Abraham Lincoln said, “People are
just as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Although most people are
confronted by the same kind of challenges in their daily life, it seems that their
response to these challenges can vary greatly. Some people tackle these
situations with a positive attitude, while others seem to be very pessimistic. These different attitudes can define our
different views of life. For some of us, a hurdle means a challenge to succeed,
but for others, it’s a dead end for their dreams. This is exactly what
differentiates a positive person from a negative person.
Positive thinking and its effect on
our wellbeing has become a very popular topic. More people are becoming
interested in learning how to think positively. But before learning how to
practice it, we need to understand exactly what the positive thinking means. Does it mean looking at the world through rose-colored
glasses? No, it does not. A positive attitude
means thinking about the drawbacks that we are confronted with as transient
external forces that we shouldn’t blame ourselves for. In other words, we never
blame ourselves for failure; instead, we always try to find an external factor
or circumstance to explain bad things that happen to us. In contrast, negative
thinking means that we always try to blame ourselves and take the responsibilities
of the bad things that we face. This
explanation very clearly sets the consequences of each approach or way of
thinking. Positive makes you try again and again without losing energy and
hope, while negative means losing your self-confidence, under estimating your
abilities and thus loosing hope.
Even though some people argue that positive
thinking can sometimes make us fool ourselves and live in denial by blaming
everything on factors that we cannot control, its benefits cannot be ignored. The
psychological and physical effects have been proven by many studies. According
to the Mayo Clinic, "Positive thinking helps with stress management and
can even improve your health." The physiology by which the optimistic
attitude can induce faster recovery after surgery or even deal better with
serious disease such as cancer or AIDS isn’t clearly understood. However, it
could be explained by the effect of stress hormones on the body’s immune
system. Many studies has found that stress management that results from
positive thinking can lead to noticeable reduction of stress hormones which in
turn has its positive effects on the body’s overall health. It seems that the
mind’s power has a great influence on the body.
The mechanism of optimism cannot be
explained by the law of attraction. We cannot just attract success or good
luck. It is not magic. Think of it as when you want something so badly. You
convince yourself that you can get what you want, but it won’t happen unless
you do your best and give all of your effort. You cannot expect things to
happen just because you want or wish them to happen. When you put sugar in a
cup of tea, you cannot expect it to become sweet unless you stir it. You need
to learn how to make lemonade out of lemon, how to make success out failure, and
how to learn from your mistake. This is what it takes to succeed, and this is
the realistic meaning of positive attitude.
