To have daily positive emotions is a life long goal for many of us. What is more important, in the end: how much dollars you made during your life or how many times you laughed? However, people tend to put their positive emotions in the dark shadow of their negative feelings. This is one of the biggest problems we come across during our lives. A negative experience can't simply be replaced it with a positive one. It just doesn’t work that way.
As a child, if your puppy dies, you would be extremely sad. Your parents will certainly buy you another puppy, but the sorrow still takes a long time to go away. Things get even more serious with adults. A quarrel with your spouse the night before will affect your entire day. You will go to work angry, tired, with your mind wandering. Then you will go home with an even worse mood. On the way from work towards home you won’t be able to notice the sun shining and you won’t be tempted to stop at the supermarket and buy your favorite ice cream. All these because that one negative thought is contaminating the way you perceive the reality around you.
Finding a place to relax your mind would do wonders. Such a place can be a real location or an imaginary place. The best idea is to totally emerge yourself in it. Let’s say you have a problem on your mind and it just won’t go away. Go play football. Or go fishing. You don’t know how to fish, you say? No problem, go out and try it! Just get caught up in the game. Your mind will suddenly jump from the negative thoughts that dominated your last hours or days and start processing a whole new kind of information.
Also good for relaxing your mind can be a song, a movie, even a person, just to get positive feelings and emotions. The main thing is to allow yourself to get completely involved with this new activity. You might still get flashes of the problem every now and then - ignore them and get even more involved in what you are doing.
When the game, the song, the movie or the conversation ends you will have a rather abrupt return to your problems. Maybe you will feel sad and want to go back to the safe place. Don’t do that. The safe place exists only as a helping hand, it is not the solution to your problems. It is there because you need it to relax your mind, for a few minutes or hours. You will feel energized, better about yourself and more confident that any issue can be resolved. This is how a small escape from a harsh reality can increase your fighting energy and allow you to deal even with the most difficult problems.
