Do you keep a “jar of awesome?” Neuroscience and positive psychology suggests you should…

You may have come across a post on Instagram which is a jar of folded up post-it notes. The gist of the caption is that once a week you write something great on a note, pop it in the jar, and then at the end of the year you read all the awesome things that have happened.

Thanks to a further understanding of neuroscience, “choose your thoughts” is generally pretty good advice. It works on the basis that our thoughts become wiring in our brains so we want to make sure that our thoughts are aligned with the wiring we want to create.

So many people believe that you can’t really build resilience until you have experienced a major setback. The good news is that isn’t true. No two brains are created the same, which means that some people are naturally going to be more optimistic and resilient than others. And thanks to neuroscience we know that brains are able to be re-wired so that resilience can be built even if it doesn’t come naturally to you.