Think Positive: With These 12 Exercises You Will Learn Optimism

How happy you are, depend less on the external circumstances, your thinking is much more important. With our 12 tips and exercises, you can learn to think more positively and become more satisfied.

What positive thinking is and what it brings you

Thinking positively means seeing the famous "half-full glass" in a situation, so perceiving its positive aspects rather than its negatives. It also means having confidence in yourself, believing in success and opportunities, and tackling things that others consider impossible. Almost all the great successes in history have to do with positive thinking: someone believed in an almost incredible possibility and implemented it. Positive thinking has many advantages in your life:

Focusing on good things makes you happy

Whoever sees the bad things, the dangers and failures will soon be paralyzed. Positive thinking keeps you capable of action and ensures that you can always get up and keep going.
Thinking positively makes you healthier: Those who believe in their cure have a much higher chance of defeating even bad diseases.
Optimism is an important prerequisite for professional and personal success.
If you learn positive thinking, you will learn a second important lesson: You are the master of your thoughts, you can decide for yourself up to a certain point what you think. This opens up completely new possibilities!
A positive look at yourself and your success strengthens self-confidence and self-esteem.
Positive thinking makes you open to new things and helps you to broaden your horizons.
It has been found that the sense organs of people with a positive attitude work better. So negative thinking does not just seem to lead us to "close our eyes".

What positive thinking is NOT !!!

Many people initially roll their eyes when it comes to "positive thinking". The reason is a wrong idea of ​​what it actually means. Positive thinking does not mean simply hiding everything negative. And it certainly does not mean to just dance around the world, as some might imagine. Optimism is as realistic as pessimism: after all, there is almost nothing that is only positive or only negative. We decide which aspects we focus on.

12 tips and exercises for positive thinking

1. Draw your attention away from negative thoughts

Negative thoughts can have tremendous power. They destroy our mood, our courage and our joy. You don't have to give them that power. You can simply draw negative attention away from negative thoughts. Of course, this does not mean that they will no longer be there. But they don't have that much of an impact on you anymore. This is how it works: If you find that you are dealing with worries, fears, self-reproaches or other negative thoughts again, you draw an energetic line in your mind and turn to other things. Distract yourself from the negative thoughts, they won't help you anyway.

2. Smile

Positive thinking: Smile is actually healthy

There are people who always go through life grumpily and others who always have a smile on their lips. The smiles are almost always the happier people. The reason is also in the smile itself: Researchers have found that a positive facial expression releases happiness hormones almost immediately. The brain also seems to be picking up information about how you're doing from the facial muscles. So smiling makes you more relaxed and content, and that helps you to see things around you not quite as black.

3. Always look for the good in a situation

There is almost always something good in a situation, if only it is something you can learn from it. You can also interpret obstacles as challenges, mistakes as learning areas. If you haven't found a parking space near your apartment, you can either get angry or enjoy the short evening stroll. If the food you need for your recipe is sold out, this is a chance to experiment with something new. Admittedly, it is often very difficult to find something positive with the large, existential topics. "It will be good for something" is an unhelpful piece of advice for someone mourning a bad loss. But on a small scale, there are countless ways to take a closer look and find out the positive. And finally, this will also be possible with larger topics.

4. Keep a gratitude diary

Even if everything looks bad sometimes, there are certainly a lot of things in your life that you can be thankful for. By keeping a gratitude diary, you focus on these things instead of the perceived lack. Just write down three things you are thankful for every morning or evening. It doesn't matter if it's always the same. The main thing is that you notice that they are there. And over time you will notice more and more positive things in your life.

5. Dose the messages

Disaster reports on television, on the radio, in social networks and via other channels can quickly give us the impression that there are only bad things in the world. Of course that is not the case. In addition to the major disasters and acts of violence, there are millions of positive things every day. Only these are not the messages that come first in the news. To alleviate the negative impression, dosing the news can help. Just stop watching the news for a while or at least shut yourself off from the constantly popping up messages on social networks. Don't let yourself be bombarded with negative things continuously.

6. Move away from lousy meters

Beware of negative thinkers

Whether we are positive or negative also depends on the people around us. If you are constantly dealing with people who complain and whine, then this negative attitude rubs off on you. Conversely, cheerful, fun people can make us happier too.

7. Say goodbye to your victim role

Thinking positively also means taking full responsibility for your own life. Say goodbye to the thought that you are the victim to whom bad things happen again and again. You have many more aspects of your life in your own hands than you think! Once you understand this in its entirety, it will be much easier for you to take advantage of the opportunities in a situation.

8. Avoid comparisons

The neighbours have such a nice apartment and a big car, the colleague is slimmer and prettier and the cousin is much more successful in his job ... Such comparisons make us unhappy and they are an expression of negative thinking. We might as well compare ourselves to the many people who are worse off than us. But we rarely do that. We tend to compare ourselves in each area to someone who supposedly does better. If you manage to avoid these comparisons, your basic attitude almost automatically changes to the positive.

9. Make your success clear with positive thinking

Even if it sometimes doesn't feel like this: You have already achieved a lot in your life. Make a list of all the successes that come to mind: your school-leaving qualifications, your driver's license, difficult situations that you have mastered, the children you have raised reasonably well, the move to a nicer apartment, completed projects, ... If you think, a lot will surely come together. Then add to this list again and again the little things you encounter every day. Have you finally made an overdue doctor appointment or repaired the dripping tap? Great! A daily “I did it” list motivates much more than a to-do list.

10. Pay attention to your limits and needs

It is very difficult to stay positive when you are constantly trampling on your limits. Paying attention to your needs and limits is, therefore, an important step on the way to positive thinking. Take good care of yourself!

11. Start the day with positive thoughts

If you start thinking something positive in the morning, the rest of the day will go better. This exercise helps: Put yourself in a situation every morning in which you were really well, in which you were happy and carefree and felt really comfortable. Try to feel this situation again and enjoy this positive moment.

12. Read books about happiness

There is much more to say about positive thinking and happiness than is possible in an article. And: dealing with these topics helps to rethink. So read a book about happiness and other positive topics from time to time.

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