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Positive Thinking Related Articles : What Is Positive Thinking? : Positive Thinking For Skeptics : The Benefits Of Positive Thinking : Positive Thinking Techniques : Positive Psychology ::
Positive thinking is a way of looking at the world where the way you think, and your inner voice, are looking at the world and expecting the best from it. You are anticipating happiness, joy, health and success to be the outcome of whatever you do. It is about being an optimist, and seeing your glass as half full and not half empty.
Positive thoughts make your world positive and so you try harder. You are happy in what you do, and this happiness rubs off on others. Other people like to be with positive people because theory have a 'buzz' about them that makes other people more positive. People with a positive attitude achieve more, and a group of positive people can achieve remarkable results.
Positive thinking people live in the real world, and have setbacks and disappointments just like everybody else, but they fail forwards and learn from their failures, and don't let it divert them from their true happiness and goals in life. Optimists have more resilience than pessimists and bounce back quicker. They are also more resistant to learned helplessness, where a setback causes someone to give up trying altogether because they have just given up.
Positive thinking is also about the meaning in your life and this adds realism to the positive attitude and gives the results their true value, because only then is the value of your results put into the context of living a positive and worthwhile life. This is well explained in the book 'Authentic Happiness', where Martin Seligman asks people if they would like a machine to always give them positive feelings, and everyone declined, because this would deny them the basic human feeling of reward for their own achievements, their growth, and their value as a human being. Life's shortcuts to positive feelings such as shopping, loveless sex and chocolate are only short term fixes that soon wear off. Only the positive feelings from things we have achieved ourselves lead to authentic happiness.
The evolution theory of emotion suggests that negative thinking is a protection survival mechanism. It is the one that produces fear and anger that call us to battle stations with the adrenaline rush of the fight or flight response. Here is the situation for win-lose conflict. In contrast positive thinking is associated with the win-win situation which makes us feel good. It has much more of the happiness hormone serotonin about it.
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