MY RULES TO A MORE POSITIVE LIFE

I have always been curious and amazed of psychology. I love understanding people, why they act the way that they do and how their past experiences affected who they are today. I see psychology as a life hack. It can teach you how to handle difficult situations and how to stay composed, focused and goal-oriented despite stress and negative thoughts. Since I am not a bookworm, I feed myself with psychology stuff through watching TED TALKS. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, this is a short talk around 13-20 minutes, from an expert of a specific field sharing his worth sharing ideas to a crowd. This usually happens at colleges and universities. Before it wasn’t filmed but now they are, which is a great thing because we get to watch them on YouTube. TED Talk topics are now limitless, it includes: Science, Technology, Psychology, Love, Nutrition and etc. When I have time, I sometimes watch TED Talks and most of the time I watch psychology related videos. From watching a lot of TED videos, I have definitely improved my self-management and I am capable of keeping things positive and healthy in my life. This is why I consider psychology and TED my life hacks because they literally help me keep my shits together by learning simple tips and healthy habits that are going to help you stay on track.

On this post I would like to share things I have learned from TED Talks and from my personal experiences on how to keep positivity in your life. In this world that is too noisy, too busy and too toxic, staying positive is not an easy thing to do. We can easily get carried away with the negativities of the people around us and even of ourselves. I hope that on this post, you’ll learn some useful ideas that you can use and apply on your life. This ideas work for me and I hope it does on you too.

Whether you are a student, an employee or even if you are just at home. No matter where you are and what you do, stress is inevitable. We become stressed every now and then, because of work, because of people around us and because of our negative thinking.

The great news is even if stress is inevitable, we have total control on how it is going to affect us. Do you know that if you change your mind about stress, you can also change your body’s response to it?

Our mind is very powerful and it is the most effective tool against stress if we know the right thing to do. We can use our brain to manipulate our body. At moments of stress, we usually think negatively, we panic and our minds become clouded and our output becomes more inefficient. Now to counter this, we can actually train our mind to believe that stress is a good thing and stress is positive. If we believe that stress makes us better, that stress is good for us, that stress actually pumps our drive to execute more efficiently, our body believes it and does exactly it. It makes us more courageous, willing to fight and rise up against challenges.

Here is a part of the transcript from a TED Talk done by Kelly McGonigal about stress. You can check out the whole Ted talk script and the video Here

People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.

That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.

So when you are stressed out, just think that it is your body helping you out to do better. Instead of being negative about it, the next time you experience stress think of it this way and you’ll whole life will be more positive and your perspective of life will definitely become better.

It’s an amazing feeling if we have people in our lives that just put everything in perspective. They make us feel happy, positive and they help sort things right for us. Though it is great to maintain that relationship with those people, still we shouldn’t expect people to always make us feel better. We shouldn’t expect people to make our life positive.

Positivity should come from within you. If our happiness and positive outlook come from other people, our happiness wouldn’t be stable because the source is not stable either. We can’t predict what other people are going to do, thus we wouldn’t be able to predict our happiness. We should stop outsourcing happiness. Happiness, Joy, and Positivity can be found in your brain and there is no sense finding them anywhere outside your brain. What you only need to do is to be aware of yourself and know when to stop. When you are feeling so frustrated about something, PAUSE! If you feel so much negativities and emotions from the people around you, PAUSE! Don’t let your environment drown you with negative stuffs. Don’t continue doing something when your mind is not properly set to achieve it because of the negativities running in your mind. Instead learn to PAUSE! THINK! and BREATH! Tell yourself that negativity isn’t an option, it is not the solution for any challenging situation that you might be in, instead keep your cool and brush those negativities away and go back to what you were doing.

Yes it is great to have amazing people in our lives and indeed they put color to it but still your primary source of happiness should be yourself.

As kids, our parents taught us how to maintain our physical hygiene. Kids are taught to shower everyday, brush their teeth after every meal, clean a wound, and whatnot. Parents do a great job in teaching their kids to maintain their physical health but not much on how to deal with emotional struggles. When we feel frustrated, we do something that frustrates as more. When we feel rejected, we self-pity. When we fail, we tell ourselves how much of a failure we are and we aren’t going to succeed.

We are very good at maintaining our physical health but we know nothing at maintaining our emotional and psychological being. To become emotionally healthy can’t be taught in one sitting but there is definitely a place to start. The best place to start is to become the bestfriends of ourselves. When your friend gets dumped by her boyfriend, you tell her “It’s his lost”, “He doesn’t deserve you”. If you are the one who gets dumped tell the exact thing to yourself. Be the bestfriend that you want to have, be that best friend to yourself. If you help yourself think better and help yourself build more self-esteem, you eventually become positive because you will think that there is nothing that’s going to bring you down but yourself and you are not allowing that to happen.

There is actually a TED Talk done by Guy Winch which is one of my favorites. You can check the video Here

When your life is positive and you feel happy and in control of everything in your life. Don’t keep all the positive energy in you, share it, give it away. Everyone is fighting a hard battle, it could be financial problem, academic, marriage or family problem. The people around you, whoever they are, are going through something. SMILE, treat people around you with kindness, wish them well. Those might just be simple things but it matters a lot to those people who need it. Time will also come that you will be the person who is going to need those positive gestures from others and if you have given those to them, you are going to get them back.

We expect to get negativities from the things around us: work, people, bills and etc. But sometimes the culprit of these negativities is us. One biggest cause of negativity in our society today lies on how we look at ourselves. There are a lot of people famous because of how they look and we tend to feel less confident because we don't look anywhere near them and we start feeling negative about ourselves. We scroll on our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feeds and we see Kardashians, we see models, we see people who might have things we wish we had. To be positive we should be able to find the positive things about us, we don't have to fit to specific beauty standards or to what people say is beautiful. We are all beautiful in our own ways and it is on us how to find it. We should start looking at the mirror and tell something positive about our negatives. Look at the mirror and say: