How to change your life by understanding the core beliefs that affect your perceptions of experiences.

Easy Life, Hard Life, or Hard Knock Life

What determines if your life is easy or hard? God's plan, karma, attraction, choices you make, luck or lack of it? If you live long enough you'll experience the wide range of circumstances life brings. Most lives include some challenges, some misery, some joy, some love, and lots of routine.

What does determine the mix of these events in our lives? What causes some of us to have, on average, a very difficult life or a rather easy life? Are some simply destined to suffer, while others are blessed?

Research Studies

Researchers find that how we perceive our lives is closely correlated with how we think about life. In other words, what we believe about life can impact whether we perceive our lives to be easy or difficult. This is true regardless of the specific events we experience.

The Milgram Studies

A famous study by Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist, points out in a rather dark way, how our beliefs affect our experiences. Milgram's study , often repeated by other researchers with similar results, demonstrated that people will act in opposition to conscience if directed to do so by an authority figure. The belief that authorities should be obeyed apparently justified abnormal behavior in Milgram's studies.

Blind Spots

Other research has repeatedly pointed out that we see what we expect to see. When we expect life to be contentious and competitive, we tend to see that behavior in the events around us, but tend to have a blind spot to events that aren't contentious or competitive.

Ease Your Life By Changing Beliefs

If life feels very difficult and a constant struggle against problems, what can you do to ease your life? Change your beliefs about the way life is. It may not change the experiences you have, but will certainly change how you experience the events of life.

This is not just playing with words, nor sugar-coating events with a Pollyannaish attitude. Just as your current life beliefs are genuinely impacting your perceptions of events, altered life beliefs will do the same.

The Sources of Beliefs

Can beliefs be changed? Certainly. We weren't born with beliefs. We form them over the years based on our experiences and our interpretations of experiences. Interpretations are learned from parents, teachers, religious leaders, and friends; everyone who influences us affects how we interpret life events.

Changing Beliefs

How do you go about changing something as basic and foundational as a belief about life? First, it's important to fully understand your current life beliefs. One way to go about this is to write this sentence across the top of a blank sheet of paper or computer screen:

"Life is..."

Next, finish the sentence, over and over again. Keep writing what life is for you until you have a strong emotional reaction or a moment of great clarity. This is your signal that you've unearthed your basic beliefs about life.

With clarity of your life beliefs you'll be in position to question and even change how you experience life. Wouldn't it be nice to end each day thinking, "What a nice, easy day that was?"

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