The Little Blue Book

Positive thinking is good for your health. There are countless clinical papers to support it, but it’s something we just know: when you’re feeling good inside, there’s a lightness in your step and the world just seems to smile with you. The role of positivity and its benefits to the immune system is mostly agreed (research – see box, page 19), but there is no dispute over its beneficial effects on physical health generally, and on psychological health. Positive emotions provide a protective armour for the psyche that enable us to better cope with negative experiences and to recover more quickly from them. They also help us to better manage psychological stress and to be less susceptible to anxiety, depression and mood disorders. 1 This is something we recognise in ourselves: when you’re in good humour, those little things that might normally irk you are like ‘water off a duck’s back’ – you can just brush them aside. But positive thinking, and a positive emotional state, is more than just being able to dust off and deal with small stresses that come with the day – like the daily commute, the difficult client, the burst water pipe, the scratch on the car. Positive thinking, in strengthening emotional resilience, also helps us deal with ‘the big challenges’. Resilient people can take bigger hits to the psyche and better deal with stressful life events without getting all knotted up about them. A ‘brake’ on negative thinking Negative emotions narrow thinking – the problem becomes the only focus: like walking with a stone in the shoe, all you can think about is the stone. Positive emotions, however, give us a broader shield against stressful life events and enable us to logically compartmentalise problems and setbacks and deal with them without catastrophising the event (a “my life is totally in the toilet” response). The positive thinker can recognise stressful events as parts of a picture – and not the whole picture – and can typically see and construe positives in the negative event itself (“well, we learned something today”, “this will be good for us in the long run”). This also helps them to rebound successfully despite the setback. 1 PRACTIsING POSITIVE THINKING 14 Towards Resilience - The Power of Positivity