Choose Positivity

My ethos in this post comes from the amount of time that I spent in negativity and the amount of time I spent in positivity. For three years of my life, I lived with pessimism and cynicism. I had hate in my mind and only saw the worst in the universe. For one year, I lived in neutrality, losing the meaning of everything, and was, as a friend called me, nihilistic. For one year now, I’ve spread positivity. I’ve seen the best in the universe. I’ve learned forgiveness, love, acceptance, and other things. In this post, we’ll discuss pessimism and negativity, positivity and optimism, and a few things that can aid in being more positive if you will it so.

Pessimism is a process of thought in which a person will notice the worst parts of situations, people, and objects. It often creates negative opinions, judgements, and observations. Pessimism is often considered, well, negative. However, many people are pessimistic, likely due to evolution. Back in primitive times, if you saw a tiger, you were not gonna wait and think, “maybe it won’t eat me.” No, you were gonna book it out of there. Now pessimism, the assumption or surmise of the worst happening, has carried into present society. However, pessimism isn’t a great line of thinking anymore. Nowadays, we have learned that negative feelings narrow thoughts and range of action. Cynicism will likely make it harder to trust people and harder to forgive people, and we’ve discussed the benefits of forgiveness here. In one study, they injected a cold virus into two groups: people who were more positive and people who were more negative. The positive people healed faster. The biggest disadvantages of pessimism, however, are found when compared to the advantages of optimism.

The last year that I’ve spent in optimism was undoubtedly the best year of my life. Even though I felt pain, even though I had someone I loved die, I learned many things and evolved myself into a much better being than I was a few years ago. So, in my opinion, optimism and positivity, are better than negativity. However, I try not to hold opinions, so here are the facts. Positivity and optimism have been shown to increase productivity and performance. people who are more optimistic make better leaders and tend to make a higher income than their negative counterparts. Positivity also literally expands the peripheral line of vision. The mind is open to more thoughtfulness and creativity, and optimistic people generally have a better sense of well-being. And with positivity comes laughter, which decreases stress hormones, lowers blood pressure, and releases endorphins. I’ll drop the mic, and let the facts be facts.

I think if we’re looking at facts, optimism seems to be logically better than pessimism. With that said, as I have written before in “Mindful Optimism”, use logic to make sure your optimism doesn’t lead to you being scammed. Sometimes things are what they are, and if you know for sure something won’t work, then with positivity in your soul, don’t do it. Now, if you want to be more positive, you have to firstly, as I always say, truly want to be positive. After that, there are many exercises you can do to increase your positivity. Here I will write one that has shown great results in testing. Write three positive things down everyday, at the same time everyday. It will help tetris effect your brain into being more positive. What you write doesn’t have to be extremely insightful, but be specific. Other than that, I ask you to do research to find what works for you. Read “Cool It” if you would like, or read The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.

Anyways, that’s why I believe you should choose positivity. Positivity is objectively better for your health, wealth, love, and happiness than negativity. And health, wealth, love, and happiness is what I call success. I hope you all learned something from this, and I hope that if you’re negative that you end up choosing positivity. Anyways, thank you for reading, and have a wonderful week. I’ll see you the next one. Peace.