MY RULES TO A MORE POSITIVE LIFE

The great news is even if stress is inevitable, we have total control on how it is going to affect us. Do you know that if you change your mind about stress, you can also change your body’s response to it?

Our mind is very powerful and it is the most effective tool against stress if we know the right thing to do. We can use our brain to manipulate our body. At moments of stress, we usually think negatively, we panic and our minds become clouded and our output becomes more inefficient. Now to counter this, we can actually train our mind to believe that stress is a good thing and stress is positive. If we believe that stress makes us better, that stress is good for us, that stress actually pumps our drive to execute more efficiently, our body believes it and does exactly it. It makes us more courageous, willing to fight and rise up against challenges.

Here is a part of the transcript from a TED Talk done by Kelly McGonigal about stress. You can check out the whole Ted talk script and the video Here

People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.

That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.

It’s an amazing feeling if we have people in our lives that just put everything in perspective. They make us feel happy, positive and they help sort things right for us. Though it is great to maintain that relationship with those people, still we shouldn’t expect people to always make us feel better. We shouldn’t expect people to make our life positive.

Positivity should come from within you. If our happiness and positive outlook come from other people, our happiness wouldn’t be stable because the source is not stable either. We can’t predict what other people are going to do, thus we wouldn’t be able to predict our happiness. We should stop outsourcing happiness. Happiness, Joy, and Positivity can be found in your brain and there is no sense finding them anywhere outside your brain. What you only need to do is to be aware of yourself and know when to stop. When you are feeling so frustrated about something, PAUSE! If you feel so much negativities and emotions from the people around you, PAUSE! Don’t let your environment drown you with negative stuffs. Don’t continue doing something when your mind is not properly set to achieve it because of the negativities running in your mind. Instead learn to PAUSE! THINK! and BREATH! Tell yourself that negativity isn’t an option, it is not the solution for any challenging situation that you might be in, instead keep your cool and brush those negativities away and go back to what you were doing.

Yes it is great to have amazing people in our lives and indeed they put color to it but still your primary source of happiness should be yourself.