Joy is a Choice

Summer is slipping by so quickly! My intentions to spend more time relaxing and reading seemed to be quickly evaporating, so this past week, I picked up the book, Wired for Joy by Laurel Mellin. WOW!

The first chapter has such powerful insights into what we are learning about the brain. She says that the brain has an amazing capacity to create joy not by chance, but by choice. Is this true? Can we just "think" ourselves out of depression and bad moods?
Mellin entices us to read how to use your consciousness to create ripples of pleasure in your body. BUT the pleasure cannot be about anything that one acquires, ingests or injects. So shopping, food and alcohol might bring momentary pleasure but not true joy.

According to Mellin most stress is caused by having too many stress circuits and too few joy circuits. She advocates EBT, Emotional Brain Training, a recognition of the possible 5 different brain states that one might be experiencing and how to change the circuits to a higher level state. I find this book to be a great resource.

As I prepare for several upcoming workshops on the role of stress in learning, I will include this book as a resource for participants along with Dr. Earl Henslin's book, This Is Your Brain On Joy His book includes images of a stressed brain and a peaceful brain. Brain imaging technology is adding an incredible amount of information to our knowledge base.

So as I was in a perfectly awful mood on one day last week......I decided to try to choose joy. It was difficult but the process was interesting.....and eventually I hope to live more often in level I and 2 as described by Mellin and be kinder to myself when I am stressed.