For all their effects on the body, second darts usually have their greatest impact on psychological well-being. - Rick Hanson

Third, you can increase the positive — whatever is enjoyable or beneficial — by creating, growing, or preserving it. You could breathe more quickly to lift your energy, remember times with friends that make you feel happy, have realistic and useful thoughts about a situation at work, or motivate yourself by imagining how good it will feel to eat healthy foods.

In your own mind, what do you usually think about at the end of the day? The fifty things that went right, or the one that went wrong? Such as the driver who cut you off in traffic, or the one thing on your To Do list that didn’t get done . . . In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. That shades implicit memory — your underlying feelings, expectations, beliefs, inclinations, and mood — in an increasingly negative direction. Which is not fair, since most of the facts in your life are probably positive or at least neutral. Besides the injustice of it, the growing pile of negative experiences in implicit memory naturally makes a person more anxious, irritable, and blue — plus it gets harder to be patient and giving toward others. But you don’t have to accept this bias! By tilting toward the good — toward that which brings more happiness and benefit to oneself and others — you merely level the playing field. Then, instead of positive experiences washing through you like water through a sieve, they’ll collect in implicit memory deep down in your brain.

There are three fundamental phases to psychological and spiritual growth: being with difficult material (e.g., old wounds, anger); releasing it; and replacing it with something more beneficial.