IS there anyone in the world you like totally? As in, approve everything about that person, all the time? Even if you are wildly, obsessively in all consuming love? Even if you have your rose-tinted glasses pushed right back up your nose? Can you honestly say there is nothing at all about your loved one you would rather change?
Surely not. It cannot be possible to like everything about even the one person you love most in the world

this is one of the best way to calm down when you feel anger rising rapidly Anger is nothing but misdirected energy says Dr Rachna Singh, lifestyle management expert at Artemis Health Institute, Gurgaon. So before you throw a cup at your partner or chase the car that nicked you while overtaking from the wrong side, start breathing slowly and deeply and count to 100. This will keep you from doing anything dramatic. “Deep breathing for 2-3 minutes at this time will help distract you and bring adrenalin levels down,” adds Dr Singh.

 HAVE WATER/JUICE/CHOCOLATE: Sipping water when you are really angry helps calm you down, says clin- ical psychologist and psychotherapist Seema Hingorrany “Many people feel irritable when they are hungry so eating a piece of chocolate helps provide your body with some food. Chocolate also activates feel-good hormones, so two pieces might do wonders tor your mood.” Sipping water or juice also helps distract you and your mind moves from negative to positive thoughts.

 CALL A TIME OUT: sometimes, in an argument with a friend or partner, you may say something in the heat of the moment that you will certainly regret later. At these times, it is best if you remove yourself from the situation. “Excuse yourself, wash your face and return to the discussion after 5-10 minutes. When you return you wn find yourself much cooler and calmer and more capable of dealing with the situation calmly,” says Dr Singh. She adds that this technique works well also while dealing with kids throwing tantrums or teenagers who flare up at their parents. “Send them to their bedrooms for 10 minutes. The kids cool down considerably,” she says.

 VISUALISE: When you feel the anger rising, visualise something that calms you down. “It could be a soothing waterfall, a calm sea or even walking on cold grass,” says Hingorrany “Even a symbol like the Buddha will work because it helps shift your mind from irritability to calmness.” You can also chant a mantra that will help bring you out of the negative spiral you have entered. If you are a controlling personality you are more likely to explode in anger than if you are not. So it will also help to consciously remember that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot.

VENTILATE: This simply means that whenever you are really angry about something, before reacting violently to the cause of that anger or instead of letting it fester inside you, call a friend, partner or parent to vent your feelings. “The saying ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ means something. When you discuss something you are angry about with a friend or partner, you reiterate your thought process aloud. This helps you calm down and also manage to see things more clearly”.

BY colleen braganza

Source : HT

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?
   If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.
   Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.
   So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills”, so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.
   This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness:Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
   
Compassion:Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as

being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.
   
Story skills:These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.
   
Letting-go techniques:These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

   
Enjoyment skills:This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and, especially, gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
   Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

 by : Tony Wilkinson

source : times life