There are a lot of tips on how to stop mortgaging your happiness because of undue obsessing.

What works instantly is not to try to alter your behavior but to seek an alternate route to reducing obsessing.

Postpone the thoughts.

Train the brain to put off having to think obsessive thoughts to a certain time in the day – or night and do not exceed your obsessing time.

Tonight at 8pm until 8:30 I will obsess away.

Then, every obsessive thought gets pushed into the next day.  Same time.

Eventually you may be able to skip obsessing sessions every day and do them less frequently.

This same approach is also magic with fear and worry.

Train the brain to pick up the fear thought at a specific time later and then devote no more than 30 minutes to thinking about the fear.

This approach gives you back your life and eventually introduces a protocol for putting obsessions and worry in their place.

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The first and only thing is – know how to make a life, not a living.

We keep pouring all our heart and soul into making a living and shortchanging what matters most.

Money doesn’t buy happiness and we already know “money can’t buy you love”.

Do you know how much money annually earned by two members of the family is the sweet spot?

You’re not going to believe this study of 2,000 people who were questioned about their lives and then asked their income.

$70,000 a year for a working couple.

That’s an average in the U.S.  It’s higher in Hawaii and lower in other states where the cost of living is lower.

What happened when couples earned $80,000 on average?

Their happiness (self-reported in the survey) did NOT go up.

What about a lot more money, did that make a difference?

Actually, they became unhappier the more money they made.

This can’t be, but it is.

Maybe that explains why a person fighting a disease just to stay alive is often happier in that unsettling situation than healthy people who think more is better.

The way to make a better life is to not fear living.

If you do, you risk losing life and happiness.

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Trying to please others is a losing game.

We know this and still do it.

So, is it possible to please others and ourselves at the same time?

More often than not, it is.

When you feel you’re being asked to do something that someone else wants and maybe you’re not that wild about doing, look for a win-win way forward.

The boss wants you to base the presentation on things you think are not that powerful.

The boss is still the boss but by trying to find if she/he is open to allowing you to infuse some new data that you have discovered, you are potentially satisfying her/him and you at the same time.

It isn’t always possible but asking for that which you need to make you happy and fulfilled too is legal, positive and has tremendous upside.

And not just at work.

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Most people don’t try to be depressed or unhappy.

The don’t wake up and say “I hope something happens to bum me out”.

Things start going wrong when the first thing occurs that causes unhappiness.  And if a second thing happens then the pattern is established.   Often it only takes one thing to ruin a day.

It’s going to be hard to turn your mood around.

How we survive from something going wrong or things that are said that hurts or angers us, sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Plainly put, we throw in the towel too quickly.

Sometimes all it takes is to try to be more resilient.

I’m bugged, but I’m not going to let this ruin my day.

I worked for weeks on that project and it hasn’t been appreciated, but I’m sure not going to dump on myself.  I did my part.

That fender bender is just what I didn’t need today BUT, I’m thankful that it’s the fender that is hurt and not me. 

This is more than just happy talk.

There is more and more science that proves how we think is how we train our brains to think.

Give in to negativity, and you will most assuredly get it.

Fight off as many aspects of it as you can and your brain gets retrained to make you stronger.

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Air traffic controllers through the use of technology can track many airplanes at one time for eventual landing.

Not too long ago, with just the help of radar, these overworked and stressed controllers would have nervous breakdowns trying to keep the planes separated and landing without incident.

You can only land one plane at a time on a runway.

Managing the multiple problems we face every day is similar.

In spite of multitasking and other techniques, humans can deal with only one problem or challenge at a time.

Try more than that and stress levels skyrocket.

One approach is to see in your mind’s eye, all the problems you are facing the way you might envision airplanes in line or circling to land.

You check back, work on it, update it, make decisions about it and bring it in finished.

Seeing multiple problems in your periphery is doable, trying to solve them all at once is useless when the price you pay is an increase in stress and anxiety.

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If a baseball team feared losing, they would never take the field.

If a tennis player couldn’t bear the thought of going down in defeat to another competitor, they would put their racquet down before the match started.

The same with life, if we allow fear thoughts there is no reason to expect happiness and accomplishment.

Fear thought is the enemy, it must be banned from our minds.

Failure is inevitable and ironically it is the dress rehearsal for future success, but worrying about failing is the main reason for failure.

It robs us of our confidence.

Gets us off our game plan.

Makes us anxious so that we become tense and nervous.

Study successful people and you will see every one of them has the ability to give themselves a chance to win – maybe even a lot of chances – fearing not failure itself but the inability to focus on trying harder.

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Often we are our own worst enemy when it comes to confidence.

Quick – name something you did extremely well today.

Then – name something you could have done better.

Most people can name their faults before the positives and some can’t name a positive unless you pull it out of them.

This changes today.

From now on, for every criticism (justifiable or not) make sure to think of something positive that you have done well.

No criticism without compliments.

Our brains get trained to obsess with how we could be better, how others want us to be, how we are wrong and not right so balancing out that tendency with some honest praise is the most important step in confidence building.

In other words, we can learn to have more confidence when we teach our brains that there is a lot of good upon which to build a positive view of ourselves.

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Anger is scary.

When we’re on the receiving end of it, anger may be scarier still.

“Calm down” doesn’t work.

“It’s not important, it’s not a big deal” seems to make people more enraged.

What we want when we are angry is for someone to listen to us – to hear us out without judging or – and this is important – without giving advice.

Advice just seems to inflame things even more.

But there is also good anger.

This is when we have a right to express our displeasure and to make every attempt to be heard.

Good anger is constructive.

Bad anger is destructive to us and to everyone who comes in contact with it.

The tool for dealing with anger is to become a good, non-judgmental listener.

The means for expressing concerns you have a right to air is to not destroy yourself or your relationship with others in doing so.

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Wishing you had what someone else has is second best.

Wanting to be more like them is useless no matter how admirable they might be.

Even the most enviable person is not worth imitating for many reasons including one basic indisputable one.

Try to be like someone else and you will always be an imitation of something that is not you.

When they innovate, you will have to copy.

When they surprise, you will have to somehow surprise.

When they change their goals, your goals will always be a hostage to theirs.

Enact your dreams without regard to anyone else.

Embrace the personality that you have developed no matter how unique.

Accept the gifts that you have been given not the ones you wish you had.

The human condition seems to be that we always want what we don’t have but the winning formula is to not only want it but accept our traits and quirks as the gifts that they really are.

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Toxic workplaces are inhabited by toxic people.

Often but not limited to the boss.

Here’s how to handle toxic co-workers and their defeating habits:

1. Unattainable goals – When they get caught up in unrealistic goals, you concentrate on realistic goals both short and long-term.Break them down into weekly, daily or hourly.
2. Perfectionism – If goals are set too high as many managers do, insist on sticking to realistic goals or else you will be on your way to shooting yourself in the foot.
3. Fear of failure – Perfectionists often fear failure, which is why they hesitate and often delay action.Never fear failure.  Learn from it.  Failure is essential to success.  It is the rehearsal for success.
4. Judging others – Constantly criticizing others is the road to failure. If you work for someone or with people who do that, make sure you don’t criticize them when encouragement is the better choice.

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Don’t overthink it.

Lots of remedies are out there – maybe too many – some of which promote more anxious thinking.

Focus on one thought.

99% of what we fear will never happen.

And that 1% will very likely not be as we feared or imagined.

That means we are worrying about things that can never hurt us.

Our thoughts about fear are hurting us more.

We can talk ourselves into more anxiety even as we spend time being aware of it and trying to fight it.

For every fear thought, a reminder.

99% of what I fear will never happen.

Why spend so much of my life waiting for it?

Our fear thoughts program our brains.  Putting fears into perspective retrains our brains and makes us more able to deal with anxiety in a world obsessed with fear.

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Failure is a rehearsal for future success.

Get beyond the pain to see the benefit.

You’ve learned something, now use it the next time.

Your ego is bruised but ego is vanity and vanity has little to do with success.

You’re discouraged – but if you really want it that discouragement will be temporary and will show you how badly you want to pursue your goal.

But I worked so hard – take a rest and appreciate your hidden advantage, your work ethic.

Sometimes the first plan is the worst plan – failure helps us hone it to make the next one a better idea.

Perseverance is the key to success.

Failure can help us see if we have it.

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To guarantee that you’ll be unhappy, try to change someone.

In spite of the desire to help people, save them, make them better or just offer your way of doing things, there is zero chance they will make permanent change.

I first heard this wisdom at a seminar with Dr. Amit Sood, the Mayo Clinic doctor, author and lecturer who has written extensively on relieving stress.

Not trying to change someone is as hard to do as another person changing because you want them to.

No real change can take place unless or until we want to make that change.

Alcoholics know this the hard way when things have to get so bad or they lose their family or their health.  And yet, some won’t even change then.

It will surely drive people away the more you try to change the way they do things or look at things.

Even when others ask for advice, they don’t want it.  What they want is for us to listen.

With zero chance to change another person – even for their own good in our opinion – the winning alternative is to accept them precisely the way they are.

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You can’t win against a control freak whether it is an associate or the boss.

If they have more power, they prevail.

You can make yourself miserable by trying to fight for some input but control freaks have to be in full charge or they are not happy.

One seemingly counterintuitive yet potent way to combat the control freak ruining the workplace is to do what they don’t expect.

Give them more control.

Ask them in detail how they want things done.

Pepper them with endless questions.

You may find that they will actually cede the details to you as long as they feel they are in charge.

This is a short-term workaround.

If you love your job, wait them out and hope they leave.

If it’s untenable, find a new job with less drama but there is no shortage of control freaks – there’s a good chance you will find more elsewhere.

To best a control freak, give them more control and they may call it a victory and cut you a break.

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You just can’t teach people to be happy.

They have to discover what delivers joy and it is usually not some big, expensive rich thing that many expect.

We often don’t know what makes us happy because we spend so much time dealing with that which doesn’t fulfill us.

Time off, meditation, a gratitude journal, getting in touch with those around us who are important – these are ways to avoid short-circuiting what really matters in our life.

Then, on to rewirement.

The changes that are required to set a new course.

We have to change our life’s circumstances.

Discover the things that deliver joy (have we even used the word “joy” lately?) 

Teach ourselves to be thankful.

To motivate ourselves to make some changes.

To know what those changes are and be dogged in pursuing them.

Re-wirement is the personal process of changing how we think about happiness.

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Everything we do wrong is in the front of our minds.

We churn it up, regurgitate it and even invite others to remind us of our failings by being first in to insult ourselves.

We think of what we have done wrong more than what we have done right.

There is research to prove that when we think like this we are actually programming parts of our brain to continue making us think this way.

But MRIs have observed the changes in the brain when people attempt to shortcut negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones.

Not pep talks but step talks that elevate thinking to the next level of possibilities instead of shortcomings.

Every failure is a rehearsal for future success.

Even on a bad day, think of the things you have done right and replay them as often as you obsess about the negative.

Small successes work as well as big ones to help train our brains.

To boost confidence, stop the band aids and think of recording positive thoughts in your brain because after a month or two, research shows your brain will help you to do this more automatically.

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The Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr has won two world championships with his talented team that has changed the way basketball is played.

When Kerr senses the team is tired of hearing from him, he buttons it up often handing play-creating power over to a leader on the team that everyone respects.

This is not always the team’s superstar.

Work teams off the court could also learn from this.

Sometimes team members stop listening.

In fact, research shows some of the best coaches of all-time know when to do nothing.  Incessantly cramming more directions and continuing endless teaching is counterproductive.

As Kerr says:  “It’s their team …I think that’s one of the first things you have to consider as a coach.…Our job is to nudge them in the right direction, guide them, but we don’t control them. They determine their own fate.”

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Whether keeping a task list or not, there is a shortage of things that need to be done.

Sometimes we make lists or use our phones to remind us.

There is evidence that we are trying to do too much which is too bad because even when accomplishing numerous things, we get the feeling that we didn’t have that productive a day.

The max number for peak productivity is seven.

Better yet, five tasks as a goal someday.

How to choose the seven priorities for today?

Which things are going to provide the most success, productivity, happiness and/or revenue.

Then focus on those 7 things.

This means a lot of other things will be sidelined, but according to time experts, doing less with more focus delivers the better result.

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Dogs are great emotional support aides for people who have experienced PTSD.

Warmth, approval, companionship, less isolation, reduced levels of stress and anxiety – these things matter to people suffering from stress.

People could also be emotional supporters if they attempt to provide these benefits to others.

More time.

More companionship.

Approval and acceptance.

It’s a sign of our times that we live with so much stress and emotional upheaval so it gives us an opportunity to supply the very things an ESA does.

One added benefit is that when giving emotional support to others, we are also the beneficiaries.

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Maybe trying to balance work and life together is the wrong approach.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos thinks of it as a work-life circle and that it shouldn’t be looked at as a strict tradeoff.

Now as work follows us into our personal life through digital and social connectivity, any balance is hard to achieve.

Work-life, two integrated parts.

Circular in that they intermix with each other.

The mega billionaire Bezos has breakfast with his family every morning, does not set an alarm clock at night, avoids scheduling meetings (timewasters) and as busy as he is, does his own dishes.

Tech mixed with living.

Being aware of the need for balance in life is probably more helpful than actually wrestling with keeping work and life equal.

Better yet maybe to inject both elements into daily living in an attempt to remain in the now as a function of daily life.

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