There may be times in your life that you feel out of control. You may have lots of stress coming from work or family life and your mind goes directly to a negative space. This negativity can not only break your spirit, but it can cause health problems as well. Research has proven that long term stress and negative thinking can compromise the immune system.
Positive thinking should not be underestimated as a powerful tool to keep you healthy. It’s striking how often I see in practice that people with a positive attitude toward life get sick less often than those with a negative attitude.
It makes sense that the brain can transfer either negative or positive energy to the rest of your body. The brain stimulates the endocrine system to release hormones that can have an effect on the immune cell’s ability to divide. When the thoughts are negative, your immune system can become sluggish, and a positive outlook can help ensure that things are working properly.
There are many ways to change the negative thoughts to a more positive way of thinking. There are relaxation techniques like meditation, mental imagery or visualization tools that can take you away from negative thought immediately, and attitude adjustment exercises that can make you focus on positive outcomes.
Having your glass half full or half empty is really a choice. You can make the effort to change the way you look at things overall. Thinking more positively will not only help you get more focused on ways to better your life experience, but it can also benefit you mentally and physically in ways that help you to deal with change, even when those changes are bad.
Here are some ideas to help you get to the positive side.
- Keep a journal of your thoughts. After awhile, you will be able to see exactly where your mind goes when there is a challenge.
- Replace the negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Once you’ve targeted the negative attitudes you have found-change them. An example is changing “I am going to fail” to “I’ve got this”.
- Eliminate external influences that stimulate negativity. Are you a news junkie? Maybe you don’t need that constant feed of negativity.
- Don’t let other people’s attitudes affect your own. Just because your co-worker is having a bad day doesn’t mean you have to as well.
- Don’t make everything a catastrophe. Problems often have obvious solutions, and a positive outlook can see those more easily.
- Get outside once in awhile. Nothing like a good sunset at your favorite spot to clear the clutter.
- Understand it’s going to take practice. Getting rid of negative thoughts takes effort. This is where meditation becomes a powerful tool.
- Get physical. It’s true, a healthy body promotes a healthy mind (and vise-versa)
- Use your creativity. Expressing yourself through arts or crafts can be a great tool to release negative thoughts.
- Have some fun. Doing what makes you happy is always a good way to keep positive thoughts on track.
Here’s to a positively healthy new outlook.
