Surrounding yourself with a great lifestyle and material goods may seem to lead to happiness, but how you really feel is governed by what goes on inside your head. When you train yourself to think more positively, everything gets better. Your eyes will be opened and you will see the bottle half full, instead of half empty. You will start to notice solutions and will understand that every problem is actually an opportunity to grow. Here are ten tips to help you think positively and make changes.
1. Practice gratitude
Write down 5 things that you feel grateful for every day. Science has found that gratitude can significantly increase your happiness and positive emotion, and protect you from stress, negativity, anxiety and depression.
2. Set clear goals
The root of all the motivation or inspiration you have ever felt in your entire life are goals. Goal setting provides you the foundation for your drive. By making a goal you give yourself a concrete endpoint to aim for and get excited about. It gives you something to focus on and put 100% of your effort into and this focus is what develops motivation. Goals are simply tools to focus your energy in positive directions.
3. Surround yourself with positive people
Positivity is contagious, and if you surround yourself with positive people, that positive energy will surround and fill you too. Positive people are able to see the good things in life, and find ways to make the bad things better. They will give you advice that will be honest, positive, and encouraging. Being around somebody like this will make you try new things, achieve new goals, and reach for dreams that you didn’t even know you had.
4. Use the power of humor
Humor shifts perspective, allowing you to see situations in a more realistic. A humorous perspective creates psychological distance, which can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes you need to stop focusing on the things which are stressing you out and start focusing on things which are making you feel good about the world in which we live.
5. Find the silver lining
If you learn to see each challenge as an opportunity to become stronger and more capable, everything changes. You can use challenging situations to unlock your untapped strengths and abilities. Each time you do this it will increase your confidence until you begin to see most challenges as opportunities to harness your personal power to an even greater degree.
6. Exercise regularly
Regular exercise and physical activity keep your heart healthy, reduce your risk of serious illness, strengthen bones, help you to stay in shape and improve your thinking processes. It can also be a great way of reducing your stress levels and lifting your mood if you’re feeling down. According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that aerobic exercise training can increase the size of a region of the brain called the hippocampus—a part of the brain that begins to decline around age 30 in most adults. The hippocampus is a key brain structure important to learning, memory and stress response.
7. Take responsibility
Blaming somebody else for your bad experiences may help you to feel better about yourself, but in the long-run an attitude of blame will mean that you will not achieve your objectives. An attitude of responsibility allows you to look objectively at a situation and identify the areas for improvement. Rather than focus on the problem and who you can blame, you focus on finding, and implementing, effective solutions. When you accept responsibility, you will find solutions quicker and in a manner which allows you to correct others without causing rifts in your relationships. Quite simply, if you want to achieve your objects and enjoy quality relationships, you must choose to accept responsibility for your life.
8. Meditate
When you enter a state of meditation, you enter a realm of silence; the thoughts which assail you fade away, and the reality of the present is revealed to you in all its intensity. Your senses send you a direct image of the world which is not altered by your mind or your conditionings.
9. Use visualization
When you vividly imagine achieving your goals, you trigger a whole series of subconscious processes which will help you to reach your target. By training your brain to know what you want, you’ll inevitably experience more real world success – and feel more chilled about the process, too. The more you visualize, the more focussed you’ll be, and the more desire you’ll develop for making your goals come to fruition.
10. Forgive yourself and others
Nothing can change what happened. It is over. You have to choose whether you want to continue living with regrets over a past you cannot change, or choose to energize a better present and future. You can keep revisiting and giving life to the negative in your mind, or you can choose to release it. By forgiving yourself and others, you substitute your negative with positive feelings, thoughts, and behavior.