How to Push Yourself to Be Happy Even When Life is Hard

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dile. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you want to get some inspirational mindset tips and tricks sporadically to your phone throughout the week and you live in the U.S. or Canada, text right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to be happy even when life gets hard. Do you ever notice how when life punches you in the gut, your mind starts attacking you too? And suddenly you're not just stressed, but you're spiraling and now you're finding flaws in everything in your life, in your job, in your body, in your future, in your own worth. But here's the truth that most people never actually learn. Happiness is not what happens after the pain is gone. It's what you practice during it. When you only focus on what's going wrong, your brain becomes a magnet for misery. You find more things to be miserable about. And that's a really, really slippery slope. So what if you could actually rewire your brain to find the good in everything, even if your entire life is on fire? And if you can train yourself to search for even a sliver of good, your entire mindset and even your brain chemistry and your brain wiring will start to shift. And so let's dive into it. Let's just call it like it is, right? Most people, very good people in this world, completely cave when things go sideways in their lives. If bills start to stack up, they shut down. If their relationship starts to have a little bit of stress, they spiral out of control. If they get bad news, they start finding everything that's wrong in their life, every single little teeny tiny thing. It's kind of like as soon as like one thing just goes wrong, the brain is like, see, I told you your entire life was trash. It's like just this, you know, it's like this little teeny tiny house of cards and you just give it one little flick and the entire thing falls apart. Does that sound familiar? Well, you have to understand that if you don't actually start to work on your mindset around this, it's only going to get worse and worse and you're going to start to develop patterns to find the bad in everything. Like, you probably know somebody. I have somebody in the top of my head right now that I can think of that is negative all the time. They can find negative that you could, you could win the lottery and they'd be like, oh my God, do you know how much you're going to have to pay in taxes? Like they can find the bad in everything and they're that way because they have accidentally, I'm sure they didn't do it on purpose, they've accidentally wired themselves to find the bad in everything. But people who really actually become resilient and develop a really resilient mindset are different. The people who have done the inner work and worked on themselves and worked on their mindset and worked on their trauma and worked on their past and everything, they see life differently than everybody else. Like those who have spent time going and finding the things that's going on, like in the trenches, in their mind and in their life, the ones that are doing the real inner work, they don't collapse when things get hard. Why is that? Because they've trained their brain to find the good even if it's hidden under layers and layers and layers of chaos. Now, now I want to be very clear. I'm not talking about toxic positivity. I'm talking about you finding good in anything that's happening so that you can become a better person, thinking better to work out of whatever negative thing is happening in your life. This is called neurological resilience. It's like you learn to internalize the truth behind the yin and the yang, which is within every hard thing, there is something good. And even if it's tiny, if you search for it, you can find it. You just have to be willing to look. And so I want you to remember this phrase the rest of your life, happiness is a choice. Now, that phrase when I put it on Instagram or I talk about it on Instagram reel pisses a lot of people off. It triggers a lot of people because they're like, well, you don't know my life and you don't know what's happened to me. You have to understand not some like feel good slogan. And I'm not being all woo woo when I'm like, hey, happiness is a choice. Your life is on fire. Act like it's not on fire. When I'm saying it's not a feel good slogan, it's neuroscience. Your brain is always rewiring itself always. And every time that you try to find something good, which means that you are not being on autopilot anymore, but you're actually taking time and energy and intention to find something good, you're actually strengthening the part of your brain that is responsible for positive pattern recognition. Now, on the opposite side of that, if you are actually looking for the bad in something, you're strengthening the part of your brain that's responsible for negative pattern recognition. And so in neuroscience, there's a thing called Hebb's law and they say neurons that fire together wire together, which means at any time that you think something a certain way that wiring becomes stronger. And if you decide that you want to think differently, you're going to actually start to wire together new neurons that have never been together. And so when you practice happiness and gratitude and finding the good in things, especially when you don't feel like it, you're actually literally reshaping your brain. You're doing three different things. You're strengthening your prefrontal cortex, which is where your decision making and your optimism comes from. You're soothing your amygdala, which is where your fear and your threat detection comes from. And you're building more dopamine receptors in your brain, which is where motivation and pleasure comes from. So over time, this actually will become your new default setting. So you don't even have to try to find the good in things. You'll actually just start living that way. And I can tell you from 100% in my own anecdotal story, trust me, I was the definition of a negative Nancy when I was younger. I could find the negative in anything and I could give excuses and I could tell you why I was screwed over all the time and why life wasn't working out for me and other people always had good luck and I had bad luck. But now my default setting is to find the good in everything. But I also do just so you know, have the overall, because now that, you know, I've been living my life now for a while and I've seen things happen for my benefit, even when I didn't think they were going to be in my benefit, I truly believe and I have this like just thought over my entire life that with all 40 trillion of my cells, I believe it, that everything that's happening in my life is happening for me, not happening to me because if it's happening to me, I'm a victim. If it's happening for me, then it's actually happening for me to learn or grow or get better or to have a better life. And I believe that to my core. And so let's actually tell you with research. So I gave you my anecdotal, oh, yeah, this is what happened in my life, but I don't want to just give you fluff. I wanted to actually talk real studies for those of you guys that want proof, right? So there was a study that was done at Indiana University where they used fMRI scans to show participants who practice gratitude and they showed that the people who practice gratitude showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of their brain, which is the area that's linked to learning and decision making. They studied them six months later and they actually found that the effects lasted over six months after the study ended, which means when you train yourself to look for the good in something, your brain eventually starts doing it on autopilot. Now, I don't want to give you just one study in case you're very, you need some, a lot of studies and really a lot of proof to believe me. There was actually a study that was done by Dr. Martin Segelman, who is considered the father of positive psychology and showed that people who practice optimistic reframing, so whenever something happens, you find the optimism in that situation were more likely to recover from setbacks and experience less depression in their lives over time. And then the last one, Harvard psychologist, Dr. Sean Acker, found that five minutes a day of positive journaling and finding the positive in their life significantly increased happiness and reduce stress hormones like cortisol in somebody's brain. So this isn't like I said, toxic positivity like, "Oh my God, the house is on fire. I'm just going to act like it's not on fire." It's not toxic positivity. It's neurological facts that your brain actually starts to change and rewire itself for the good and finding the good when you actually take time and intention to find the good and anything that's going bad. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And you have to understand that that the rewiring is not something that just like happens instantly. It's not like you do it one time. But if you stay consistent, it will be inevitable. The way you like to think of, the way you should think of your brain is kind of like a big cornfield, right? Like think of your brain like this giant cornfield and this new, maybe you've been negative your entire life and you're just trying to figure out how to be more positive. Every time that you choose to find the good, even when it's buried, even when it's in the middle of a bunch of chaos, it's like walking a new path the very first time in that cornfield. Is it going to be hard to walk through a cornfield if it's a brand new path? Yeah. But the next time you do it, it's going to be a little bit easier. And the next time you do it, a little bit easier. The hundredth time you do it, it's going to be way easier. Eventually that path becomes clearer. It becomes easier for you to walk down, aka to start to think through. And it becomes a road that you actually will start to take in your brain over time, even without thinking after a while. But the truth that most people avoid in this situation is you do have to push yourself. Like you have to push yourself sometimes to when you see shit hitting the fan, be like, "Okay, I've got to get out of my victim mindset. I've got to stop being so sad and I've got to figure out what is the good that could possibly come from this. How could this be working out in my favor? What lessons can I get from this?" So happiness just doesn't float down from the clouds and it's not delivered to you by a unicorn. You don't just wait for something to make you feel happy. You have to decide that my natural state will be happiness. So you have to sit there and say, "I'm going to find one thing to be grateful for today. I will shift my focus, even when my brain wants to catastrophize everything and think that my life is in shambles. I'm going to stop feeding this victim story in my head and I'm going to find out how the world is working for me." Because if you don't, your brain will just keep collecting evidence that your life sucks and that's a natural part of our brain. It's called the negativity bias. It's like this way in almost every single person. I've done entire episodes on the negativity bias you can go back and listen to. So your brain will always look for and collect evidence that things are going wrong as a protection mechanism for you. You know who also collects evidence? Your subconscious mind and whatever you think about a lot and whatever you repeat the most, it will believe. So if you say stuff like, "Oh, I'm stuck," or, "I don't have any good luck," or, "Nothing ever works out for me," or, "Life is just hard and I'm always screwed over," guess what? That is actually going to become your truth. And so what you want to do is this. When something becomes hard, acknowledge it. I'm not saying, don't be like, "Oh my god, no, this is completely fine." I'm not saying that you need to spray perfume on a turd. What I'm saying is clean up the turd and then make the floor that it was once on shinier. Find the good in that thing. So acknowledge. Okay. Yeah, this is tough. This is really hard. I really do feel it. Then you want to just breathe through it, right? Because when stuff is really hard, your brain's usually all over the place and when your emotions are high, your logic is low. So you breathe. Anchor yourself in the present moment. It might be two minutes you need to breathe or if shit's really hitting the fan, it might be 10 minutes. And then just ask yourself to try to see change your perception in some sort of way from, "This is so bad. This is so bad. This is so bad." And doom and gloom, ask yourself, "What can this teach me? What's one good thing that could come from this? How can this circumstance possibly make me stronger? Or if everything is happening for me, that must mean that this thing is going to make me better. So what lessons can I pull from this?" And it might be like, "I'm actually learning to ask for help." Or, "This pain that's happening is showing me that I need to figure out new boundaries." Or, "It could be even, I'm still here and that's something." And you can find the good in the fact that you're still here. And that becomes your access point for starting to rewire. So it's like, "What good can come from this? What lessons can I pull from this? How can this make me stronger? What can this teach me?" And you start to actually ask yourself these questions because when you ask yourself a question or ask anybody a question, you're framing their perception. And you're framing your own perception from, "Something's wrong. This is not good, too. What can I learn from this? How can I get better in this?" And so I want you to understand, in your life, happiness is a choice. It really is. And if you're going to have a great life, if you're going to be happy in your life, then you need to make the choice that no matter what happens, you're going to end up having a great life. That everything in this universe that happens around you is happening for you, for your greater good. You're not the story of your past. You're the narrator of it. And you're the person who gets to reframe everything that's happened to you, to reinterpret everything that's happened to you, to rewrite everything that's happened to you, and to see it from a different perspective. And life gets hard. You're not going to go through this life without at least a decent amount of pain. But when you're hardwired for growth, you push yourself. You smile through the tears. You laugh in the middle of chaos. And you keep finding the gold that's hidden inside of the dirt because every single time that you do, what you're doing is you're building yourself and your brain neurologically into a stronger, happier, and more powerful version of you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories, tag me in @robdialjunior, @robdialjr. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of just this podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.