To start the New Year, consider trusting your emotional brain to do what it does best: return you to your natural state of joy.
Last year, I had a cluster of health issues for the first time in my life, and now, in returning to health, I have decided to up my EBT Prescription. Spiraling up 10 times per day seemed sad to me. Why only feel great 10 times per day when I could do so much more?
So I set my goal at 20, and I found myself laughing because it was actually easier than doing only 10 of them. My brain stayed at a higher state, so I didn’t have to disrupt those stress circuits to feel great. Consider giving the “20 Spiral Ups per day” prescription a try!
New to EBT? Start with 5 Spiral Ups
Granted, it takes a while to warm up to the idea of transforming stress into joy, so I don’t recommend starting with 20 spiral ups per day. Five are enough to scare the amygdala at first, but that will soon shift.
However, after a week or so at five spiral ups, the brain will become bored if we do not challenge it and get up to 10 of them.
Yet given that the Instant Boost takes only a minute with practice (and a clear desire to crash through the process and get it done), even disrupting stress 10 times per day feels slightly neglectful. Why not take up some of the other 23 hours and 50 minutes, spiraling up even more?
20 Spiral Ups! Feel the difference!
As I upped my EBT prescription, I became curious about how many of them I really needed. Spiraling up is now part of my brain on a cellular level, but given my health issues last year and my desire for optimal health, why not do a whole lot more of them?
So far, three days into my new plan, I’m surprised. I like the new prescription. It’s not hard to do, and I exceeded the 20 yesterday . . . racking up 23 of them and 33 Joy Points.
I’ll keep exploring this, and I hope you will, too. However, one thing you won’t have to worry about is becoming addicted to joy. All the elevated emotions, including love, compassion, hope, forgiveness, and awe, are natural pleasures that flow. Instead of the “I gotta get it” feeling of addiction wires,” the desire is to cherish the moment, knowing full well that it will fade so we can send off that email, fold the laundry, do the dishes, and then come back yet again and again in due time.
The joy surges are not the “I gotta get it” of addiction, but the “I got this . . .” of optimal health. It’s a multi-layered feeling of contentment and it is worth training the resilience pathways to deliver it.
The “I got this . . .” sense of adopting a vigorous EBT practice is all about emotional security, that we know how to take really good care of ourselves, and we do it. We put our joy first, and then everything good flows from that.
