Gram’s Wisdom 44: Positivity and wellness.
When you feel well it’s a positive feeling. Positive thinking can make you feel better at the moment, but can it make you feel better overall?
My Gram certainly thought so. Gram understood the direct connections between exercise and a balanced diet on your physical wellness, she didn’t see positivity as a substitute for taking care of yourself. But she felt there was a definite link between positivity and your physical and mental wellness.
She often reminded me as I grew up, that my well-being was in my control. To feel well, tell yourself that you do. To be well, do the positive things that contribute to health and wellness.
Don’t beat yourself up.
Usually, stress is thought of as coming from external factors like work, traffic, or family friction, beyond your control. But a surprising amount of stress in life comes from within.
When a difficult situation arises, or even if you anticipate a difficult situation, some of you tend to criticize yourselves and begin imagining the things that could go wrong.
While it is important to understand the possible downsides of a situation, if you spend too much time thinking about the dangers of a situation or how we may be unprepared to deal with them, it can drastically increase the levels of unhealthy stress that can come from a situation. This stress not only makes it harder for you to think straight and control the situation, but too much stress over a long period contributes to health problems including weight gain and heart disease.
The next time that you begin to worry about a situation, look at it from a viewpoint of finding ways to make the situation favorable rather than thinking about how the situation could get worse. This small example of positive thinking will lower your stress levels, making you feel more comfortable and helping you to maintain control over the situation.
Positivity and other coping mechanisms.
Stressing about negative situations does more than prevent you from solving the problem at hand, it can also make problems worse and even create further difficulties.
If you are stressed or otherwise upset about something, it can be easy to slip into making unhealthy choices, whether that’s turning to comfort food or drugs. Even legal ones like tobacco and alcohol can quickly harm your health.
Thinking optimistically protects your health from the main effects of stress as well as these additional problems that can come on when you are drawn to manage your stress in unhealthy ways.
A positive mindset bolsters your health.
It was already discussed above that excessive anxiety over too long a period can be bad for the heart. This can be partially due to those secondary concerns mentioned in that last paragraph, like a diet. However, it can also be due to stress itself.
Stress is a complicated phenomenon in the body, involving a lot of chemicals being created and released into your blood. This cascade of events evolved in humans to help us run from predators or fight invaders, but a faster pulse and slowed digestion don’t help us get over the loss of a loved one or the frenzy of tax time. Our ancient ancestors needed the stress response to escape danger, but in today’s modern world it can tend to linger too long. This can be a draw on your body’s resources and can even prevent it from fighting an infection like it is supposed to.
Thinking positively can be good for your emotional health, but it may also help you to avoid whatever bug is going around.
Pondering positivity.
Your attitude is everything.
How you face life each day largely determines how you feel about your day. If you have a positive approach to life and yourself, even your most demanding days will feel tolerable. Thinking positively is a simple rule, the key to living a satisfying, fulfilled life. However, putting it into practice in your daily life can be more difficult.
Consistently thinking positive can be challenging. Maybe your self-confidence isn't as strong as it could be. If this is the case, you may need to take a leap of faith to think positively.
To be positive you must persevere.
Negativity is the human default, and everyone falls prey to it at some time or another. You are human, and you will stumble and even fall occasionally. The positive person is not faint-hearted, he knows that to stay down is a failure, not a fall. After a short letdown, you’ll remind yourself that with your intelligence and perseverance, something good will happen soon. You can’t lose by approaching life’s events with positive thinking.
We get what we expect.
Dare to think your project offering will be chosen. Whatever we expect or believe will occur will indeed come to pass. So, if you believe that you'll do well on a work project, you will. If you expect not to do well, then you likely won't. The implication is that if you can manage your thoughts, you can think your way to success.
When you aren’t sure about how to think about a situation, approach life positively. With enough positivity, you can change your life.
My final thought.
Looking on the bright side can be challenging, but if you don’t take it seriously it’s impossible. While some people avoid trying very hard to be positive because they think that it’s just a bunch of feel-good nonsense, hopefully, this article has helped you to understand some physical and mental benefits of positive thinking.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Let me know if I’m on track with the kind of information you are looking for.
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