Attitudes are the way people tend to think or feel about someone or something. You might think of attitudes as self-talk—conversations you have with yourself. Some attitudes are uplifting and make you feel good, such as when you tell yourself, I can do it, while other attitudes leave you feeling in a funk, such as when you mumble to yourself, Poor me, I can’t do anything right. Attitudes and feelings go hand-in-hand.
Attitudes can become everyday habits, almost as automatic as picking up and holding your fork in your hand when you eat. You might not even notice the inner mumblings at first, probably because you’ve gotten so used to them. Or maybe you notice them all the time and they drive you crazy because you can’t turn them off! And, just maybe, no one ever helped you take a close look at them so you could see how they color the way you see the world and how they can affect your relationships.
If you were to stop and truly pay attention, you might notice that attitudes can play repeatedly in your mind. You might mutter aloud, “He’s no good and shouldn’t have made the team” without even realizing you’re doing it. Have you ever done that? You might stew about something someone said that made you feel hurt or disappointed and rehash it over and over, which makes you feel even worse. It can be difficult if not impossible to turn off this self-talk. In a similar way, you’ve probably observed your friends, classmates, parents, and teachers grumbling about the same thing again and again. We don’t have to tell you that negative attitudes can create a lot of stress!
Sometimes it’s clear when a person needs to change an attitude. Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Girl, you need an attitude adjustment.” Or you might say to a classmate, “You’re always complaining about your math teacher and how unfair you think she is. You’ve got a real attitude problem.” An attitude like that isn’t going to help the situation, and a change of attitude is needed. By the way, teens aren’t the only ones with griping and grumbling attitudes. Adults have them, too!
An interesting thing about attitudes and feelings—and something to be on the lookout for—is that it’s very easy for your brain to justify them. Your brain will likely have no problem at all coming up with a list of reasons why you’re justified to stew in self-pity or gripe about school.
For example, let’s say a classmate did something that made you really mad. You sat there grumbling to yourself that what she did wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, that she’s stupid to behave that way, and that you wouldn’t treat someone that way. For all of those reasons, you have the “right” to grumble and stew about her actions.
But here’s the tricky thing: what good does that attitude do except keep the story alive, leaving you feeling miserable? If you recall from chapter 3, when you feel miserable, you’re also producing stress hormones and your nervous system is revving up. Not to mention that while you’re stewing, the other person is probably out having a fun time and completely unaware of how you’re feeling. Your poor-me attitude ends up hurting you. It also does nothing to help you find a way to work out the situation.
There are other negative attitudes besides the poor-me attitude. Here are some common ones:
You may have one of those attitudes as you think about a situation, another person, or even yourself. Attitudes can also be stories that you tell yourself about yourself. Here are a few examples:
Or maybe you complain about things at school or at home:
The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.—John C. Maxwell
Although it might sound like a cliché, it is our attitude toward life’s circumstances and challenges that can determine our future. Many studies show that our attitudes determine our degree of success in life. You may have noticed that people who have more inner strength and positive attitudes and feelings enjoy life more. They tend to be more successful than people who are down on life and complain about anything and everything. Attitudes can motivate us and provide energy, real energy, to accomplish the things that are important to us. Other attitudes, however, such as those listed above, can drag us down and take away not only our success, but also take away our personal fulfillment.
Exercise: Your Attitude Inventory
Think of this exercise as taking an inventory of your attitudes, especially the ones that play out as grumbles and gripes. Have fun with it. You might even find yourself laughing at some of your attitudes and the griping and grumbling you do! Be genuine, though, as you do the exercise. You may discover some attitudes you didn’t realize you had.
The first step toward changing an attitude is to identify what needs to be changed, as you’ve done in the last exercise. When it comes to changing your attitude, an honest self-evaluation is a must. But in your self-evaluation, be sure to have some compassion for yourself. Why? Because you’re not alone. Almost every human being has attitudes that get in the way of living life fully. Attitudes are simply learned behaviors that accumulate over time, and as you might be discovering, all too often they become automatic ways you think about something. In other words, grumbling seems to just happen! You may feel like you’re stuck in a muddy rut, spinning your tires and going nowhere—except deeper into the hole of even more negativity. You don’t have to keep spinning your wheels though, as you’ll see shortly.
When you’re first trying to name your negative attitudes, you may feel threatened or awkward about identifying an attitude that doesn’t serve you well—an attitude such as telling yourself, Everything I do is wrong. It is part of growing and maturing where an old “skin”—your old attitude—is shed in favor of a newer one. For some, it might take real courage to shed an old skin, but the results will be worth it. Changing an attitude can feel like an uphill struggle or a do-good attempt at positive thinking with no juice behind it. You need power to change the momentum and make attitude shifts that are meaningful. So what can you do?
One thing you can do is practice Quick Coherence (chapter 2), which can help you quickly shift a feeling or an attitude. But there are times when you’ll need extra power to shift from a deep-rutted draining attitude to a more positive attitude and to make it stick so you’re genuinely free of that old attitude. You can add that power with a HeartMath technique called Attitude Breathing. With Attitude Breathing, you can change a negative attitude more quickly and find your way to a more positive attitude that can improve your outlook on a situation or about life in general.
The Attitude Breathing technique helps you stop negative attitudes and replace them with ones that boost your energy, clear your head, and freshen your outlook on life. Making this attitude shift will also lessen the amount of the stress hormone cortisol circulating in your body.
When you decide to use Attitude Breathing, you choose to make a positive difference for yourself. It’s like changing your old inner story and writing a new story in that moment. This time it’s a story that is stress-bustin’ and resilience-boostin’! Attitude Breathing can help you get out of the “poor me” rut or any other negative attitude you might have. Moment by moment, you decide what new attitude or feeling you would like to have. And perhaps best of all, when you practice Attitude Breathing regularly, you gradually build the power to make attitude shifts that last.
Attitude Breathing requires that you choose an attitude—such as courage, patience, “I can,” or “it’s going to be a good week”—to draw into yourself. Don’t worry if you can’t find a new attitude or feeling right away or if you feel an inner resistance. Take your time and don’t try to force anything to happen.
Now it’s time to give Attitude Breathing a try. We’ll give the technique first and then offer some tips for using it. Read through all of the steps at least once before you try the technique. Have your notebook ready. Be sure to write the replacement attitude you select in step 2 in your notebook as well as make notes of what you experience when you try the technique. (If you have difficulty coming up with a new attitude to replace a negative one, see the section below entitled “Replacing Negative Attitudes with Positive Attitudes.”)
Technique: Attitude Breathing
Step 1: Recognize a feeling or attitude that you want to change and identify a replacement attitude.
Step 2: Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
Step 3: Breathe the feeling of the new attitude slowly and casually through the heart area.
Option: Breathe two attitudes if you’d like. For example, breathe in an attitude of calm and breathe out an attitude of confidence, or breathe in an attitude of love and breathe out an attitude of compassion.
Here are a few helpful tips to get the most out of Attitude Breathing:
Now give Attitude Breathing a try for two to three minutes. If possible, you might want to practice this in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. (You also may want to review the steps one more time.) When you finish, reflect on your experience. What did you notice as you practiced it? Make notes of your experience in your notebook. Attitude Breathing is a simple but effective technique, so practice it a lot.
To help jump-start the process to the practice of Attitude Breathing, take a look at the following two lists to give you some ideas of common negative attitudes and some suggested positive feelings and attitudes to replace them—right there on the spot! You can think of replacement attitudes as being opposites of the unwanted ones. These are only suggestions. You might have a sense of one that works better. Go with it!
| Negative Attitudes and Feelings | Positive Replacement Attitudes and Feelings |
|---|---|
|
Angry/Upset |
Breathe calm or neutral to cool down |
|
Anxious |
Breathe calm |
|
Bored |
Breathe responsibility or creativity |
|
Fatigued |
Breathe increased energy or vitality |
|
Fearful |
Breathe courage, peace, or calm |
|
Fogged/Confused |
Breathe clarity |
|
“I can’t” |
Breathe “I can” |
|
Impatient |
Breathe patience |
|
Breathe being connected, sociable, or appreciated |
|
|
Judgmental |
Breathe ease, tolerance, or compassion |
|
Overwhelmed |
Breathe ease or peace |
|
Rebellious |
Breathe respect or calm |
|
Self-pity/Poor me |
Breathe maturity, confidence, or strength |
|
Shamed/Guilty |
Breathe kindness, care, or compassion to yourself |
|
Stressed |
Breathe calm or ease |
|
Uncertain |
Breathe patience |
Can you think of other negative attitudes that you experience? If you can’t think of any others right now, be on the lookout for them. See which positive replacement attitudes give you the most relief and write them down. As you practice, you’ll discover that each positive replacement attitude has a different feeling that helps you get the stress out.
Take a look again at the list of Negative Attitudes and Feelings and Positive Replacement Attitudes and Feelings above. Let’s see how the attitudes in each column fit into the Emotional Landscape diagram that we discussed in chapter 3. As you read down the list of Negative Attitudes and Feelings, what effect do they have on your inner battery? They drain your energy, right? You could put that entire list on the left side—the depleting side—of the Landscape. As you can probably guess, each of the negative attitudes and feelings creates an incoherent heart rhythm. Remember that an incoherent heart rhythm sends signals to the brain and takes your smart-thinking brain offline. When that happens, it’s difficult to work through a situation, and, in fact, you likely will end up with even more unwanted, negative attitudes that further drain your inner battery. You just can’t be your best on the left side of the Landscape!
So what about the positive replacement attitudes and feelings? They all go on the right side of the Landscape, right? For one, they feel a lot better. They also create a coherent heart rhythm, which sends ordered signals to your brain, bringing it back online. Rather than draining your inner battery, you’re recharging it. You can be at your best more often.
Attitude Breathing, then, is another technique that can help you shift from the left side to the right side of the Landscape. Attitude Breathing helps put you in charge of how you respond so that you—not those automatic attitudes—run the show.
It can be fun to experiment with different attitudes, especially when you are stealthily practicing the Attitude Breathing technique around people at school or at home. With practice, you will develop new awareness of what each attitude feels like and what it can do for you. Practice Attitude Breathing until you remember to do it automatically when you feel irritated, frustrated, angry, anxious, or fearful. Here are some ideas of when you might practice Attitude Breathing during the day:
Do Attitude Breathing several times during the day—even when nothing is disturbing you—in order to build up a storage bank of energy. The advantage of stored energy is that it helps lift you above frustrations, anxieties, and gridlocks in day-to-day life that would otherwise drain you. It gives you a chance to sort out challenges without them taking you down. When these stressors take you off guard, and they will from time to time, take a moment and use Attitude Breathing.
The great thing about Attitude Breathing is that you can literally do it on the go. During the day if you notice any negative attitudes, thoughts, or emotions, take a moment to focus on a positive replacement attitude and then practice Attitude Breathing again. Learn to practice Attitude Breathing while you’re walking down the hall, doing your homework, or hanging out with friends. As with any of the techniques in this book, you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to use Attitude Breathing. And keep in mind that a lot of your energy drains away when you get sucked into other people’s drama. Sincere practice of Attitude Breathing can help change this or at least cushion you from getting whacked by someone else’s lousy attitude. Positive thinking alone is not enough to shift attitudes that are highly charged with emotion. Adding heart coherence is the missing factor, because it puts energy behind the intent.
And after you’ve been on the go all day, Attitude Breathing can help you end your day on an uplifting note. Focusing on a positive replacement attitude when you go to bed can lead to more peaceful and deeper sleep, reducing the carryover of emotional turmoil accumulated from the day. Breathe balance, ease, appreciation, or any replacement attitude for a few minutes after you close your eyes or until you fall asleep.
Just as you can use Attitude Breathing on the go throughout the day, you can also use it to prepare in advance for situations, encounters, and events that you may be concerned about. Let’s look first at general prepping and then prepping for your day.
Let’s say tomorrow you have a test and you get anxious or nervous on test days. Practicing Attitude Breathing today can help you get calm now, which can make it easier both to get calm when you sit down to take the test and to remain calmer during the test. Of course, positive attitudes are not just for getting ready for taking tests. They can help prepare you for any encounters with people, issues, or situations that trigger stress for you. Practicing Attitude Breathing builds your resilience, which means you can be better prepared for unexpected situations that might be stressful. Try breathing attitudes of calm, compassion, courage, forgiveness, or patience that give you emotional strength. By breathing these attitudes, you store energy so you have it when you need it.
You can also use Attitude Breathing to prep for your day. Start the day with Attitude Breathing as soon as you get out of bed. Negative thoughts, attitudes, and emotions like worry, sadness, hurt, or anger often creep in as soon as you wake up in the morning and sometimes before you even get out of bed. That’s where the expression “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” comes from. That’s not a great way to start the day.
Breathe appreciation or calm while you’re getting dressed, making breakfast, or getting ready for school. When you get distracted, just remember to go back and practice Attitude Breathing instead of rehashing situations in your mind. With sincere practice, this technique can prevent your emotions from becoming frayed, helping you rise above the grind of daily living. You can use Attitude Breathing before any situation that might be stressful.
Remember, it’s not the situation itself that drains you. It’s the repetitive thoughts and emotional oversignificance you give to those situations that depletes your energy. Typically, it’s the little stuff that gets blown out of proportion that then becomes big stuff. Practice taking the significance out of negative thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. You can do that by breathing in the attitude of “taking significance out” or “no big deal,” which then can cut short your journey down the stress highway. Having a “no big deal” attitude can also help in other challenging situations that we’ll talk about next.
It’s understandable that you would feel upset from a past situation that caused you hurt or pain. But that doesn’t mean you can’t begin to release the hold that hurt and pain have on you. Your heart can open you to new insights that will help release those feelings and help you see the situation with clarity and balance. When situations come up that trigger negative attitudes, breathe in a replacement attitude to clear out the negativity, which will help ease the grip that the old attitude has on you.
When memories of more traumatic situations or events resurface, use Attitude Breathing for a few moments to stop the momentum of the memories from building. Regular practice of any of the techniques—Heart-Focused Breathing (chapter 1), Quick Coherence (chapter 2), or Attitude Breathing—can lessen the impact of traumatic memories and, over time, help you build healthier responses.
It’s important to understand that Attitude Breathing doesn’t sweep negative attitudes under the rug. Instead, it helps transform them. You might think of this transformation as a process of befriending the negative attitude by bringing it into your heart—not fighting it—and holding it in your heart while releasing the significance you’ve attached to it. For example, let’s say you’ve had the attitude for a long time that you just can’t do anything right. To “befriend” the attitude is to acknowledge to yourself in all honesty, that’s how you feel. That can help because you’re not putting energy into holding it in. Sometimes that alone can take out some of its charge. Then breathe in a replacement attitude of how you really want to feel.
Sometimes, however, when you might prefer to hold on to a reaction or pout, or when a negative attitude “owns” you, go against the grain of habit and have a talk with yourself. Say to yourself that you’re going to do something different for yourself and breathe in a positive attitude. You might decide one day—it might just be today—that you’ve simply had enough of draining emotional reactivity. That’s a great attitude to have—enough already! That can give you a boost of energy and commitment to “take on” daily challenges.
You might also find that you’re not the only one with attitudes that need changing. It can be helpful to realize that many and probably most people have their own day-to-day issues and challenges to handle. They, too, feel frustration, uncertainty, fear, anger, or rage. This can make everyone around you edgy and irritable. Have an attitude of compassion for yourself and others. You won’t always know what someone else may be struggling with. As soon as you catch yourself getting irritated, frustrated, angry or full of rage, use Attitude Breathing to take out as much of the negative reaction as you can and shift into heart rhythm coherence. Anchoring or “settling in” your energy in your heart will help you stay centered so you can see these situations calmly and find a better way to respond.
Again, you aren’t the only one with attitudes that don’t serve you well. More than likely, almost everyone around has them, too. Now that you’ve read this chapter and better understand negative attitudes, start noticing if other people are grumbling. Pay attention to what it’s like to be around people when they’re griping about something someone said to them or about how unfair it was for the teacher to talk to them in a critical tone in front of everyone. How does another person’s grumbling affect you? Is it annoying, irritating, and just not fun to be around? Of course! Who wants to be around that?
What commonly happens is that people can get pulled into someone else’s grumbling, which then pulls you into the rut with them, and you end up spinning your tires together, going nowhere. Put on the brakes by practicing Attitude Breathing (or Heart-Focused Breathing, from chapter 1, or Quick Coherence, from chapter 2)—and maybe teach your friend how to do it, too. You’ll both end up feeling better. You may end up laughing about all the grumbling you just did! Doing so can help keep other people’s grumbling from getting under your skin.
As you breathe in positive replacement attitudes with greater frequency, your inner security increases and you know better how to handle stressful situations. Inner security means being comfortable and confident with yourself so that you can respond appropriately rather than react to a situation. It is worth the effort it takes to build that sense of security. Without inner security, you can’t be who you really are. In short, this entire book is about building inner security.
You can start increasing inner security by generating attitudes and feelings of courage, compassion, care, appreciation, forgiveness, and “I can”; these attitudes and feelings also increase heart coherence. They release different hormones, which feel better to your system. That’s your body’s way of saying, “Yes, I want to feel more of these attitudes.” As you feel more secure, you see that you have a choice about the kinds of attitudes you experience: those that are more reactive and self-defeating such as anxiety, fear, irritation, or anger, or those that help you respond with greater poise, maturity, security, and awareness.
And don’t forget to practice Attitude Breathing even when you’re already feeling great. Doing so will add energy to your system, making it easier to bounce back when you do get knocked off your feet. If you keep practicing it, you may find you start doing it automatically. That’s certainly a worthwhile goal!
You can see that attitudes, whether or not you are even aware of them, can be the source of a lot of stress. In the next chapter, we’re going to talk about a fascinating topic, intuition, and how you can put your intuition to work for you to help you de-stress.
Your Stress-Bustin’, Resilience-Boostin’, On-the-Go Action Plan