Which category do you find yourself in, an optimistic person, or a pessimistic individual?
In this article, we are going to explore some ways that you can become an optimistic person and reap all the significant benefits of living optimistically.
What Does It Mean To Be Optimistic?
In society today, we find so much negativity surrounding us it's hard to be an optimistic person.
An optimistic person is becoming a rarity in today’s culture. Optimistic people always see a glass as half-full while pessimistic people view the glass as half-empty. As I once read, an optimistic person sees what’s happening around them, not as a negative, but to make things better and more positive. They can visualize how to take something that may be negative and turn it into something positive.
A pessimistic person sees something negative and immediately their mind tells them that things are only going to get worse. These people cannot see that will a little hard work they could turn a negative into a positive. A pessimistic person will be defeated before they even try.
The Benefits Of A Optimistic Lifestyle
Having a positive attitude in life brings with it many great blessings. Being optimistic has proven to create a less stressed lifestyle which can lead to living longer.
A growing number of scientific studies suggest optimistic people live longer and have better physical and mental health than pessimistic people.
In my research on optimism, I found that many researchers have found that individuals with a positive, optimistic outlook on life not only lived longer, but they had better heart health, better immunity, defeated cancer easier, living with less stress, had better blood pressure, less apt to catch diseases and infections and their pain tolerance was higher.
What Do Optimistic People Do Differently Than Pessimistic People Do?
Optimistic people do not let negative thoughts take over the way they think or the way to live. This does not mean that optimistic people don’t have negative thoughts. They do. It is how they deal with negativity that makes them different. An optimist takes difficulties and negativity and they make opportunities out of them.
We have learned that being an optimist can bring significant health benefits, but having an optimist attitude can also have many positive results mentally and in our careers.
Benefits of Being Optimistic
Self-Esteem
People with an optimistic mindset deal with failure by focusing on the positive results that they achieved and use this towards future endeavors. Learning from our mistakes and finding the positive from our failures and putting this to use instead of trying to avoid failure shifts the mind from focusing on failure and focus on positive successes.
Optimistic people do not let pessimistic people define who they are. They take this failure and use it as a building block for future opportunities. Optimistic people focus on the end goal and do not let past failures ruin them from being successful.
Careers
A person who is optimistic has a more positive outlook on their life and the future that is ahead of them. These people are in control of their life and expect to have positive events happen for them. Most times, optimistic people will have a positive outlook and they seem to be more focused and they use their creative ideas to accomplish tasks that are set before them.
Relationships
There is a vast difference between optimistic and pessimistic people when it comes to friendships and relationships. Optimistic people see the good in everyone and they make friends faster than people with a pessimistic attitude. Pessimists only see the negative with those around them.
In romantic relationships, relationships, where one partner is optimistic can help the other partner to become more optimistic than pessimistic. Also, having a partner that is optimistic about a relationship can lead to both parties living a longer, healthier life.
6 Ways To Become An Optimistic
We all would love to be optimistic. Many of us fight daily with ourselves to be more positive and less negative about people, places, or things around us daily. Let’s look at some ways to become more optimistic.
Create Positive Thoughts About Yourself
Very often, many of us wake up in the morning and plan on a positive day. But before the end of your first cup of coffee, you are already getting attacked with negative comments and from family, friends, or when you’re at work. Then throughout the day, while you’re still getting attacked by negativity, you feed your brain your own negative thoughts. Thoughts like, “I am not good enough, I am not smart enough, or clever enough.” You need to turn off this negative switch in your brain and start replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.
Listening to uplifting music and read positive messages or books. These are a few ways to fill those negative voids in your head with positive, uplifting thoughts about yourself.
Surround Yourself With Positivity
I find it easy to fall into circles of negative people. In today’s culture, they seem to be everywhere. You need to put up a barrier around yourself that blocks these kinds of people out of your life. In order to be an optimistic person, you need to surround yourself with people that are positive and uplifting. Plus, be careful of the music you listen to, the podcast you subscribe to, and guard your mind against external negative forces.
Don’t Relive The Past
Don’t be the person who constantly relives the past. The past is behind us and you cannot go back and change anything, even though you wish you could. Many of us keep blaming ourselves for what happened in the past. What we need to do is to learn from the past and don’t repeat what we have done wrong. The past is gone, no sense on dwelling on what is gone. Focus on the future and plan on taking what you have learnt from the past and make it work for the good for your future.
Don’t Predict The Future
Continuing on from the last paragraph, take the lessons you learnt from the past to improve your future, but do not predict what is going to happen in your future. Just because something failed for you in the past doesn’t predict what is going to happen in your future. Take the positive from your past and build on this foundation to make your future optimistic.
Challenge Negative Vibes
Most of the time, a negative thought life comes from low-self-esteem, self-doubt, and fear. Many times, this can be traced back to your childhood, including myself. This could be from our home-life, grade school, or past friends that were in our lives.
When these thoughts enter our mind, we need to stop them and challenge these thoughts. When these thoughts come flooding into your brain, write them down and play defence against these thoughts. Argue with your-self of why these are just lies here to ruin you and then write what you are going to do the opposite to counter these lies.
Focus On A Solution Not On The Problem
There are many times when us pessimist will focus on the problem and sit there and dwell on it, exhausting all our energy on the situation. While an optimist will look for a solution to a problem and take his or her energy to work on the solution and bring it to a resolution. Remember, an optimist will take a challenge or negative situation and turn it into a learning or teaching experience rather than waste time and energy dwelling on it.
