How to Be Open to Interest, Enjoyment, and Appreciation

Interest, curiosity, enjoyment, appreciation, compassion, and love create approach motivations that seek more of what feels engaging. Resentment, anger, disdain, disgust, distraction, anxiety, obsessions, and boredom create avoid motivations that seek less of people or situations. Approach motivations are incompatible with avoid motivations and are opposite of attack motivations that focus on perceived threats to the ego. The most intense and frequent emotion becomes habituated and functions as an autopilot default. Avoid and attack often win because they require less openness. Changing conditioned emotional responses requires deliberate practice that builds new associations so approach reactions become automatic in the present. This involves validating and declaring feelings to shift them from past-based habits.

"Interest and enjoyment carry approach motivations-we want more of what stirs our interest and enjoyment. The first series of emotions carry approach motivations; we want more of what stirs them. Approach motivations are incompatible with avoid motivations, in which we want less of something or someone. Approach motivations are the opposite of attack motivations, in which we perceive threats, usually to the ego."

"Whichever emotion we experience the most intensely and frequently becomes habit, the default emotional state. On autopilot, something unusual must happen to switch from avoid and attack to approach. Avoid and attack motivations usually win out because they don't require an open mind and an open heart. When that is the case, we must deliberately open our hearts and minds."

"By the time we're adults, most of our feelings are conditioned responses; we automatically feel the same way in the same circumstances and physiological states. In addition, my current feeling loads into implicit memory the other times I felt this way, and I am apt to behave now the way I behaved then. To the extent that feelings are habituated, they are about the past."

"To change a prevailing conditioned response requires practice of new associations, so that avoid and attack motivations automatically stimulate approach motivations. Validate and Declare Here is the formula I use for myself and my clients to make feelings work for the present an"

Read at Psychology Today