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 the response of your body towards it?

Our mind has power and 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.

Don’t expect people to make you feel better. Don’t expect people to make your life positive. Positivity should come from within you. 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!, and then THINK! and BREATH! Tell yourself that negativity isn’t an option, it is not the solution for any challenging situation that you might have, instead keep your cool and brush those negativities away and go back to what you were doing.

When your life is positive and you feel happy and in control of everything in your life. Don’t keep all the positivities in you, share it, give it away. Everyone is fighting a hard battle, it could be financial problem, academic, marriage and 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.

At a very young age we are already taught how to keep our body clean. We are taught to shower everyday, brush our teeth after every meal, clean a wound, and whatnot. We were trained well on how to keep our physical health but we don’t have much idea on how to deal with our 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.

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. 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: