More about positive thinking or how stress affects the performance

Low level makes us tired and we are sleepy. When the stress level rises, we are alert. When we have reached the optimum level (positive stress) we are performing our best. When the stress level rises further we begin to experience anxiety and finally become totally confused.
As long as the stress is on the optimal level a person is functioning as best, can work and stress level drops naturally in the evening.
It is only when you have gone over this level the negative effects are beginning to show itself.
You can not relax, you have trouble to go to sleep and you may suffer other stress symtom.

No stress - nothing gets done
A little stress - you feel sprightly
Optimal stress level - you perform well
Too high stress level - you start to feel agitated and possibly anxious
Long term high stress level - clear symtoms of stress. Burnout

Bernie Siegel, a surgeon who has written books drewing attention to believe that every disease has a message that we must pay attention to. This in itself is nothing new, even Freud explained several diseases with mental health grounds. While Freud's teachings are considered obsolete, at least in some circles, there is the same idea behind Siegel approach to health and disease.
And not just his ideas but every idea that sees body and soul / consciousness as a whole.
Siegel says that we can learn something about each illness and he thinks that although we can not control everything that happens in our life, we can control our own reactions.
And of course we can. If someone says that we can not, I would like to ask the person; "whose thoughts are you thinking. My thoughts are my own and I can actually choose to think what I want.
There are also various techniques such as meditation, to learn to put the focus of things you like.
This can be used as a preventive "medicine", you need not wait until they are already ill or burn-out.

Some traps when trying to use positive thinking style

The victim:
You have a feeling that you do not control your life yourself, but it is controlled by someone from outside. Especially this is used to happen in adverse events, which just happens but you feel you just have to let it happen. And for positive events, you may see is as a "pure luck" that the good thing happened. Anyway, you feel there is no idea to do anything but be passive. We can still do not control the future and not get past obstacles.

Yes, but ...:
Your answers to all possible solutions is "yes, but" because of a myriad reasons why it proposes, can not and will not work.


Exercise to try:
Write your negative thoughts, thoughts that are so automatic that you no longer even thinks about them.
Do the same with your positive thoughts and try to find them and actually dare to write them up. Opposition to see the positive things in yourself tends almost to be more than to see the negative things.

And finally: anything can happen at any time!

It is just a thought, nothing to be afraid of

When you have an experience of difficult emotions they always are accompanied by sensations and feelings in the body. Then we tend to automatically react negatively, instead of friendly attention right into the areas of the body where we feel pain or discomfort. If we do so, note them immediately, the long-term effects start immediately. By doing this we are shorting the reaction patterns in the brain that trigger avoidance. We also disrupt the automatic neural connections between body, emotion and thought that consolidate vicious circles and depressive spiral. In the long term we are going to develop more constructive and sensible way of dealing with these experiences that have been considered negative. We no longer see them as evil and scary, because if we see them that way we trigger avoidance. This in turn means that we get stuck there. But if we begin to see the unpleasant experiences as they are, take them for what they are; transient mental phenomena or events, feelings and thoughts, showing interested to examine them, being curious, rather than to be afraid of those things we regard as abhorrent events and that we have learned to hate.We might as well invite them because they are already there.
Although anxiety is actually just a feeling, a creation of your own brain, nothing to be afraid of ...

Nourishing steps

Walking meditation is like eating. With each step, we nourish our body and our spirit. When we walk with anxiety and sorrow, it is a kind of junk food. The food of walking meditation should be of a higher quality. Just walk slowly and enjoy a banquet of peace.


-Thich Nhat Hahn

The power of your thoughts

The feelings that the situation I described before, when meeting a person on a street, arouses in you, depends entirely on how you see yourself and how you feel at that moment. Often we do interpret the situation seeing it from our own poit of wiev and when doing so we do not take into account that you can never actually know what the other people think.

The reaction to the other's behavior depends on the story we tell ourselves, the internal discussion within us that constantly interpret what we see and hear. If you do not feel good when the situation occurs, you probably interpret it as that the other person deliberately ignores you, he doesn´t want to see you. That is probably your inner monologue telling that. However, if you feel well that day, you might think that the other person probably did not see you because he was sunk in his thoughts or something like that. Yet, this is about exactly the same situation, it's just your inner voice, which acts as a critic or as a friend and informs you what to feel.

Since this works like this it should of course be perfectly possible to determine what the inner voice, or "old man in the machine" may issue. If your answer is no, it means you can not choose what you think of ... right?

Remember: your thoughts are your thougths and only thoughts, not a reality, and you are the one who is controlling your own thinking!