The Importance of Positive Thinking
David Reynard
As Buddha is quoted, “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” You have the power and strength within yourself. The brain is a wondrous organ. The way you use it will affect the outcome of your life. Thinking positively builds your self-esteem, your confidence, and the path that your life will take.
Your brain is an important part of your body. How you use it is just as important as your diet used to nourish it. Think of this way, if you feed your body strictly on an unhealthy diet, it becomes slow, weak, sluggish, and, sometimes, difficult to get started. It can become ill or diseased. Whereas if you feed your body a balanced healthy diet, it becomes faster, stronger, more agile, and its flexibility and endurance increase with a stronger resistance to disease.
If you’re repeatedly thinking negative thoughts about yourself, situations, or others, then your mind will begin to fail you. These negative actions creep their way into the crevasses of your brain and fester. You become sour, moody, temperamental, combative, and unlikable in the sense that you are a downer to be around. The negative thoughts eventually slip from your mind and out of the lips and become a visible and audible “personality trait”. The negativity affects the people around you. Your surrounding area becomes stagnant. People will start to avoid you or stop conversations short because the negativity starts to bring them down as well. The proverb “misery loves company” is scenario in the simplest terms. If you allow yourself to live with negative thoughts, those thoughts become part of your being and begin to fester. They will weigh you down and, in turn, make you want to bring everyone around you down to the same miserable level.
On the other hand, if you wake each day with gratitudes, which we will discuss in another post, your day will start out lighter and brighter. Your mind will be clearer, and you will be more focused on tasks, errands, and interactions with other people. You are not focused on the negative situations going on around you. You will start to not allow the negative to invade your space. Your mind will start separating you from those situations. You will become the person finding ways to excuse yourself from the negative situation or take the other route, and put boundaries into place with those you interact with. The boundaries can be verbally stated or implied by distancing yourself from the conversations or situations, if possible.
Changing the negative thoughts to positive thoughts is not a simple and easy process. In the beginning, you may find yourself faking it in front of others to escape from the situation. But the longer you replace the negative thoughts with positive thoughts, the progress becomes easier.
As the process continues, you will notice that you smile more, laugh more and, often, are less stressed daily. You will have days where something will get to you, but if you concentrate on thinking positively, those moments of frustration, or even anger, fade away faster and simpler than before. People will start to notice there is a change in you as you become more positive and more interesting to be near.
With positive thinking, you will notice that your body starts to ache less as your stress levels reduce. This is because you hold stress in your muscles. The strain or tension in your muscles cause headaches, shoulder and back pain, and even facial pain from grinding your teeth. As you become better at positive thinking, you will notice that these complications start to reduce or fade away completely.
If you feed your mind sour thoughts, you become a sour person. Be determined to find something else from recent occurrences that were positive and concentrate on those. Don’t ignore the negative situation but engage with it to find different ways of processing your thoughts. Dig into the negative situation without letting it attach to you and find a cause/solution to make a positive outcome without obtaining any wounds. Each day you practice positive thinking; the day becomes a little bit brighter.
My father and I had a conversation prior to his passing. He asked me to do him a favor. His request was for me to make a whole-hearted effort each day to make at least one person smile. Except through my darkest, bedridden, days when I didn’t see anyone, I kept my promise to him that I made that day. Especially the time around his passing and my subsequent medical journey, the act of wanting to make someone smile each day was not easy. People carry their own issues and stories with them. It became a concerted effort to find ways to get to someone and make them smile. That was the beginning of my change that is still a work in progress.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not a quick and easy change to make. You can fake a smile on the bad days that may mask the thoughts, but you will notice that forcing yourself to smile and seeing someone else take your smile and give you one in return lightens both of your days. It may be just for a few moments, but those moments are what are worth cherishing. Starting to change to positive thinking is like starting a campfire. It may take a few attempts to get going, but once lit, the flames give off light and warmth with the negativity being turned to ash and smoke. Be that light and touch of warmth for someone each day. You never know how long that person will carry it with them and how many other that they pass that light onto throughout their day.
“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” —Buddha