How to Become More Positive
What You’ll Do: You can boost your happiness by focusing on positive things and reducing your negative thinking. This week, follow every negative thought with a positive one. This practice will help to retrain your habitual thought patterns to bring more positive thoughts into your life. How It Works: The ratio of positive to negative thoughts is a major factor in overall happiness. Your brain is constantly monitoring the emotional tone of your thoughts—too many negative thoughts and your brain responds by creating stress and sadness in your body. When you add more positive thoughts, your brain will create relaxation and happiness. Get Motivated: After you’re aware of your negative thoughts and feelings and have worked to counteract them for a few days, they will gradually begin to lessen. You’ll be able to concentrate more on what you want to do without experiencing distracting emotions and stress. This will make you more productive and energetic. Best of all, it will make you happier. Note: Keep practicing the smiling technique. It will help reinforce and strengthen the effects of this skill.
The Steps of Becoming More Positive
This Week’s Commitment: This week I will label my negative or stressful thoughts and feelings and follow them with a happy thought. After a few days, the number of negative thoughts and feelings often decreases. It’s almost as if the brain gets bored being negative because you replace the thoughts so quickly with positive ones.
Tips for Increasing Positivity and Happiness
Don’t just wait for the negative thoughts to come along to think about something positive. Add to this skill by making a conscious and planned effort to think positive thoughts throughout the day. Decide that you will think only positive thoughts for your entire lunch hour or during one of your breaks. Decide that you will only think positive thoughts while driving in your car. Some more tips for accentuating the positive:
Don’t judge yourself. Everyone has lots of unhappy and negative thoughts throughout the day. As you become more aware of them you might feel embarrassed or ashamed about how many you have. Don’t worry: it is perfectly normal to have all sorts of strange thoughts. We usually don’t pay so much attention to them. Combine this task with smiling. Force a smile on your face as you bring your happy thought to your mind. This will help erase the effects of the negative thoughts. Be sure to remind yourself to do this task throughout the day. Don’t let a day go by without engaging with your negative thoughts and substituting positive ones.
This will give you even more practice at being positive and happy. Subscribe Now: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts
