“The power of positive thinking”

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.