Positive thinking isn’t merely about making you feel happier or providing you with a more optimistic outlook. While these two outcomes are by-products of thinking positively, there are far more benefits that can change your mental clarity and help you achieve greater success.
Recent studies have shown that positive thinking is directly linked to your brain’s reward system and pleasure stimulus.
This means that once your mind feels the pleasure that positive thinking or happiness brings, it is going to reward itself in the hope of receiving more of this type of feeling. Positive thinking can have a snowball effect on the brain, and once you start thinking positively, your brain isn’t going to want you to stop.
Instead, positive thinking will entice your mind to continue to think this way so that you feel good more often. The manifestations of being able to think more positively about your behavior in regards to your interactions with people you encounter throughout your day will include being more optimistic.
The Brain and Optimistic Thoughts
From a more scientific perspective, positive thinking has been proven to influence growth that takes place in the brain. Specifically, positive thinking has been linked to stimulating the growth of neural connections in the brain.
Of course, even if you are someone who doesn’t typically think positively, these connections will continue to grow, but they will grow at a faster rate when you think positively.
This is important because as you get older, your brain’s ability to develop these connections will inevitably start to slow down. When you can begin to think positively, it means your mind will be able to function more efficiently for a more extended period.
Along with being able to motivate the growth of neural connections in your brain, two other benefits that come with positive thinking are related to doing output and analysis. Thinking positively has been linked to bringing the mind the ability to process thoughts more quickly and being more alert.
Along these same lines, it has also been linked with being able to solve complex problems in less time more efficiently. When your thoughts are negative, it can sometimes seem like we are only thinking of the poor outcome regarding a particular situation.
However, when our thoughts are more positive, we are more likely to be open to experiencing a variety of results. This allows our brains to think of broader scenarios when it comes to finding solutions to our problems.
You Are What You Think
Another way that you can look at positive thinking in regards to decluttering your mind is to recognize that our thoughts often lead us to action or inaction. For those who think positively, they are able to see the world as a better place, where there are more opportunities and where they can accomplish anything they desire.
On the other hand, negative thinking often leads people to believe that the world is a place where their current circumstances are the only circumstances that they will ever realize.
While the positive thinkers use their positive thoughts as a platform to take a leap and strive to achieve their dreams, those who think negatively will use their negative thoughts to limit what they produce and ultimately stops them from growing.
It is essential that you remember that everything is always in flux. Take the time to understand that as a human, you are continually evolving.
To settle and think negatively when it comes to your personal growth is something that you should avoid. This is why positive thinking is critical because people often become their thoughts.
How to Become More Positive
Now that you know why thinking positively is so essential for your success, it’s time to discover how you can become a more positive person. While some people seem to be born with a greater sense of positivity, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t something that you can learn yourself.
The first thing that you need to understand is that people who are optimistic aren’t always positive. These people fully understand that being too positive can also be detrimental to their health and mental clarity.
Instead, positive thinkers are typically those who see both the good and bad in any given situation, yet they choose to focus on the good instead of the bad. This is an excellent place to start when you want to try and be more optimistic.
It is essential that you fully understand that there is a difference between someone who is blindly optimistic to the point of harm and someone who is realistic about what could go wrong and what could go right. Finding this kind of balance is incredibly important, especially if you tend to have more negative thoughts than positive thoughts.
Rather than going all out and trying to be as optimistic as possible, it would be better for you to learn how to recognize both the good and the bad in a particular situation before you consciously turn your focus on the positive aspects of the situation at hand.
Volunteer Your Time
When you can discern the difference between being blindly optimistic and being realistic, you can start to look at ways to become more positive. An excellent way to do this is through volunteerism. You can volunteer your time in a variety of ways.
Write Down What You’re Grateful For
If volunteering your time in your community isn’t something that you enjoy, you can become more positive by keeping a gratitude journal. Every night before you go to bed or when you first wake up in the morning, spend some time writing down everything that you are grateful for in your life.
When you do this, you want to only think about the current day if you are doing this at night, or the previous day if you choose to do this exercise in the morning. This will help train you to think more about the positive details in your life rather than the negative and will likely help you see that your life has many amazing aspects.
Be Kinder
A great way to shift your mindset from negative to positive is to be kinder to those people around you. When you are trying to be more positive, it is essential that you create an environment where you are kinder to the people in your life. Not only will this allow you to see your world from a different perspective, but you will also start to reconsider how you live your life on a daily basis.
Learning how to think more positively isn’t just an essential exercise for your sanity, but it can also help to improve your health. You have the power to change the way you think and thinking positively can help you clear the clutter from your mind and gain more mental clarity so that you can enjoy greater success in your business.