The Psychology of Positive Thinking

Positive affirmations, "serenity now", calling for that moment of calm in a sea of turmoil….does any of it actually work?

Well apparently the answer is a resounding YES! And even more importantly scientific evidence points to the positive impact on life, satisfaction with life and well being and reduced stress that a positive outlook : optimism can have. Optimism is indeed a key part of stress management.

According to the Mayo Clinic, realistic optimism, allows you to approach daily life stressors in better and sometimes more creative ways. But to do so requires you to eliminate negative self talk.

Negative self talk is borne out of life experience but also from the perception and processing of information with a negative bias. The two are intrinsically linked. Experience of bullying about personal appearance such as freckles, brings with it perceptions of what is and what is not attractive. When layered with messages from cosmetics companies, TV, social media : the initial experience is reinforced and a belief is set. That negative belief is increasingly more difficult to overcome the more ingrained it has become either over time or by the constancy and frequency of the reinforcement mechanisms.

So simply saying to someone "you need to be positive" is really no help what so ever if a belief system is strongly held.

Positivity or rather the ability to see things differently requires the practice of creative and critical thinking about a subject. It requires analysis of why something is this way and what other ways could a subject, issue, thought, action be perceived, processed and assessed.

What is required is multiple thinking lines. While the natural state for many of us is to look at "what is wrong", the mindset shift needs to move to asking "what is right here" or "how can I look at this differently".

It takes practice. And initially it requires some form of imprinting to enable a different thought process to take hold.

Writing the issue down and transforming the thoughts to what is possible is a great start.

So what's wrong with your life right now? Write it down….

And what's right with your life right now? Start writing it down…..

Now if you are in a job that you're not enjoying because you feel undervalued and under appreciated, you are single and want to be in a relationship, if friends around you seem so happy (Facebook tells you so), you're not the weight, shape you want to be, you don't have enough money to do the things you want to do ….and so on and so on…..maybe your list of what's wrong with your life is getting pretty long.

Those are big issues. It may even be worse, there may be trauma and hardship and sickness surrounding you. There is no illusion here that you are not facing challenges.

What we are asking here is to just digest the information differently.

So maybe your "what's right with my life" list is going to start with small things.

….I'm alive today

..I heard a bird chirp the morning awake

..best piece of toast ever

..I saw a smile on a childs face

..I heard something on the radio that made me laugh

You getting the idea?

So what about that main issue you may have? No matter how bad it is, can you get a different perspective? Maybe not now not in moments of absolute desperate grief. No one could possibly ask that. But sometimes thats when gratefulness comes.

It's about changing the process of thinking through an idea and drawing into your life by attraction that which is what you want to attract not what you want to run away from.

Even in your darkest moments : asking for a way through, wanting to feel better …..is a start.