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hey this is Leo for actualised dot-org and in this video I'm gonna talk about negative visualization misfortune ways most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune this is a quote from Seneca Seneca was a Roman senator as I recall and he was a stoic what is stoicism and more importantly what does this have to do with our topic our theme for this video which is negative visualization negative visualization is a pretty cool idea and it's a technique that was developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to help you develop gratitude and more happiness in your life and what I want to do in this video is show you how to use this technique and start to get you to really notice how you're leaking happiness in your life because this is what's happening a lot of people is that we're going out there and we're creating success externally for ourselves but then we're still feeling empty inside and that's because we fail to understand some of these fundamental principles about happiness that the ancient Greeks and Romans understood several thousand years ago and yet today with all the information that we have we still failed to actually practice this and it's always good to go back into the past look at the sages and the wise people who really knew and really studied the stuff and really understood how happiness works because human psychology hasn't changed in the last two thousand years it's basically the same as it was so this is a good reference point so what is negative visualization as a technique this is a psychological technique that you can use on yourself and it basically works like this you visualize yourself deprived of whatever it is that you really value in your life so whatever in your life is important to you something that you maybe strive for in the past and now you have whether that's your family or your material possessions or your job or your health or anything like that that you would really appreciate what you do is you imagine that you lost this thing so imagine that you lost your family imagine that you lost your house imagine that you lost your job imagine that you lost your health and when you imagine this you do it in a cool and rational sort of way not in a neurotic anxious sort of way and as you do this what it does is it helps to build a sense of appreciation within you that you have these things that's basically what the technique is it's pretty simple what's powerful about it though is that it goes to some really fundamental truths about human psychology that like I said the Greeks and Romans understood 2,000 years ago and here is the fundamental truth the fundamental truth is something called hedonic adaptation that's a modern word but the ancients knew about this hedonic adaptation is the human tendency to get acclimated to whatever circumstances were in in life it's kind of like going into the pool right you go into the cold pool and at first it feels very cold and uncomfortable but then you get acclimated to it and the water becomes refreshing and it just feels like you're floating and you're not in cold water if you go into a hot or a warm pool again your body will also acclimate to that and you're not going to feel that as much as well now this happens with us physically with sense of touch with sense of sight with sense of hearing but it also happens to the stuff that we have in our lives so whatever you have in your life whether you have really bad circumstances in life what we would call objectively bad let's say you're in severe poverty or if you have really good circumstance in life let's say that you're really wealthy actually those circumstances they don't have as much effect on your happiness level as we would assume they do the naive assumption that we would have just our intuition would say well of course the the rich person is going to be much happier than this parsha person who's stuck in poverty but actually what you find is that there's not that much of a difference there is an initial difference so what your body is really good at and what your brain is really good at registering is changes in differences so that means that if you were rich and you become poor you're gonna feel that that's gonna probably hurt a lot for you but then if you acclimate to that situation let's say you go from be very wealthy to going bankrupt and becoming very poor if you live in poverty for a for a while you're not gonna start to notice that as much it's not gonna it's not gonna really influence your happiness level because your mind and your body is very adaptable it just takes on whatever conditions it's given likewise if you are poor your whole life and then suddenly you become rich that change in your conditions is gonna make you feel really good it's gonna make you feel very excited and it's gonna seem like you became happy because now you're much richer but actually what's gonna happen is that you're gonna get that initial spike in happiness but then it's gonna drop back down because your body and your mind are gonna acclimate in a few months after your wealth a few months of living in in that kind of that kind of lifestyle and those kind of circumstances eventually what's going to happen is that you're just gonna get back to them basically the same level that you were at when you were poor so this is a tricky thing hedonic adaptation this is really why it's hard for us to ever be happy in our lives because we're always going out there and we're chasing stuff we're trying to establish really good life circumstances right whether it's that family that you want that girlfriend or boyfriend that you're really looking for or maybe you're looking to improve your health you want to get fit or you just want to get rid of some ailments that you've got or you want more money you want to start a business you want a career you want a job you want more friends whatever it is if you want of course we think that those are gonna make us happy and you should pursue those things but you should also develop appreciation for it and this is really where the Stoics had some brilliant understanding of human psychology who were the Stoics the Stoics were people like Zeno Seneca who I'm quote who I quoted at the beginning here Epictetus and also Marcus Aurelius all of these people were famous Greeks and Romans and they practice stoicism as a life philosophy stoicism was a school of philosophy that was really concerned about how do you create a good high quality life it wasn't just interested about arguing theoretical concepts and doing kind of traditional philosophy as we think of it it was more what I would call now a positive psychology it was more like self-help it was like how do you live your life in accordance to certain principles that will guarantee maximum happiness and the Stoics were really keen and real sticklers on practicing what they preached and so they developed some of these techniques and these techniques can be really powerful and they used them themselves you could read books from Seneca or from Marcus Aurelius you can read their writings and you could see the way that they thought about life was very different than the way that we think about it today so appreciation how does this negative visualization create appreciation for us it might seem on the surface that if I'm thinking about being deprived of some of the stuff that I'm happy about in my life like my family or my home or my job then that would make me depressed or miserable let's take a look at an example of how this actually works so what the Stoics are telling you to do here this is literally how it works you wake up in the morning and let's say you go and you do your morning routine so you're gonna go to the bathroom and you're gonna shower and shave and do all your stuff there and brush your teeth now as you're brushing your teeth what you're gonna do to practice this negative visualization is for about five minutes as you're doing that you're gonna start thinking and you're gonna think to yourself hmm what do I really value in my life that I take for granted now just be cuz I've adapted to it through hedonic adaptation well what about my hands it could easily be the case that I don't have any hands what if I was born without hand there are people like that it's a genetic defect what if I lost my hand let's say I lost my left hand in a car accident or while I was deployed overseas or in some sort of accident elsewhere what if I did have my left hand right now what would my life be like and so you start imagining what your life would be like and in fact as you're brushing your teeth and you've picked up the toothbrush with your right hand and you're reaching for the toothpaste with your left hand you're gonna notice oh I couldn't do that if I didn't have this amazing left hand in fact this is a really amazing instrument we take it for granted but the amount of movements possible with this hand the precision that we have is really amazing there's not even any modern mechanical robotic hands that are really quite as sensitive and quite as as as capable as a human hand so it's a really a marvel of engineering that this thing evolved and now we have two of them but how often do you really think about that maybe never in your life have you considered how amazing your hands are and how how much you really appreciate and value that until right now when I'm telling you this but see as you're doing this negative visualization and you're reaching for that toothpaste now you can't you can't do that if you don't have a left hand so now you start to appreciate oh this left hand allows me to squeeze the toothpaste on my toothbrush while I'm holding it how would I do it otherwise I'd have to like lay my toothbrush down on the counter maybe it would tip over because then I would have to use my right hand and how would I unscrew the cap from the toothpaste with only one hand that would be a challenge to I'd have to lay down the the toothpaste and then I have to somehow finagle it see and this is gonna start going through your mind and as you're thinking about this you're really getting a sense of gratitude about how nice it is to have a left hand whereas if you didn't do that that negative visualization then you would never even consider how much value your left hand has to you in fact you might have noticed this but if you ever get like a cut on your hand or maybe you get a blister or something and then you go about your normal everyday life you start to recognize not only how much you use your hand but even a specific part of your hand has that ever happened to you it's funny like sometimes I'll cut myself and and then I'll be driving the car and I'll notice that actually that part where I cut myself and maybe it's just I'll lick a little cut like maybe it's even just like a paper cut right just like a little thing and it's somewhere on my hand here and I just I would assume that you know well this this part of the hand it's not it's not very meaningful it's just like maybe 2% of this entire surface area but actually what you realize is that when you're driving your car that little paper cut you can notice that oh now I see that I was actually using that part of my hand on the steering wheel and maybe not only on the steering wheel but you're also using it when you're doing something else like flicking on the blinker lights and maybe you're using it when you're writing a document at home maybe you're using it when you're picking up your kids maybe you're using that part of the hand when you're working out at the gym and it's really funny that when you when you get a little cut like that it makes you appreciate and almost sometimes when I get a cut like that in a really kind of a like a place that gets used a lot on my hand then I'll start to think I'll be like oh damn I just I just wish I got that cut somewhere else and then what happens is that sometime later maybe a year later I get a I get a cut on some other part in my hand and then I wish oh man I wish I wouldn't didn't get a cut there either because you never appreciate just how much you're using this stuff so this is what the Stokes really want to turn you onto with this negative negative visualization is is just how much you're taking for granted everything in your life it's good to make a list I want you to actually use this technique for the next week so what that means you're gonna spend five minutes every single day consciously doing some sort of negative visualization and to help you do that what I want you to do right now is after this video is over I want you to sit down pull out a piece of paper and write down ten things that you really have in your life that are just absolutely amazing but that you take completely for granted maybe that's going to include your parents your family your kids your house the country that you live in the fact that you have good health the fact that you have decent income the city that you live in the girlfriend or boyfriend that you have maybe how fortunate you've been up to now in your in your childhood and also as as an adult the circumstances that you've had you know take note of the stuff that you're really taking for granted in your life maybe it's your hands maybe it's your body maybe it's your eyesight or your sense of hearing there's quite a lot here really sit down and think about this create a list of your top ten now when you've got this list briefly consider right then as you're looking over it what your life would be like if you lost that thing because you're not entitled to anything see this is where people really go wrong about happiness and success in life and I see this happening a lot in modern society and this wasn't the case I think 2000 years ago because back then it was a lot harder to acquire some of the amazing stuff that we have today simple luxuries that they didn't have 2,000 years ago today we just take completely for granted a lot of people argue are so entitled about stuff in life and really what the Stokes taught was that you're not entitled to anything anything at all we like to think for example that we're entitled to a decent house we're entitled to clean water we're entitled to free medical care we're entitled to being treated well by our spouse we're entitled to seeing our children go grow up and grow old we're entitled to see ourselves be healthy we're entitled to have a good job we're entitled to have friends that are nice to us we're entitled to not have to pay too many taxes so like all of these things we think like they're just our rights when in fact if you really think about if you'll really look around you for a second it's just a miracle that you're just sitting right now wherever you're sitting or standing and that you're just living and breathing that right there is already an amazing thing as I wonder because you've literally got several trillion up cells in this body that are comprising you and each cell is like a little organism and it's got its own life this cell you are made up of trillions of those and all those cells are somehow cooperating and working together functioning amazingly well so that you can have energy so you can wake up in the morning so you can go pick up the kids so you can go work at your job and do all the kind of normal stuff you do in your day and you take completely for granted but then of course if you have a health problem you quickly realize just how much you take that stuff for granted that your body does for you just a simple cold will make you very aware of this fact but an even more serious condition will will really sober you up to that fact and the fact is that you're not entitled to anything in life you're not entitled to a job you're not entitled to have a car you're not entitled to love or sex you're not entitled to income you're not entitled to even be alive you're not entitled that your family is a lie you're not entitled that your children are alive none of that stuff is entitled that stuff is just something that exists right now in the moment and it will go away one thing that the Stokes really taught and based their whole philosophy around is this idea that life is very impermanent and that everything that you have now everything that you've ever had will be gone and it's not going to be that long until that happens so you have to start to appreciate really how much you have in your life right now and how fleeting all that stuff is because that stuff is all in a state of flux a state of transition everything around you that you value is transitioning including your own body your health yourself your children your house your job all of that stuff will decay all that stuff will die not only will all the people around you die all the circumstances around you will decay all the buildings around you will eventually collapse all the corporations that exist will eventually dissolve or go bankrupt or be no more the entire human species will eventually be gone this entire planet that we're living on is eventually going to be evaporated by the Sun when the Sun expires and it burns through and it basically explodes and consumes the earth and every other planet in our solar system so all of that is gonna go and it's it's sobering to realizes because we don't usually think about it some people might say well that's pretty negative Leo pretty pessimistic of you to be talking about this stuff shouldn't we be positive well the the Stoics were I wouldn't say they were pessimistic sort but they were they were very they were they were very pragmatic about life it wasn't about positive or negative it was just about what is and they were doing this in a controlled cool and rational sort of way they weren't doing this as neurotics or as anxious pessimistic thinkers that wasn't their modus operandi so I want you to make this list make a list of these things and really consider what would be like if you lost some of those things how would you feel how how would you like be different it's interesting because people will sometimes leave me comments in the YouTube sections of my videos and it's it's very interesting to read some of those because sometimes you really see a lot of negative thinking or a lot of victim energy in those comments and one of the things that people will do is they'll start to compare themselves to other people and they'll feel entitled to certain things for example somebody will come in and say well but I suck with women Leo I can't attract the woman that I want I can't get that girlfriend I want or somebody else will come in there and say I can't start the family that I want to start or I can't do the this kind of job that I want to do or I don't have enough money to do this or this or this or this and so they compare themselves to other people and they feel like they're entitled to the same level of results or success that other people have and this is very much not the case you have to start considering that your circumstance are very unique and that you're not entitled to absolutely anything in life sometimes people will come in and they'll say something like this oh man I just lost that amazing promotion that I wanted at work I was really gunning for that promotion and I didn't get it and now I'm so depressed and so miserable but what the Stokes would say that person is but do you still have a job do you still love your work and that person would then think about it say oh yeah that's right I do have a job I was taking my amazing job for granted I was already doing good at my job I want to do even better I was so focused on doing better that I completely forgot that I was already doing pretty good okay wow I should be grateful I should be happy just about where I am right now not thinking about where I need to go but then see some of you will say beliya I don't even have a good job so aren't I entitled to be miserable and depressed and complain about that because this person sure he's got a decent job so that promotion that's like icing on top of the cake but what if you don't have a good job aren't you really miserable then and the Stokes would come back and say what about your family do you have a family that loves you why don't you be grateful for that even though you don't have a good job oh that's right I do have a family I should be grateful I'm taking my family for granted a lot are not it oh that's right maybe I could feel a bit more conscious about that a little bit happier in the moment okay but see some of you will still keep going and you'll say bolillo not only do I not have a good job but I don't have a good family either in fact my family is miserable maybe they hate me or we have a lot of conflict very dysfunctional family so I don't even have a good family so aren't I entitled to be miserable now and the answer is no you're not because the Stokes would come back and say okay so you don't have your family do you have a pet do you have a cat or a dog that you love oh you do well you should be grateful for the fact that you have a cat or a dog or some other pet that you really love even though you don't have a family or a job because there's a lot of people in the world that don't have a pet to love but you do why don't you be more grateful for that appreciate that a little bit more and now some of you will keep going you'll say but Leo I don't even have a pet I don't have a pet I don't have a family I don't have a job so my life is miserable surely right and the answer is no you don't have a right to complain either because maybe you don't have all those things but do you have clothing do you have clothing that you can that you can wear you have a shelter that you can live in why don't be grateful for that because there's a lot of people in the world that don't have clothing or shelter and now someone might say the leo I even struggle to to buy clothing and shelter in fact maybe I just got kicked out of my house or my apartment now I don't even have that surely I can complain that I'm miserable now can't I I'm justified in being miserable and the Stokes would say no because you've still got so much what about your health you've got great health be happy for that maybe you don't have good clothing maybe you don't even have a house or a place to live right now and you don't have a family or a pet or a good job but you still have your health and that's a very amazing thing and now someone might say but Leo surely there are people in the world that don't even have their health they don't have health they don't have shelter they don't have clothing they don't have a dog they don't have a cat they don't have a good family they don't have a good job they don't have anything can they be miserable are they allowed to complain and the answer is no they still have a lot to be grateful for because they still have their eyesight when was the last time you really showed appreciation for your eyesight and how amazing that is how much do you take that for granted and if you don't have your eyesight then you have something else you have your arms and your legs and if you don't have your arms and your legs then maybe you've got hearing and if you don't got hearing and you don't got anything that was already mentioned then at the very least which you've got is you've got your breath and you've got just your aliveness you are alive and just the very fact that you're alive is not something that you should take for granted and it's not something that you can feel entitled to that is not a right being alive being alive is a very precious and a very precarious thing in this universe because it's here one moment and it's gone the next moment and you really need to appreciate a lot more so no matter where you are in your life there's always something for you to be grateful for there's always something that you could lose and feel worse than you're currently feeling so if you've got nothing at all and all you've got is your life then at the very least you've got that and if you lost that you would be worse off than you are right now that is how the Stoics want you to think and I think it's a good way to think I don't always go around thinking this way but sometimes for five minutes in the day doing five minutes of this kind of thinking can really bring you back down to earth ground you because we live in a in a culture and a society it's really ending with media and the media is always showing us how to do more right we want more we want to do more we want to create more and nothing is ever enough with this kind of philosophy and basically what it does is it creates a never-ending treadmill and because of hedonic adaptation you never get ahead you're just spinning your wheels all the time well if you want to stop spinning your wheels and develop some some real gratitude some deep sense of happiness and life then you need to start appreciating more of the stuff that you already have that today you completely take for granted think about all the stuff just five years ago that you wanted to create in your life and align that stuff you probably have already and how you completely have forgotten about that stuff it's however the thing about that that's why it's good to keep a list of goals if you're a goal setter if you're doing lot of personal development keep a list of goals keep those goals keep a record and history of those archive those put them in a file somewhere so you can go back ten years from now and take a look at the kind of goals that you had today and you take a look at where you are ten years from now and you see how much you've accomplished but what's really scary is you see how much you've accomplished in those ten years but you also see how you take all of it for granted and how it hasn't really created any happiness for you because even though you accomplished all that stuff because you've now adapted to it it's not making you any better on the inside the last point that I want to mention here before I let you go is this distinction between worry and negative visualization these are two very different things and what I'm telling you here what the Stoics were doing with this technique is they were not telling you to be a worrier they're not trying to make you a pessimist about life they're not trying to make you neurotic they're not trying to make you anxious well they're simply trying to do is to say you have this ability to imagine and to appreciate this is a conscious act worry and anxiousness these aren't conscious acts these are reactions these are emotional emotionally triggered reactions that's not what negative visualization is about at all negative visualization is a very cool even minded almost meditative technique so there's a very big difference between those two even though on the surface they might seem similar and I don't want you to use this as license to now be a worrier about stuff that's not what we're doing here so worrying is still bad don't do worrying but negative visualization is good and what I'm leaving you here with now is I want you two to do a week where you do seven days straight of negative visualization for five minutes every day in the morning in the evening whenever you want to do it and just see how you feel a week after that see how much stuff you've been missing in your own life that's right there it's right under your nose and you've been missing it this whole time until now all right this is Leo for actualize that org I'm signing off go ahead post your comments down below I'd love to hear what you think about this share your experiences with this exercise and then of course please like this click like button right now for me share it if you would share with a friend the more people watch these videos the more free content I can release to you guys and finally come and sign up to actualize that org this is my 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