5Self Sustain Your Brain. Grow A Positive Mind. A positive mind is absolutely your most important comprehensive health resource. Your brain has an inherent optimism bias. Consider how much negativity it takes to undermine that bias and the effect of changing our basic nature so that we are more negative than positive. Do you think this could affect the health of your memory? Your brain runs most efficiently on positivity. Our greatest waste of energy is the poor use we make of psychic energy. The greatest energy crisis is the non-use and misuse of the energy of the brain. Self sustain your brain. It is a vast resource that is continuing to evolve. How we cooperate with the evolution of our brain determines our health on a primal level. If negativity is in the way of that evolution by narrowing the options and choices of the brain and rigidifying, the lean toward disease is far greater. If it is the job of your brain to "get the larger picture" as you grow older, if you dig in and become rigid and narrow, why wouldn't the loss of wasted energy express itself in the loss of the capacity for memory? Half of your brain, the entire right hemisphere, is for the purpose of novelty, of integrating and organizing so that new information can be lateralized, passed over to the left hemisphere. You will learn how to live in an UpSpiral that actually raises the level of your moods, your emotional states, and your everyday experience of "feeling good." This UpSpiral increases your openness to new information, to novelty. As you increase in growing your positive mind, it will move in the direction of increasing the meaning in your life. At the core of positivity is the way we make meaning, called our meaning-making system. New developmental stages of meaning-making emerge throughout our entire life span. Growing a positive mind greatly enhances the move into and through these stages of meaning-making. When that growth is thwarted, aliveness is dulled and negativity takes its toll on health. Our brains are meant to evolve into higher and higher stages of more complex reasoning. This book is about the growth that enhances those developmental stages of meaning-making. A positive mind also enhances the ability to navigate the transitions that exist between these stages. This is not just theory, it is not simply insight, but the "how to" in language anyone can understand. "Growing The Positive Mind" is a guide to becoming emotionally more agile and flexible. It helps you recover from the learned non-use of positive emotion which affects everyone. We learn not to be positive by the small and large traumas of our lives. It is something like a stroke where we discover that what we thought was not workable is still there ready to spring to life. That is the potential for higher and higher levels of positive emotion that you learn in Dr. Larkin's Emotional Gym. Growing positive emotional muscle is actually something you can learn. and learning helps you manage your moods, your states of mind, and puts the control of positive emotion back into the hands of the reader rather than in the events of life outside the person. You can feel positive emotions simply because you decide you can. You don't have to have a reason. You can grow positive emotional muscle that is at your control, and this book tells you how. Each chapter is a strategy that is a "how to" of an overall process of change, that creates both a more positive mind but also creates the potential for deeper and more significant meaning-making in life. Your brain can always grow new neurons, your brain is always evolving and a positive mind insures the healthiest and easiest use of the energy of the brain to grow and evolve. Learn how from a book grounded in science and translated so simply that anyone can understand it. The research that grounds the book is contained in the rich bibliography.