Our brains are not hardwired for optimism or pessimism, so you can learn to accentuate the positive. Here’s how:

• Learn to meditate. An eight-week program of daily mindfulness meditation — trying to stay in the moment without distracting thoughts — increased activation of the left prefrontal lobe in study subjects.
• Think in threes. Approximately three positive moments are needed to counteract one negative one, according to Fredrickson. So volunteer, listen to music you like, or pet a puppy.
• Write it down. Martin Seligman, the psychologist who authored the book Authentic Happiness, suggests you create a journal. Every night, write down three good things that happened that day — and include an explanation for why each happened.

Loneliness is not only emotionally painful; it can harm your health. It’s a risk factor for a host of problems: high blood pressure; sleep problems; decreased ability to deal with the stress of daily life; and the body’s reduced ability to handle inflammation, leading to conditions such as atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and tendinitis, as well as a weakened immune system, so you’re more susceptible to illness. Researchers have yet to identify the exact ways these health problems occur, but they know that loneliness seems to make them worse.

Researchers found that physical pain and intense emotional pain, such as feelings of rejection after a bad breakup of a relationship, activate the same

With sexual shame being so common it may seem surprising that we don’t talk about it more. Only it isn’t. Shame leads us to be silent about our sexuality and it gets more powerful in that silence. Whether you can live a life without any sexual shame or not, there are things we can all do to change our experience of sexual shame. For many of us this work is best done with a professional (either a general counselor or therapist or perhaps someone who specializes in sex therapy). In fact for some people, starting to unpack their sexual shame can be unsafe if they do it on their own, without any supports in place.

Sexual shame refers to are all the ways we come to feel that who we are as sexual beings (including how we think about sex, our sexual beliefs and values, our sexual desires, and our sexual behaviors) are wrong, broken, fundamentally bad, or even evil. People experience sexual shame in response to many things, including:

• who we feel sexual desire for
• who we want to have sex with
• the kinds of sex we want to have
• our sexual thoughts and fantasies
• the ways that we see ourselves as sexual (which often includes how we understand our gender)