Dr. Anthony Hlynka, a family physician at Turtle Bay Medical Clinic, joined us on May 13 to talk about his experiences as an ultra-marathon runner and how we can achieve happiness in our personal lives.
Several key messages emerged from his presentation:
- We do NOT live in a happy world and often go out of our way to FIND misery. When surrounded by negativity, our brain focuses not only on our successes, but our stresses, hassles, and complaints.
- If we learn how to look at the world differently, we can train our brain to become happier. Intelligence, productivity, creativity, and resilience increase when our brains are positive.
- Only 25 % of job success is predicted by IQ. 75 % of our success is predicted by our optimism, emotional support, and ability to view stress as a challenger and not a threat.
- We can program our brains to be optimistic, positive, and more successful, within one month and make permanent changes in 90 days.
- There are five things which we can do to create personal happiness:
- 3 gratitude’s: identify 3 things each day for which we are grateful.
- Journaling: create and maintain a daily personal journal.
- Exercise: motion is lotion
- Meditation and mindfulness: reduce stress and fatigue.
- Random Acts of Kindness: do good in the world.
- Scan the world for the positive, relive positive experiences, increase dopamine levels, focus on the small positives in life.
- We can train our brain to see the positive over the negative and it will end up seeing the positives around us automatically.
- Failure in life can be a great resource. If we never fail, then we have never tried and will never learn what amazing things we are capable of.