How to Train Your Mind to Be Positive: 5 Steps to Positive Thinking.
1. Intro
A lot of people are skeptical about using positive thinking as an approach to change in their lives. They think it isn’t very scientific and will not work, and it may also be risky to use.
However, I have been studying the topic for 4 years now, and I have found great success with the approach. In fact, I have made so much progress with the approach that I am considering a book on the subject.
In fact, there are many books on the topic: “The Power of Positive Thinking“, “Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale, and “Positive Psychology” by Martin Seligman. But here are seven basic steps to becoming more positive:
1. Recognise And Realise Your Negative Thoughts And Feelings
2. Take Action To Clarify Your Desires And Goals
3. Create A Plan To Execute The Action You Have Made
4. Develop A Rationale For What You Want To Do
5. Remain Positive Throughout Your Day-to-Day Life
2. Optimism as a learned skill
Humans are inherently optimistic, but they can be trained to become much more so. Here’s how.
In a study at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard, researchers showed a group of students a series of pictures and asked them to rate them on how happy they were looking at them. They found that those students who were shown positive images scored higher on their mood ratings than those who saw negative ones. This finding supports the idea that being positive can improve our emotional lives, but why?
Well, there’s an interesting theory about this: your brain tells you that you are happy when you think you are happy, and it does this regardless of whether or not you feel like it (because we’re hard-wired for optimism). The reason for this is that your brain already has a tendency to interpret information in terms of what you want. When it comes to happiness, for example, your brain is constantly looking for cause-effect relationships between situations and events to maintain optimism (it’s called “the confirmation bias”). If someone tells you they’re going to get married because they want kids — or if they tell you their marriage will end in divorce — their brains interpret this information as cause-effect relationships. In other words, the brain treats two events as if they were causally connected (which is an adjustment called the “attribution process”).
Here’s where positivity comes into play: we can train our brains to see things in entirely different ways by altering our attribution process. For example, if someone says that their relationship will end in divorce because they want kids — or if someone says that something bad will happen to them just before the marriage ends — their brains will interpret these statements as causally connected (which is an adjustment called the “attribution process”).
So what does all this have to do with optimism? Well… nothing really. It just means we can teach ourselves to see things differently by changing our mindsets about events that affect us (so we don’t get so wrapped up in negative thoughts), which is something positivity has always done anyway; we just have never been taught how. So change your brain! And have some fun with it!
3. Positive thinking leads to good health
In this post, I’m going to discuss the role of positive thinking in health.
Positive thinking is the belief that life can be better than it is, or you can do something about it. This is a strong desire to change your circumstances and pursue your goals. We all have a strong desire to be happy and free from suffering, or we wouldn’t say we want to change things. So, it’s not surprising that people who believe in positive thinking are healthier than those who don’t.
A recent study by the University of Minnesota found that being positive about life and feeling optimistic about future events helped people to feel optimistic about their health. In other words, being optimistic helps you stay healthy by reducing stress and anxiety.
4. Achieving your goals is easier when you’re positive
The first step to achieving your goals is being positive. Positive thinking is an approach to life that often requires a great deal of discipline and self-belief, but it’s not impossible to achieve. And if you’re going to succeed, you have to believe in yourself. Here are seven steps you can use to be positive:
1. Choose a positive goal for yourself
2. Find ways to work toward it every day
3. Make plans and stick to them
4. Have faith in your progress and expect it
5. Use the power of self-talk to send good energy into your life
5. Conclusion
In the last few years, there has been an explosion of positive thinking books and articles. This is not surprising, given that most of the social sciences have been focused on negative thinking for centuries. However, it is worth noting that a lot of these books are good reads and offer some useful insights into positive thinking. The first thing to keep in mind is that positive thinkers tend to think this way because they have had success in life, and have learned something from their experiences. The second thing to keep in mind is that people who are successful at being positive are not necessarily good. I don’t think it’s easy to be a good person who is successful at being positive; if you take all your success and happiness as credit for yourself then you may be uncomfortable with feeling like you don’t deserve it (or having the courage to seek it).
The book “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie was published in 1936; however, the importance of being a positive thinker goes back much earlier than that: Plato said that to live happily we must be happy. Aristotle said happiness comes from having good friends. Of course, he didn’t say we should be friends with everybody!
