Imagine if you were to start giving heartfelt appreciation for everything in your life — the good and the bad, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the easy and challenging. No matter what happens for you, nothing will knock you down.
This is the power of positive thoughts. And its benefits are backed up by science — they improve your physical and mental health, increase your happiness, and boost productivity.
Most importantly, you can choose to think positive thoughts to live a happier life and spread your positive contagion around the world.
What Are Positive Thoughts?
Positive thoughts focus on the good (and even realistic) things in life and bring about uplifting emotions and feelings. Practicing them daily is often called positive thinking or an optimistic attitude.
For example, when you see a glass half-filled with water, there are two ways of looking at it — a half-empty or a half-full. The latter is a display of positive thoughts.
Is positive thinking always positive? Not entirely. It turns out that it can be toxic when you only focus on the brighter side of things and ignore reality. One of the forms of toxic positivity is toxic gratitude.
Positive thinking, in actuality, is recognizing the positive and negative aspects of everything, and even when you face something unwanted, you expect it to work out well. In other words, it’s your deep-seated belief that Universe always has your back.
Why Are Positive Thoughts So Powerful?
The power of positive thinking has a basis in physics. Since everything is energy and has a specific vibration — and like attracts like — the quality of your thoughts can’t help but attract situations with similar vibrations.
According to the emotional guidance scale by Abraham Hicks, love, joy, and appreciation have far more vibrational power than blame, worry, and frustration.
You may argue that the vibrations of your environment and circumstances affect your vibration — they do, but only if you allow the negativity to dominate your thoughts.
Instead, you can practice positive thinking to raise your vibration to the point where it overrides the negativity around you and begins influencing your circumstances.
On top of that, scientists discovered that sending positive thoughts to another person can heal them. It’s called “quantum entanglement,” a phenomenon that explains the interconnectedness and oneness of separate particles.
In other words, your positive thoughts can influence your immediate environment and the people around you.
The benefits of positive thinking
Studies show that positive thoughts are beneficial for your mental and physical health. The physical benefits include:
- Lower chance of having a heart attack,
- Better resistance to cold and flu,
- Lower blood pressure,
- Less stress and stress-related inflammation, and
- Better pain tolerance.
The mental benefits include:
- Boost creativity,
- Better problem-solving and coping skills,
- Clearer thinking,
- Better mood, and
- Less depression.
Most importantly, if you are optimistic, according to these scientific findings, you may live longer, make better decisions, and stay focused on your long-term goals.
How to Have More Positive Thoughts?
Remember the characters of Winnie the Pooh: extroverted and optimistic Tigger vs. introverted and pessimistic Eeyore? They represent positive and negative attitudes. So, is it an innate character trait or something you can cultivate?
According to Martin Elias Peter Seligman, the father of positive psychology, there are three major reasons why some people can stay positive in the face of adversity and others slip into a state of “learned helplessness.” Understanding these reasons will help you have a more positive attitude:
1. Temporary or permanent
First has to do with the way you perceive the bad thing happening to you. If you think it’s temporary, you can stay positive. If you see it as a permanent outcome, you feel helpless.
He says, “If you fail an examination, for example, and you think the cause is, I’m stupid, well, stupidity is permanent. It’s not very changeable. Whereas if you thought I had a hangover, that’s changeable.”
2. Control
Control is about whether you think you have the ability to control the outcome or not. Pessimists believe that negative experiences are uncontrollable, while positive thinkers believe the opposite.
3. Pervasive or ocassional
The third is whether you think of the painful experience as pervasive — something that always seems to happen to you or if it happens occasionally.
In short, if you want to have more positive thoughts, especially in the face of a challenge, it’s essential to see all bad events as temporary, controllable, and occasional.
5 Positive Thinking Tips by Mindvalley’s Trainers
Undesirable experiences and events are inevitable; they’re things we can’t control. So the ultimate purpose of positive thinking isn’t to bypass unwanted situations but to eliminate unnecessary suffering.
Where does this suffering come from?
According to Srikumar Rao, one of the most popular MBA lecturers in America and trainer of Mindvalley’s The Quest for Personal Mastery program, most of the human suffering comes from the negative scenarios that they create in their own heads. He calls it mental chatter you are constantly engaging with.
So to choose to think positively, you first become aware of your general line of thinking. When you see where you are, you can choose where you want to go.
Here are five tips by Mindvalley’s trainers on how to change negative thoughts to positive ones and cultivate an optimistic mindset:
1. Srikumar Rao: Observe your thoughts
Srikumar explains that your mental chatter is fake news. You can’t stop it as it’s always there.
So the problem isn’t about your thoughts. The problem is that you don’t observe them.
“When you become the observer, you don’t engage with your mental chatter, so they don’t lead you where you don’t want to go,” he adds.
When you find yourself engaging in fake news of the mind, simply describe your thought process without judgment. It will help you disengage and choose a positive way of thinking instead.
2. Marisa Peer: Command your mind
According to Marisa Peer, the formidable hypnotherapist and trainer of Mindvalley’s Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapy for Abundance Quest, your happiness and overall success depend on how well you can dialogue with yourself. She compares the mind with a genie and your wish with the command.
Here are some examples of the wrong commands:
- I don’t want to go to work today.
- I am dreading the presentation.
- I am really worried about my assessment.
- I’m going on a date. What if I am not good enough?
She explains that when you think that way, you are commanding your mind to be scared and worried. Instead, you want to command:
- I absolutely love my job.
- I’m going to be amazing.
- I insist that this meeting be incredible.
- I am enough.
Even if it’s not true, positive thoughts are better lies. And when you practice dialoguing with yourself in a positive way, these lies become true.
3. Paul McKenna: Practice gratitude
Paul McKenna, renowned hypnotist and trainer of Mindvalley’s Everyday Bliss Quest, elaborates that when you focus on great things in life, you start to create more of them. He assures you that joy and beauty are always present all around you, and the more you train your brain to spot them, the more you begin to experience them in your own life.
One of the most potent tools to reboot your natural joy system is also the simplest — writing down and keeping a joy list. It includes small and big things you appreciate in your life.
4. Sadhguru: Remember that you’re alive
Sadhguru, mystic and trainer of Mindvalley’s A Yogi’s Guide to Joy Quest, believes that the most important thing in your life is that you are alive right now. He says, “Many people die every day, but you are alive. When you wake up tomorrow, check if you are alive.”
When you celebrate your aliveness, you can shift any negative thoughts and focus on this most important aspect of your reality.
5. Jeffrey Allen: Clear your outdated pictures
Your general line of thinking is influenced by your beliefs about yourself, people, and the world. From the energetic perspective, these beliefs are stored as energy in your chakras and aura.
Jeffrey Allen, energy healer and trainer of Mindvalley’s Duality Quest, explains that when your beliefs are fixed and outdated, they are like frozen energy. He calls them “pictures.”
For example, you may have a picture of the world as a lonely place, and this picture influences your perception and outlook. So clearing your pictures helps you be more resilient to life’s challenges, understand situations clearly, and have a more positive attitude.
How do you do that? By challenging your beliefs.
Mastering Your Life with Mindvalley
Positive thinking is a truly powerful skill, and you can learn it to have an attitude of a winner, even when you experience loss. Because your life is a process, not the outcome. As Srikumar puts it, “The outcome is the mirage, but the journey is always there with you, and it’s the only thing you have.”
If you aspire to focus on your journey and embrace a life-long learner mindset, Mindvalley is the right place to be.
With trainers like Srikumar Rao, Marisa Peer, Paul McKenna, Sadhguru, Jeffrey Allen, and many others, you will learn how to become resilient to any challenge and live in bliss. Most importantly, you will become part of an amazing tribe of like-minded people.
You can unlock your free access and sample trial lessons of every Quest in our expansive library.
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