when you know that your practices are actually changing your brain, you’re more likely to keep doing them. - Rick Hanson

Living in the Green Zone Developing inner resources is like deepening the keel of a sailboat so that you’re more able to deal with the worldly winds — gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and slander — without getting tipped over into the reactive mode — or at least you can recover more quickly. With growing confidence in these capabilities, you become more comfortable raising your sights in life and sailing even farther into the deep, dark blue.

Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures — such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends — come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.

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.