of my thoughts and be at peace with them. The opinions and feelings will disappear once I pay less attention to them.

I really like the analogy from Full Catastrophe Living. The best analogy of acceptance is like going to sleep. You let go of what happened today and fall to sleep.

Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation for Happiness

When I first started meditating, I just observed the thoughts in my mind. The brain’s opinions, memories, and feelings are like text messages and can originate from an event 10 years ago. They keep on popping out of nowhere.

After practicing meditation for three months, I finally felt the benefits of mindfulness meditation. When I see my thoughts relating to self-judgment, I notice them and imagine them as clouds or pedestrians.

Many of those mindsets have synergistic effects when cultivated together in life. If you can sit with your thoughts, emotions, and memories, you have started to feel peace from the mind. Similarly to what Naval Ravikant says

Happiness is peace in motion, and stability is happiness at rest.

Naval Ravikant

Honestly, I think that “happiness in motion” is more demanding than “happiness at rest.” This is because there are more factors to control and more thoughts to observe when life is in motion.

Definition of Happiness

I know some attitudes, and emotional introspect can sound a bit corny, pop psychology-ish. However, the feeling is what I have experienced through the three months of meditation, and I described the thoughts to you in words.

The definition of happiness is an individual truth.

An individual searches for the truthful definition of happiness, and the crowd searches for social acceptance.

We once thought that money would bring happiness, but it turned out to lie in the individual’s journey.