“The way you think about your life, and yourself, is what you will manifest.” ~Monica Berg
If you’ve ever heard that ‘our thoughts create our reality,’ from what I’ve learned, this is how it works. An experience happens → we create a story about it, a belief system → this impacts how we feel (about the situation and ourselves) → which then influences our words, actions, dreams and decisions → and this blooms into our life, our reality.
So who doesn’t believe in positive thoughts, in leading life from an optimistic outlook? More than just a good idea, research now confirms that we can say, “Our life depends on it!” Recent longitudinal studies have tied greater optimism to a lower risk of developing heart disease and other chronic disorders. Greater optimism has also been shown to correlate with living longer.
Last week, a New York Times article cited Dr. Alan Rozanski, a cardiologist at Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York and leading researcher on optimism. According to Dr. Rozanski: “The data is very consistent. In every case there was a strong relationship between optimism and a lower risk of disease.”
He further explains the somatic impact of a pessimist mind (quite scary):
“There’s also a biological effect. Pessimists bathe their bodies in damaging stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine all day long. Pessimism increases inflammation in the body and fosters metabolic abnormalities like diabetes. Pessimism is also on the way to depression, which the American Heart Association considers a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.”
HERE’S AN EXAMPLE
Let’s say your plane is delayed, you’re now going to land after midnight and you have a huge work week ahead. You’re already exhausted from not sleeping well on your trip.
The pessimist narrative would sound like, “Why did you even go on this trip, you’re going to get sick, be miserable all week and you’re not going to be able to handle it all.”
The optimistic tells a very different story, “What a privilege that I am able to visit the people I care about. My body is strong and resilient, and I’m so blessed to be returning to work that means a great deal to me. It’s all going to be okay.”
Even just reading these out loud, can you feel the difference in your own body? Especially when getting to, “It’s all going to be okay.”
GETTING TO KNOW OPTIMISM BETTER
When we lead from an optimistic frame of mind, even in uncertain times, we usually expect the best. We feel optimistic about the future, without necessarily having a logical reason. We live life expecting good things to happen. We feel positively hopeful. We trust and have certainty in the future, even if we can’t see how it’s going to unfold.
Optimism can be directed towards our belief in ourselves, again, even without any evidence or history to inform this positive belief. It’s a gift for some and for most, it must become a conscious choice. It’s like our life is a script, and we are the ones writing it based on the story we tell ourselves.
The highest form of optimism, what I like to call “spiritual optimism,” is a consciousness that a universal force of goodness runs through everything, equally in everything. So whatever is happening to us or around us, whether we can see it now or not, is ultimately for our benefit.
BUILDING YOUR OPTIMISM MUSCLE (Yes, our mind has a muscle!)
Here are 3 simple steps for writing your own script, for living with an outlook of positivity and optimism:
Pause and Catch Your Fleeting Thoughts. Once we pause this puts us in a position to be in charge of our consciousness, and ultimately our lives. We often don’t realize that our fleeting thoughts are pessimistic in nature. As one of my clients called it today, “Pausing helps me see through the noise in my head.”
Direct Your Thoughts Toward Optimism. Once we pause and claim our power, we can direct our consciousness and write an optimistic script. In the field of Psychology, this is called Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Our thinking is habitual, so we want to identify the negative thoughts and narratives and convert them into positive, turn those nasty babies around. Again and again! It’s that simple.
As Louise Hay would say, “Thoughts are like drops of water. When you think the same thoughts over and over again, you are creating this incredible body of water. First, you have a little puddle, then you may get a pond, and as you continue to think the same thoughts over and over again, you have a lake, and finally an ocean.”
Say It Till You Manifest It. Not just thinking optimistically, but speak to your consciousness, out loud! Say those positively hopeful, spiritually optimistic words till they become who you are and the ocean in which you swim.
