Why are we happy? The TRUTH about the Heliotropic effect!

Hi, have you ever had a friend or a loved one who didn’t always take very good care of themselves? You know, even you might be able to relate to this in your own life where you’ve made choices that weren’t in your best interests. You knew that they wouldn’t make you very happy and yet, you somehow went and did it anyway. It’s weird, isn’t it? Well, sunflowers are never like that.

Sunflowers always lean into the sun. They keep their shiny bright flower petals always aiming at the sun. They turn around all day long to face the sun. It’s amazing! I even have a friend who loves sunflowers and I think she’s a little bit like them. She’s happy and faces into what makes her healthy. And when she’s around me, it makes me happy! I should probably lean into that and lean into things that lift me up and give me vitality in a sense of well-being. Yeah, makes sense. Well, today the video is all about what’s called the heliotropic effect.

And this basically means that biological organisms by nature move towards that which gives them health and move away from those things that take away from their well-being. And this is true for almost all biological organisms. Sunflowers, wolves, and tuna fish, in maybe you and me too. Stay tuned to find out.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world so stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, all biological organisms tend towards that which is life-giving and away from that which endanger them or takes away from their well-being and this is true in all places. Sunflowers face the sun, your houseplants at home need to be rotated every once in a while, because they lean towards the window and the sunlight that comes through the window.

Trees go to their biggest and best selves and they send their roots down to the best parts of the soil. They don’t spread it somehow equally, but they find the nutrient-rich soil. Tuna fish follow the currents where their prey are. We tend towards these things that are healthy and life-giving and that’s called the heliotropic effect. We don’t have this oddity where trees would say, oh I’ve grown big enough or a wolf says I’m content with how I am. All things in nature tend towards their biggest, best, most vital self. All things but one and that’s us humans. And that’s because our heads get in the way, we evolved have these huge prefrontal cortexes that can really hurt us and this video is not about that part of it.

It’s not about our negativity bias or fixed mindsets or poor self-esteem or even our limiting beliefs. All those things we could talk about and I have talked about in some other videos but rather it’s about what is true of our nature. Even our human nature— by good science, we know that humans when they tend towards the positive they move towards what’s good they get all kinds of great effects. Our attention span goes up, we have better mental processing, faster mental processing, we’ve better access to our memories, we even can prove that brain density gets greater when people are in typically emotional positive states and from past videos, you’ll know that we actually live longer when we’re positive. So this video is an invitation to move towards your own best self your own most vital natural tendencies and it’s difficult in our society because we’re always in these complex web of groups.

And so, I may choose myself to be my best most positive self and try to lean into those life-giving qualities. But I might be in an organisation, family, group, some workplace. Organizations that don’t support us and we know that we have a tendency to follow the emotional tone of our leaders and often our leaders have been modeled some pretty poor corporate structures. After all, corporate structures by design were based on military structures from millennia ago where the people who were the leaders were seen as noblemen and the people who did the actual fighting and died, if they were peons they had no stature. They were expendable like a spear or a wagon and so our own little work environments and family environments and groups have dynamics like that. And yet, when the leadership tends towards the positive then all members of the organization could become heliotropic— seeking out what’s life-giving but it has to be done by design. And because of our big brains, we have to do our own lives by design too.

So that the negative things don’t get in our way. So, I’ll invite you to consider your own best life, your own best positive self. And move towards that. Move towards the light and not the darkness. I know this was a simple message in this video but it’s worth considering what is your own best positive most heliotropic self like, and move towards that. And design it. Be that and maybe it’s a little bit of help, I have attached in the link below a PDF of the first few chapters of my book which lay down some of this kind of positive psychology foundation. I encourage you to download that and get it. Look, if you like this video do your thing, like it, share it and if you like this kind of content, subscribe. You’ll get a new video every Sunday morning.

I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, thanks so much for watching.