The real obstacle to being positive is that our brains are designed to search for and focus on threats as a defense mechanism, which was effective when humans were hunter-gatherers.
They faced actual threats daily, such as being eaten by a predator, getting killed by someone, or encountering any other direct danger in their surroundings, but this was a long time ago. As for now, this defensive method pushes us toward pessimism and negativity by causing the mind to wander until it finds a threat.
Nothing good comes from these "threats," which merely increase the probability that things will go wrong. This defense mechanism will help you when the threat is real. However, it will not help you and will only add chaos to your life when you imagine a threat and spend two months believing your project will fail.
Staying positive is a daily challenge that requires focus and attention if you want to overcome the brain's tendency to focus on threats. However, this won't happen on its own. So, we should pay more attention to positivity.
Positivity Impact on Your Health
Pessimism is harmful to your health. Many studies have shown that optimists enjoy greater physical and psychological health than pessimists.
Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania has conducted extensive research on this topic with researchers from Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan. They studied individuals from 25 to 65 years old to see how optimism or pessimism affected their general health. Researchers found that the pessimists' health deteriorates much more quickly as they age.
Seligman's findings are similar to research conducted by the Mayo Clinic group, which found that optimists are less likely to suffer from cardiovascular diseases and live longer. The precise mechanism by which pessimism affects health is yet unknown. According to research from the Universities of Yale and Colorado, pessimism is associated with a weak immune response to infections and tumors.
Researchers at the University of Kentucky also gave viral injections to optimistic and pessimistic people to gauge their immune response. They discovered that the immune response of optimists was significantly stronger than that of pessimists.
Positivity Impact on Your Performance
Being positive is beneficial for both your health and performance. Seligman studied the relationship between positivity and performance. In one of his studies, he measured the impact of insurance salespeople's optimism or pessimism on their work. He found that optimistic salespeople sold 37% more than pessimistic ones, who were twice as likely to leave the company during their first year of work.
Seligman has also done more research on positivity than anyone else. With enough work and awareness, he believed that pessimistic thoughts and tendencies could be changed, and his research supported this belief. It has been shown that people can transform the tendency towards pessimistic thinking into positive thinking through simple techniques that create lasting behavioral changes long after they are discovered.
Three things that will help you stay positive
1. Separating reality from fantasy
To learn to focus on positivity, you must let go of negative self-talk. The more you think about negative thoughts, the more power and control you give them. Furthermore, most of our negative thoughts are just thoughts, not facts.
When you find yourself believing the pessimistic fantasies your mind creates for you, stop thinking about them and write them down. Once you take a moment to calm down and reduce the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear in assessing their validity. After that, assess the phrases you wrote and see if they are realistic. If you wrote any of these words: “Never, always, worse, absolutely, etc,” know that these ideas are incorrect. You certainly don't always forget your keys, for example. You might forget them often, but you remember to take them most days.
The same applies to problems. You may find a solution to your problem at all. Perhaps you should have asked for help. If you find that the negative thoughts seem real after writing them down, show them to a close friend or colleague you trust and see if they agree with you or not. You will then know the truth for sure.
Your brain tends to overestimate the frequency or intensity of events when it perceives them as threats, which is why you might feel as though something happens all the time or never at all. Identifying and classifying your thoughts by separating them from the facts will assist you in shedding negativity and adopting a more optimistic perspective.
2. Identifying positive things
Once you eliminate negative, destructive thoughts, you must help your mind learn to be positive. You can do this automatically after doing some exercises, but first, you must help your mind by choosing something positive to think about. Any positive thought will make you focused again.
This is relatively easy when you are in a good mood, and things are going well. However, it can be challenging when your mind is filled with negative thoughts. In these moments, think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how simple. If you can't think of anything from the current day, consider the past week, the day before, or any exciting event you have planned. The key here is to have a positive focus that you are prepared to shift to when your thoughts become negative.
You can paralyze negative thoughts in the first step by distinguishing between reality and fantasy. You have to switch out your negative and positive thinking in the second step. If you find this challenging, try writing down your negative thoughts again to refute them and permit yourself to embrace your positive thoughts freely.
3. Enhancing feelings of gratitude
Taking time to think about what you are grateful for is a healthy thing to do regularly. It reduces the secretion of cortisol (stress hormone) by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California found that people who committed to expressing gratitude daily showed higher levels of improved mood, higher energy, and lower anxiety levels due to lower cortisol levels.
You can foster gratitude by focusing on the positive things in your life. When you encounter pessimistic thoughts, think about what you are grateful for to change your thoughts and turn them into positive ones. Over time, a positive attitude will become a lifestyle for you.
In Conclusion
These three steps are very important because they train your mind to be positive and focus on it effectively. They also help you eliminate your negative thinking habits, which result from the mind’s natural tendency to think negatively.
By following these steps, you will experience improvements in your performance and mental and physical well-being.
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