THE POWER OF THE POSITIVE MIND: 9 REAL EXAMPLES - ARTE - 2024

In this article I will explain the power of the positive mind and positive thinking, how they work and even their scientific bases. I will also show you 10 real examples. If we talk about the ability of the mind to create positive results in life , optimism or positive thinking, you can be in one of these groups: 1) you believe in it and put it into practice, 2) you believe it but you don't you put it into practice, 3) You don't believe it and you don't put it into practice.

In any case, I am sure that you will often wonder if it really makes any sense to be optimistic or if the subconscious mind exists. Human beings are pessimistic themselves, they tend to imagine negative results, something that has helped them to evolve and that has to do with the brain amygdala.

Do we currently have a positive or more negative thinking?

The fact is, being pessimistic helped a lot thousands of years ago, when you had to be on the lookout for a tiger when you went out looking for food.

Today there are far fewer dangers, but people are still quite pessimistic. However, the reality is that we live in the most abundant time in history:

• The smartphone or laptop with which you are probably reading this article has the same technology that NASA had when it traveled to the moon
• You have much more information than any president of a state 20 years ago
• The price of clothing and of life in general has fallen (who could afford to buy technology or a car 70 years ago?)
• More and more cures for disease are being discovered

But yes; we are still quite pessimistic, we do not take into account the healing power of a positive mind…

Can you have a better life with a positive mind?

In Psychology, the most common view of being positive / optimistic is "maintaining positive expectations about the future, having an implication in behavior."

It basically refers to the belief that good things will happen in your life. If you act to achieve something, you do it because you believe that it is likely to achieve those goals from your actions.

If you convince yourself that what you want to achieve is possible, you will try with perseverance even if progress is difficult or slow.

If you see the goals as unattainable, you will decrease the effort and you will become demotivated. Therefore, your expectations will have an effect on two types of behaviors: quit or persist.

There are numerous studies that confirm that people who are optimistic feel greater well-being in their lives and less stress than pessimistic people. And not only in subjective well-being, but in physical well-being.

For example, it has been shown that optimistic patients are less likely to have heart attacks in operations and that they recover faster. Therefore, optimistic people cope better with problems than pessimists:

• Optimists often take direct action in solving their problems and are more focused on solving them. They accept to a greater degree the situations they encounter and tend to come out of negative experiences and deal better with them
• Pessimists often react to stressful situations by denying them or avoiding dealing with problems. Also, pessimistic people are more likely to quit when difficulties arise.

Other benefits of thinking positively according to the Mayo Clinic are:

• Lower rates of depression
• Lower stress levels
• Greater resistance to colds
• Greater physical and psychological well-being
• Lower risk of death from cardiovascular accidents
• Better skills to face obstacles and moments of stress.

Why are some people optimistic and others pessimistic?

At least part of it is known to be genetic. However, another significant part is due to the experiences and environment that the person has lived.

In turn, learning from experiences of success or failure is important. If a person has failed in the past, she tends to think that she will fail again in the future.

Do you always have to be positive?

In some circumstances it is normal to be sad. There is a difference between being sad and being depressed:

• Being sad is a normal and adaptive emotion that actually helps you to cope better with life. If you have been lying on the couch for two months, you will probably be sad, if you fight with your family you will be sad, if someone close to you dies or you break up with your partner, you will be sad.

These are all events that do not help to cope with the demands of life and are maladaptive. Therefore, the simple fact of feeling sad mobilizes you to change circumstances.

• Besides, there is depression, which is a disease and that must meet certain conditions to be diagnosed: eating too much or nothing, sleeping too much or not at all, being unable to enjoy, recurring negative thoughts, etc.

Dehumanization

These books also lead us to think that all people have the same development possibilities and this is true within certain conditions.

For example, the middle class of any country does have the same possibilities.

But, logically, he will not have the same chances as the son of a billionaire.

And the son of an African Indian is not going to have the same possibilities as the son of an American.

Think positively to solve problems?

Imagine that a person becomes so optimistic that he believes that just by having positive thoughts he will be cured of a serious illness and that therefore, he is not treated with the necessary medical resources.

But not all self-help books are negative, in fact I've made a list of the best here.

Is being optimistic always good?

Generally yes, except when you're overly optimistic.

For example, you can become so optimistic that you study too little for an exam because you are convinced that you will pass it without effort.

Also, it will be negative to be optimistic when trying to act in a situation that is uncontrollable or that involves a greater loss.

Example: be optimistic that you are going to get rich in a casino and go broke.

Is there any advantage to having a negative mind / being pessimistic?

Sometimes yes; with defensive pessimism, although in the long term it brings negative consequences. The term defensive pessimism refers to a coping style in which negative results are expected that do not correspond to personal history.

This defensive pessimism can be helpful because it defends people from possible future failure. In addition, it will make the person act better because worry about future failure prompts him to take action.

The best example that I can think of of this trait is that of many fellow racers. They said that the exam had been fatal and that they were going to fail, that they had not studied anything. However, later they passed and some with a very good grade…

In reality, defensive pessimism seems to work, albeit only in the short term.

In addition, this defensive pessimism translates into pessimism in all areas of life and people who show defensive pessimism report negative psychological symptoms and a worse quality of life than optimists. In any case, in the long term it has negative consequences.

Examples of the power of positive thinking

Next I will comment on a series of phenomena that demonstrate the power that your mind has in your life.

The placebo effect

The placebo effect is the suggestive effect that the administration of a medicine, therapy or care produces on health.

These effects are not due to the effect of those acts -medicines, therapies or care-, but to the benefit that the patient perceives.

In fact, the placebo effect is taken into account in all research testing a drug or therapy.

An example is an experiment with a group of students from Princeton University:

The experimenters held a party and filled a beer keg with the O'Douls frame - which contains 0.4% alcohol - and observed how their peers behaved.

They acted as if they were drunk: doing silly things, speaking badly, falling asleep… (You can find it on YouTube).

The nocebo effect

The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect.

Symptoms of a disease are made worse because there is a pessimistic expectation that the therapy or drug has negative effects.

As in the placebo effect, in the nocebo effect the drug has no real power, although the harmful consequences at the biochemical, physiological, emotional and cognitive levels are.

Therefore, your brain has the power to produce a healing or physical effect from a positive belief, or the opposite effect from a negative belief.

Although this effect is very frequent - as this study shows - it is hardly taken into account by health professionals, nor by the general population.

For example, in one experiment, the drug finasteride was administered to a group of patients to treat the symptoms of prostatitis.

Half of the patients were told they could experience erectile dysfunction, while the other half were told nothing.

44% of the first group reported that they had experienced erectile dysfunction, compared to 15% of the unreported group.

Losing weight depends on mindset

How can it be that more and more people worry about their health and physique while obesity rates increase? Maybe diets don't work?

Some researchers believe that positivity is an important variable for weight loss and that it is what prevents many people from losing weight.

Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment with a group of overweight people, who should be skinny due to their activity level.

Despite exercising quite a bit at work, Langer found that 67% of the people in the group felt they were not exercising at all.

He took half of the group and explained that at their jobs they were leading an active lifestyle. The other half of the group was not given information.

A month later, Langer returned to the hotel and reevaluated the two groups. The first (who were said to be active) had lower blood pressure levels and lower weight. The other group had no physical changes.

Social support increases the years of life

According to a number of medical studies, having a positive attitude during mental illness can make the difference between healing and worsening.

In 1989, Stanford University researcher Dr. David Spiegel conducted a study with 86 women who were in advanced stages of breast cancer.

Half of the group received normal care, while the other received medical care and extra support. Support was based on expressing feelings or talking to other patients.

Women who were in the support group lived twice as long as those who were not in it.

Visualization improves performance

Visualization is used in some psychological therapies and in sports psychology.

In addition to being an exercise to focus on something, it has real effects at the neuronal level, strengthening synaptic connections.

Australian psychologist Alan Richardson did a little experiment:

He took a group of basketball players and divided them into three groups that would practice free throws:

• The first group (A) would practice 20 minutes a day
• The second (B) would not practice or visualize
• The third group (C) would visualize themselves making the free throws, without real practice

Group A improved their skills by 24%, group B did not improve at all and group C improved by 23%, almost the same as group A…

Yogis can lower the heart rate

Like the Tibetan monks, the yogis of India have great power to manipulate their psychophysiological variables while they are meditating deeply.

French cardiologist Therese Brosse traveled to India to demonstrate whether yogis had these abilities and observed that yogis were capable of lowering their heart rate so low that it could only be detected by an electrocardiogram.

In dreams the same brain areas are activated as in reality

When you have dreams, the same areas of the brain that are activated in reality are activated in your dream.

In this area there is a very curious phenomenon: lucid dreams.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute found that lucid dreamers have more developed prefrontal cortex.

In lucid dreams you are aware that you are dreaming and that capacity is closely related to the capacity for self-reflection.

In addition, the ability of these dreams to treat depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is currently being studied.

On the other hand, in the journal Medical hypotheses the case of a patient who had had chronic pain for 22 years, without having had results with various treatments, was described. After having a lucid dream, he had a complete remission of the pain.

The authors of this research have proposed that it is due to a reorganization of the central nervous system and that neuronal plasticity may explain these effects.

In my opinion, these dreams can also be used to practice any kind of skills (although research is needed to demonstrate those effects).

Eidetic memory: memorize everything in seconds

According to Jaensch, a German psychologist, the eidetic (or photographic) image is a perceptual phenomenon more common in the child and rare in the adult.

It is an image of an object or figure that after being perceived, can be projected and perceived again, in some cases with fidelity of detail, color and shape.

The photographic image can be produced spontaneously, at will on a surface (paper for example) or viewed with the eyes closed.

The ability to memorize in a photographic way has great individual variation. That is, there are people who have a great capacity, while the majority have a total lack.

Something similar is hyperthymesia or superior autobiographical memory. It is a syndrome / phenomenon that makes a person remember everything they have done during a day with almost perfect accuracy. They are even able to remember what they did on a particular day years ago.

The ability to block pain

In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl explains how he spent his stay in the Nazi concentration camps.

Something to note is that Frankl explains in the book that insults hurt much more than physical punishment. Thinking of his wife and the reasons why it was worth the effort, he managed to survive.

Something similar happened with Jack Schwarz, a writer who also lived in the terrible conditions of the Nazi concentration camps. He was physically and psychologically abused beyond what we can imagine today.

To cope with this situation, she began to practice meditation and pray, a skill that allowed her to block out the pain. Schwarz claimed that he could see people's aura, allowing him to perceive their physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental states.

After the war ended, Menninger Foundation researchers found that Schwarz could control various bodily processes with his own mind.

What's more, through an electroencephalography they showed that it had a different activity from that of most subjects.

Telekinesis: moving things with your mind

During the Cold War, the case of Nina Kulagina was widely studied.

This woman was able to move objects across a table without touching them.

In addition, it was able to control the heart rate of a laboratory frog.

The experiment was then repeated with a human volunteer, under a very controlled situation; shortly after starting, the volunteer's heart began to beat irregularly and almost reached a heart attack, but before that the experiment was completely stopped.

One study showed that he had changes in his heart thymus and brain waves.

Conclusions

It has been scientifically proven that experiencing positive emotions (that come from positive thoughts) such as joy or love causes people to see more possibilities in their life and to take more action.

However, you don't have to become dehumanized and always want to be positive. There will be times when it is normal to be somewhat sad.

And what do you think of this topic? What results has being positive given you in life?