Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday Morning.

And to Election Week, you may not live in America but it's pretty hard to ignore.

That over the last how many years is it we've been building up to the next election here.

And I think understandably a lot of people are feeling very stressed, very anxious if you look online, very angry,

on all sides of the divide.

My hope was today we could just look at some sort of practical tips for how to actually make it through the week.

No matter how you're feeling, no matter who you're voting for, hopefully you're voting for somebody.

I've come back to this idea and this set of teaching so many times on Radio Headspace and there's a good reason for it.

It's really useful. It works and I feel like it's got me through pretty much every situation in my life.

When I learnt these particular set of things in the monastery, it wasn't with a US election in mine, no matter how contentious it may be.

It wasn't even with a global pandemic in mind. It was a set of principles if you like that you could apply to any situation in life.

And sometimes one principle will feel more relevant than the other, but somehow they all work together.

And the very first one is appreciation when we are inundated, overwhelmed with something bigger going on in the world.

It's so easy to focus more on that and what we don't like about that situation, unless on what is going right in our lives right now.

They might be small things, they might be really small things.

There might be days when we wake up and we're simply grateful that we can see, that we can hear or whatever it might be.

But there are always things that are going well in our life that sometimes we take for granted and that when we're inundated by external noise, we tend to forget about.

Science has shown, when we focus on those small things, maybe even we pause, sit down and write a few things at the end of each day.

What's gone well? What's right with our life right now?

That it actually changes the way that we feel, that we're happier as a result.

So this week, look for those little things, write them down if you have to do whatever you have to do,

so that you can feel more connected with yourself or the people around you in your life.

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