Life isn’t always a bowl of roses, good and bad things happen. They lift us up and knock us down, it happens to everyone throughout life. Is it possible to learn how to think positive and stay happy when the bad times hit us?
It wouldn’t be a good idea to try and deny our emotions because we have them for a reason. They’re not only an expression of our mood, but also a protection for us. For example, if you’re feeling stressed out, it obviously isn’t good for your health. By feeling and recognizing that negative emotion, you know it’s a sign to do something to stop the stress.
Before you strive to be happy and positive for 100% of the time, you have to understand that negative thoughts and emotions are natural to us. If you’re forcing yourself to appear happy when you’re the opposite inside, it can cause a conflict and it could make matters worse. Negative feelings can also force you to take actions to make things better.
Being Positive and Happy
Look at positive and negative as extreme ends of one feeling. There’s no point along the scale where one becomes the other. Don’t see them as good and bad, they are just positive and negative. Of course, we all prefer the positive thoughts because they make us feel better than negative ones.
It’s all about balance, the problem begins when the negatives become dominant. This is what happens when someone suffers from depression. That’s a medical condition which often requires professional help, but if you tend to see the glass as half empty rather than half full, what can you do to change that?
It will be very difficult to learn how to be positive and happy all the time because it isn’t realistic. It is possible though, to be positive and happy most of the time. If there’s nothing particularly to make you feel negative, why would you be?
Ways to Stay Positive and Happy
We know that negative thoughts and feelings come naturally, but if you learn to recognize them, it’s a good start. Your thoughts create your feelings, it’s cause and effect. Your thoughts are the cause to your feelings, which is the effect. Try to understand why you’re having negative thoughts. Is it because of something that’s happening now or is it due to something that happened in the past?
If you discover you’re being affected in the now because of past events, ask yourself is that feeling still appropriate today? You might find you’re in a similar situation to one from the past, but your subconscious, in its effort to protect you, brings up past feelings which might not be relevant to today.
Far too often, we tend to dwell on the negative “what ifs”, we create bad outcomes in our mind which bring us down. More often than not, the real outcome turns out nothing like the internal perceived one. The problem with this can be that if you continually think in this way, you’ll be sending clear messages to your subconscious and you can guess what will then start to happen. Don’t begin that pattern because you don’t want to create bad situations in your life.
Become Positive, Happy and Optimistic
There is no secret regarding how to become positive, happy and optimistic other than keep a check on what you’re thinking. If it’s negative, change it to positive, even though you might not feel that way.
Remember, if you change your thinking, which will take some practising, you’ll eventually change how you’re feeling and this will have a positive effect on you. Sometimes you just have to fool your subconscious, but all you’re doing really, is sending it instructions.
You can’t control circumstances around you, but you can control what you think about them. It’s all down to thought power, if you start to take the positive approach, you’ll start to feel happy and this will inevitably lead to an optimistic outlook. Accept there will be times when this gets tested, but bit by bit, you will learn how to think positive and stay happy most of the time.