Latest / the Daily Quote - Positive Daily Inspiration and Motivational Quote of the Day / Fyodor Dostoyevsky - "Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky - "Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness." · the Daily Quote - Positive Daily Inspiration and Motivational Quote of the Day

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  Dot com Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to
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  kick start your day in a positive way.
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  I'm your host Andrew McGivern, and this episode is brought to
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  you by the Great News Podcast. Tired of all the doom and gloom
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  news from mainstream media? You'll get none of that there.
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  Instead, you'll find inspiring stories and developments making
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  the world a better place. The link to that show is right
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  here in the show notes. Today's quote comes from Theodor
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  Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist, philosopher, and one of the most
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  psychologically penetrating writers in the history of
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  literature. A man who was sentenced to death
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  by firing squad, reprieved at the last possible moment while
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  already standing before the guns, and then sent to four
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  years of hard labor in Siberia, and who spent much of his life
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  in the grip of epilepsy and crippling debt.
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  A man who had every reason to count only troubles, but
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  understood something that allowed him to see past all of
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  his from his collection Notes from the Underground, he wrote.
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  Man only likes to count his troubles, he doesn't calculate
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  his happiness. Dostoevsky wrote that in the
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  19th century. 150 years later, neuroscience caught up with him
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  and confirmed every word. Psychologist Rick Hansen put it
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  this way. The brain is like Velcro for
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  negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.
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  It isn't a character flaw. It isn't weakness or
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  ingratitude. It's biology.
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  Our brains evolved to prioritize threats.
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  The amygdala, the brain's threat detection center, responds to
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  negative stimuli with roughly twice the neural activation of
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  positive ones. The ancestors we have that
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  noticed danger first survived. The ones who lingered in
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  appreciation did not. Evolution built us to count our
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  troubles. The problem is that the world we
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  live in today looks almost nothing like the one that
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  biological system was designed for, and the survival mechanism
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  that kept our ancestors alive is quietly stealing our happiness.
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  Hanson describes how negative experiences are instantly
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  registered and intensely stored in what he calls implicit
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  memory, the deep feeling of what it's like to be alive.
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  And that implicit memory bank gets shaded darker and darker by
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  the slowly accumulating residue of negative experiences, while
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  positive ones largely pass through without even sticking.
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  Here's what that means in practical terms.
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  Think about a day where nine things went well and one thing
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  went pretty bad. Where does your mind go at the
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  end of the day? Where does it go at 2:00 AM when
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  you can't sleep? The 9 good things disappear.
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  The one bad thing expands until it fills the room.
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  Not because you're pessimistic, but because your brain was built
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  that way. Researcher John Gottman found
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  that it takes at least 5 positive interactions to make up
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  for the emotional weight of a single -1 the deck is
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  structurally stacked against happiness unless you actively
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  intervene. And that intervention is exactly
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  what Dostoevsky is pointing toward.
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  This isn't toxic positivity, it's not pretending the troubles
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  aren't real, but it's the deliberate, conscious act of
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  calculating your happiness with the same attention you
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  automatically give to your troubles, counting what went
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  right, noticing what is already good, holding the positive long
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  enough for it to actually register.
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  Hanson's research suggests that for a positive experience to
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  encode into long term memory, it needs to be held in conscious
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  attention for at least 10 to 20 seconds.
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  Otherwise it simply disappears, evaporates.
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  The troubles count themselves automatically.
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  That happiness has to be counted deliberately.
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  And now that we have the Internet and social and media
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  amplifying bad news and catastrophe from all around the
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  world, it makes things even worse.
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  Because news media knows very well that our brains are wired
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  to pay attention to negative news.
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  So that is what they give us. And social media algorithms,
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  It's all about the attention, baby.
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  And come on, negative news, negative events, negative
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  emotions, conflict, all of that stuff.
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  It's fed in our social feeds because attention is what drives
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  revenue in the attention economy.
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  The money is in the doom and gloom, but The thing is, in
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  reality, there is just as much positive news happening every
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  day, maybe even more than negative news.
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  Good things are happening every single day.
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  And that is why I started the Great News Podcast and The Daily
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  Quote Show. To spread the good news and
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  prove that the world is a better place than you might think.
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  If you were going out of your way to listen to this podcast to
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  get a positive, inspiring quote every day, then you already know
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  this. I'm preaching to the choir here.
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  So here's the question. At the end of the day, before
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  you fall asleep tonight, what if you spent 2 minutes calculating
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  your happiness with the same diligence your brain
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  automatically applies to your troubles?
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  Or maybe write it down in a gratitude journal.
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  We've talked about those recently too.
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  Do not deny the hard things. Don't pretend the problems don't
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  exist, but count the other column too, the one your brain
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  skips over by default. The kindness you receive, the
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  moment that worked, the small thing that was quietly good, and
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  all the great news stories that you listen to on the Great News
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  podcast. Just saying, because Dostoevsky
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  was right, the troubles count themselves.
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  That happiness needs you to do some counting.
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  That's going to do it for today. I'm Andrew Mcgibbon, signing off
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  for now, but I'll be back tomorrow.
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  Same pod time, same pod station with another daily quote.