The Little Blue Book

(1) Psychological Resilience and Positive Emotional Granularity: Examining the Benefits of Positive Emotions on Coping and Health; Tugade M.M., Fredrickson B.L., Feldman Barrett L., (2005) www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (2) Autonomic nervous system reactivity to positive and negative mood induction: The role of acute psychological responses and frontal electrocortical activity; Kop W.J., Ph.D., Synowski S.J., Ph.D., et al (2010) www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (3) A comparison of mindfulness-based stress reduction and an active control in modulation of neurogenic inflammation; Rosenkranz M.A., Davidson R.J. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov In this instance, the negative experience of having been caught in the rain triggered a consideration of the risk and produced a protective outcome: you took an umbrella. So, negative thinking is wired-in to our brains. It’s one of the numerous secrets of our survival: learned experience, a weighing up of the risk, and a consideration of the ‘downside’ (the negatives) before doing whatever it is that we plan to do. We make numerous of these upside/downside judgments every hour of every day. We mostly do it unconsciously, like when driving a car, for instance. An impulse for self-protection has taught us to listen to and attend to the negatives. Negative thinking is an important part of our make-up. It applies the same caution to our actions and behaviour that stopped our distant ancestors strolling past a pride of hungry lions and stops us wandering across a busy freeway. Positive emotions (good humour, gratitude, compassion, love) also have a measurable beneficial effect on physical health - on heart rate, on vascular resistance and blood pressure. PostScript Section 2 Section 3 Section 1 17 ADA Australia