Decrease the Bad, Increase the Good

At some point in your life, you may be overcome with negativity: negative thoughts, negative feelings, negative habits. Nothing seems to be going right, and you just feel stuck. Letting all of this negativity invade your life seems much easier than putting in the effort to try to protect yourself from it. By being more mindful of everything that is going on in your life, it becomes easier to find the joy in the suffering. It is also important to not sit alone and keep all of the suffering inside. Confiding in a close friend or family member can help to decrease the feelings of negativity by seeing that you are not alone in your suffering. "If you sit with a friend and speak openly, determined to discover the roots of your suffering, eventually you will see them clearly. But if you keep your suffering to yourself, it might grow bigger every day" (Hanh 38).

Selective watering is the concept that you only "water the seeds of joy" inside yourself (Hanh 41). Sometimes it becomes very difficult to focus on the good things in your life; the bad things seem to just take over. By using selective watering, you can retrain your brain to notice the good things over the bad. We need to remember that there is always more good in our lives than bad. "You have eyes that can see, lungs that can breathe, legs that can walk, and lips that can smile" (Hanh 41). It is very easy to forget how lucky we really are to have all of these things. There are so many positive things in our lives that we don't even notice and just take for granted. Imagine if we only had what we actually took the time to be thankful for? We would most likely have close to nothing.

Another useful technique for changing a feeling, thought, or habit is known as "changing the peg". This concept also focuses on replacing bad thoughts with good thoughts, "just as a carpenter replaces a rotten peg by hammering in a new one" (Hanh 62). If you keep your mind focused on what is right in your life, the bad thoughts, feelings, and habits will soon be pushed to the back of your mind.

I have a hard time with accepting that fact that people do actually like me as a person and want to be my friend. I always find myself coming up with reasons that people shouldn't like me, and making myself feel very isolated and alone when in reality I am not. I focus on my flaws and constantly feel like people notice them, when they really don't. Lately, I have been trying really hard to push all of this negativity out of my mind. In a way, I think that I have been "selectively watering" the positive thoughts instead of the negative ones. I have also found myself gravitating towards people who have a good outlook on life, and their positive mindfulness will quickly makes its way into my thoughts. I think that the people you surround yourself with have a huge impact on how you feel about yourself and about life in general. By retraining my mind to not let the negative thoughts take over the positive ones, I allow myself to be much more available to making new friends and allowing them to see the real me: happy, silly, and fun.




I have struggled with anxiety pretty much my entire life, and that definitely brings up many bad feelings. I have also spent a good chunk of my life trying to retrain my mind to not let these bad feelings replace all of the good feelings. Over the years, I have learned that worrying about things that happened in the past and about things that may or may not happen in the future allows the present to slip away. When I get older, I don't want to feel like I lived an unfulfilling life because I was never focused on what was happening in those moments. I also want to "change the peg" because I don't want people to feel as though they never got the chance to really get to know me because I was always consumed by anxiety; when I am anxious it is very obvious that I am not myself. "When you practice Right View and Right Thinking, you dwell deeply in the present moment, where you can touch seeds of joy, peace, and liberation, heal and transform your suffering, and be truly present for many others" (Hanh 63). I want to someday be able to tell my story of how I coped with my anxiety, and be able to help others get through it too.

One bad habit that I have always had is waiting until the last minute to do school assignments. This semester, I have been trying to get a jump start on my work so that I don't feel so overwhelmed. By doing things ahead of time, it also gives me a chance to review my work and make sure that everything is done correctly, instead of doing it at the last second and just submitting it to be done with it. I still need to work on this more frequently (as you can tell from this blog post being submitted at the last minute), but I definitely am getting better at not procrastinating so much. By "changing the peg" in this situation, I am working on breaking this bad habit and replacing it with a new and improved method of getting assignments done. Hopefully some time in the near future, procrastination will not longer be a part of my vocabulary.

It is really important to be able to recognize the bad thoughts, feelings, and habits that are a part of your life. By doing so, you can take part in Right Mindfulness and allow your mind to retrain itself to no longer take part in any of these things. "Practicing mindfulness helps us learn to appreciate the well-being that is already there" (Hanh 41).