Make personal growth (e.g., daily meditation, small practices) the organizing principle of your life, integrating it consistently without needing to drastically change your current life context. This approach builds significant momentum for long-term growth through many small, deliberate steps.
Increase your daily effort by just 1% in purposefully helping yourself grow, letting learning land, understanding something, or reflecting on how to improve interactions (e.g., with a partner). This small, consistent increase in deliberate effort can lead to significant improvements in happiness and well-being over time.
Systematically practice ’taking in the good’ a handful of times a day, for less than 10 minutes (closer to a maximum of five minutes) total. This helps positive learning land and sink in, counteracting the brain’s negativity bias and fostering personal growth.
When having a positive experience (e.g., feeling strong, determined, relieved, close to someone, inner peace, self-worth, enjoying petting a cat), stay with it for a breath or longer. This helps the experience ’land inside’ and convert to lasting change, as ’neurons that fire together, wire together'.
Focus on what is rewarding, enjoyable, or meaningful about a positive experience. This increases dopamine and norepinephrine activity in the hippocampus, flagging the experience for prioritization and protection during consolidation into long-term storage, making it more efficiently hardwired into your nervous system.
When taking in the good, feel the positive experience in your whole body. A richer, more embodied experience is more likely to leave a lasting trace in the nervous system, contributing to personal growth.
Practice being aware of your body as a whole, breathing as a whole body (or a large part like the torso), or the whole space/environment you’re in. This calms the mind, reduces self-preoccupation and inner division, and activates neural circuits for holistic processing while deactivating those for stressful doing and anxious rumination.
Throughout your day, take multiple small moments to reflect on the interconnectedness of things around you (e.g., a city street, an airport, a bottle of water), recognizing how everything is part of a vast whole. This cultivates a felt sense of interconnectedness, gratitude, and being supported by reality, moving from conceptual understanding to embodied feeling.
Lift your gaze out from your body towards the horizon (10 feet away or up above). This naturally promotes peacefulness, a sense of things as a whole, reduces self-preoccupation, and activates allocentric neural circuits, strengthening them over time.
Aim for a simpler life with less self-referential task-doing. This creates more room for an undefended, uncontracted receptivity to everything, fostering a deeper sense of interconnectedness and peace.