9 Practices to Deep and Lasting Health and Happiness (Book Review)
Scott Mills, Ph.D.
Rick Foster and Greg Hicks became two of my favorite authors with their first book, How We Choose to Be Happy. In that book, they layed out the nine basic choices that happy people consistently make. And I can attest, the more I make those choices, the easier I find it to be happy. A group of doctors, finding that their healthiest patients used the same strategies, worked with Foster and Hicks (with the help of Dr. Jen Seda) to create the Brilliant Health Program being offered by numerous hospitals around the country, which is the basis for their new book, Happiness and Health.
You might be surprised to find out that neither health nor happiness has much to do with what folks have traditionally believed will bring them joyful lives. Money, fame, position and even respect didn’t make it very high on the list. Want to know what did make it on the list?
The characteristics that they found true for the happiest and healthiest people they encountered on six continents were:
1. Intention – Make a choice that you are going to be happy and set your course in that direction. Many people simply know that they don’t want to be sick without deciding what they do want. Have you chosen to live a life that’s healthy and vital?
2. Accountability – Do you believe that your health just happens to you? That you have no control? Clearly the evidence in your life points to the contrary. When you eat too much you feel bloated. When you drink too much you get drunk. When you don’t exercise you can get depressed, stressed and out of shape. The choices that we make everyday affect our health. When you decide to take control of your choices you can step into greater health and vitality.
3. Identification – Setting your intention towards health is great. Now, decide what that looks like, feels like and sounds like. Give it color and texture. And rehearse it in your mind. Imagine how great it feels to be healthy. Both intention and identification are stages that can really benefit from work with the unconscious mind although the authors don’t explore that here.
4. Centrality – Do the things that you love first! It’s as simple as that. We often save the things that make us feel great as rewards. But these things actually energize us and make us feel wonderful. Start in that feeling and the rest can flow more smoothly.
5. Recasting – When obstacles come up, you can choose to get stuck in them, letting them convince you that you are really a victim, or you can choose to learn something and create an opportunity. I’m amazed by how many health nonprofits have been started by people who have used their own health challenges as a starting point to share with others. What challenges have you had that could still learn from?
6. Options – The healthiest people have the greatest capacity to see options in front of them! Getting locked into all or nothing thinking doesn’t leave much room for anything but disaster. You might say, “I can only eat healthy food or junk.” How about all the options in between or even healthy food that tastes like junk? Consider the spectrum of options and stress can diminish and you can feel better about moving forward.
7. Appreciation – Wherever you are, however you feel, value your body in this moment. If you knee is hurting, your lungs are still moving air in and out of your body, your heart is still beating, so much good is still going on. We tend to focus only on the pain but that reinforces the pain. Consider thanking your body for all it’s doing for you and ask it what it might like now.
8. Giving – Humans, by nature, are social creatures. We are designed to feel good about giving to others and receiving. There are distinct neurological advantages to these processes. Ask yourself are you freely giving (with no strings attached, no expectations) and are you allowing yourself to receive freely? Some people actually feel guilty about receiving. Others feel angry if they give to someone that doesn’t reciprocate. Pay attention to your relationship to giving. The more freely it flows, the better your health will be.
9. Telling the truth – As humans are social creatures, we seem to be biologically programmed to feel distress when we lie. Lie detectors actually work by picking up the signals of this distress such as increased blood pressure, heart rate and perspiration. Making a commitment to telling the truth to others and to ourselves actually improves our health and decreases our stress. This doesn’t mean you need to be mean, just honest.
These seem like logical and easy steps. Of course, we all have deeply held patterns of behavior that makes changing some of these things difficult. Hicks and Foster’s work would be significantly strengthened by using many of the tools available to make shifts in the unconscious mind where about 90% of change actually happens. As you delve into creating more health in your life consider using tools such as hypnotherapy, integrative coaching or other approaches that allow these changes to happen easily and naturally at the unconscious level.
For more information, please visit The Brilliant Health website at www.choosingbrillianthealth.com
