Do you believe that positive thinking works? or can change your life?

There is no magic to this.

Your expectations influence what you will try and how hard you will try and how long you will persist.

A positive attitude sometimes influences the behaviour of others to work towards important goals.

I do not believe the world is transformed by wishing. It takes commitment and work and the help of others.

Absolutely, unequivocally, yes.

At the age of 58, i wanted to go back through the police academy for a second time. my mind kept telling me i could make it, my body was shaking in my boots. could i make the long 5k runs, the vigorous physical training, the losing of my self- identity for all those weeks, saying yessir and no maam to people 20 years younger than myself? after much debate, my mind won and off to the academy i go, a 2nd time. my first day of physical training gave a whole new meaning to the words, “i feel your pain”. no one on Gods earth could have felt that pain for the first three weeks. each day after training, my wife would have a hot tub of water waiting for me.bless her soul. it took me an hour just to exit my automobile at my home. i did make it and i graduated a 2nd time. my overall academy training grade was 92.9. i am the only person that has ever gone through our police academy twice in one lifetime. was this a case of positive thinking? I know so. without my brain constantly telling me….“you can do this”, i would never have made it.

YeP!

This is my new year’s resolution! To think positive happy thoughts! I think it’s going to work… I’ll let you know.

Here is a book you might find interesting.

Here is a story you might interesting…

Money has been tight in my world lately. Earlier this week I decided I was going to get $500 in the mail. I was not expecting any money and had no idea how or where it would come from, but I decided I would get $500 in the mail. I kept thinking about it and told all my sister and my boyfriend that I was “manifesting $500.” They laughed at me. Well Wednesday I went to get the mail and what was there? A check for $1,200! It was made out to my ex and me so I had to split it with him, I got $600 and my manifestation worked! That same day my boyfriend and my sister got checks in the mail too! Neither of theirs was as much as mine. True story.

Required reading:

As A Man Thinketh – by James Allen
(The complete online text.)

Absolutely! Positive thinking definitely works. Without it there is sometimes no reason to keep on going. My motto:

You can laugh or you can cry, but if you cry your nose hurts.

Note: I live with a disabled husband, a bipolar son, and a teen age daughter, and my parents are moving to town in about two weeks so I can help them. Positive thinking is the only solution.

In normal circumstances, I can do minor jiggering with my thoughts—mostly trying to be positive. But for unusual and especially painful circumstances, I can’t do it. For one thing, it is such a joke. For another, I can’t buy it, and if I don’t believe in it, I can destroy it easily.

In addition, when I fail, I blame myself, and that makes me get worse, not better. It’s just not my path. It’s mindlessness for me, all the way!

Yes, you can do both. There is no magic involved though. Positive thinking can help you change your life in the way that. instead of being a lazy ass you be a real go getter and get a promotion. You change your life every time you make a decision.

Yes, I do. It worked for me and for thousands of other people. If there is no medical reason for negative thoughts, then it is a simple process to change your life for the better by using the techniques of “positive thinking”.

Positive thinking doesn’t directly change your life it changes your perception, which in turn can alter your behaviour and therefore, your life. So yeah, I think it does.

I believe Godly thinking works. And YES, it changes your life forever!

Yes, it works. But, there’s a price for that kind of “cheap result”, in much the same way that spanking children works in the short term but exacts a long-term toll.

The problem is that positive thinking is resistive and mechanical in nature: it’s a compensation strategy. I don’t mean ordinary positive thoughts which occur spontaneously, of course those are fine. I mean the intentional self-manipulation / reprogramming which is so popular and promoted everywhere: that comes with a price tag.

The price is measured in two dimensions: freedom and depth of self-understanding. When you have negative thought patterns that are interfering with your performance, the most effective ‘treatment’ is to get to the root of those habitual patterns and pull out the weed… but that takes time and insight and courage. It’s much easier to just slather it all over with a bunch of forced positive thinking… the trouble is, that’s like a drug you have to keep taking to salve the symptom, it never cures the real disease.

The other part of this is “loss of freedom”. Habitual positive thinking is like any habit… it tends to numb the mind and spirit into behaving in automatic and unreflective ways. Someone who is always “up” is quite annoying, yes? Just as someone who is always “down”—it limits the range of emotions and depth as well.

I’m not entirely opposed to it: when you need a band-aid, by all means whip it out. But don’t mistake that for long-term growth or personal development.

@HasntBeen I wish I could give you 1000 lurve! I have never said that before.

I have instinctively been against the notion, although I’ve tried to do it and failed. Now I have an excellent reason to explain my uneasiness with the technique. I much prefer to dig deep and understand. I’ve felt I had to go deep into something and really, give myself up to it, in order to learn how to cope with it or how to defuse it. A lot of people have suggested that I do otherwise, or that wallowing in the pain is my own “habit.” I.e., it is a habit to be depressed.

I don’t feel like I can escape my demons. I’ve no choice but to confront them. As you say, that is difficult and painful, and I tend to use fluther as a place to get some salve for the pain, which might seem a bit selfish to some people. Or boring.

I also resist diving in, hoping there is another way, and also feeling like I am giving up when I dive in. But maybe it isn’t giving up. Maybe it is facing the demon and going for the fight with the real thing, not just the symptoms. I have found, in the past, that going deeply into something (suicidal feelings) actually took away a lot of their power.

Anyway, thanks very much for that comment. It was very helpful to me.

Thanks, @daloon. I think positive thinking survives as a popular strategy due mainly to the weaknesses in our cultural understanding of personality development and human fulfillment: it’s one of our small toolbox of “happy tricks” that manage to provide some relief. That’s not a problem, except when someone (like the authors of so many books!) starts to think they have The Answer™ in such ideas.

Human beings are more than a set of tape loops and a playback mechanism, to be self-programmed into being happy machines instead of sad machines. But finding the faint glow of the road to being a whole person is challenging—your instinct that there’s something “off” about positive thinking is the glow of that road, I would say. You have to pay close attention to see it.

Funny you say that, because all I’ve wanted for the past I don’t know how many years is to be a person. A person. That’s how I think of it in my head. The implication is that I want to be a whole person. It’s been a difficult journey and I have no idea when it will end, or even if I will ever become whole.

I imagine that if I did become whole—I don’t know if my struggles would go away, but I think I would have a different perspective on dealing with them. In fact, now that I think about it, I doubt if I will ever be happy much of the time. I think I enjoy the pressure of being forced to learn new things all the time. I hope that the negative side of that—the loss and depression—will become more manageable, but even if it doesn’t, I’ve survived it in the past, and that is really helpful for the future.

You will find what you’re looking for.
So you better look for what works instead of how things can go wrong.

If you’re struggling with chronic depression, it’s good to have help. Have you seen a therapist?

One thing worth noting about “being a whole person” is that you can’t actually become whole—everybody is already whole, and this precludes any “becoming”. But, you can be infected with a lot of false notions about yourself that tell you you’re not whole, and so a lot of the journey is learning to see through those falsehoods.

When you strip away all the striving and struggle and nonsense and self-defeating beliefs, what’s left is a human being… free, undefined… a wealth of possibility in a sea of resources.

@HasntBeen so if I understand correctly, you are saying that rather than pretending to be positive, one should face whatever it is that is causing the unhappiness and hopefully get to the bottom of it so it loses whatever power it might have. That makes perfect sense to me. Getting up and pasting a smile on my face has never quite done the job for me. The positive thinking comes more from processing than from pretending.

I’m not a big fan of the power of positive thinking phenomena that has swept our nation. We have become a people who are so uncomfortable with a negative reaction, word or thought that we run to our doctors, our priests or the nearest self help shelf at the nearest book store. Avoiding negative messages or negative people doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you weaker. Building immunity to negativity takes exposure to it. You can’t build a tolerance or a resistance to it if you run from it.

@SuperMouse : I sort of agree with that—positive thinking sometimes has the quality of a sort of nervousness, as if one knows that one has taken a turd and slapped sugar frosting on it… somehow, the subject is not entirely convinced although he may fool the public. Much better to face the turd squarely (as Silhouette implies) and clean it up.

The main point though, is that both “positive” and “negative” are too limiting to capture the essence of this subject of satisfaction. When you take a human being, and clean out the debilitating mental habits and crippling self-esteem issues and harmful beliefs, what you have left is sort of empty—not in the sense of being without value, but in the sense of being full of potential: a blank canvas, not an empty shell. Without the constant interference of negatively-charged content, a person is free to create and explore, and that freedom is the essence of being—it’s about liberty, not positivity.

@HasntBeen.. I meant to tell you this earlier but had to dash out the door. Your answer is excellent!

I guess I have a different understanding of positive thinking. For me positive thinking is looking for and focusing on the positive aspects of your life or a specific experience. It doesn’t mean to gloss over the bad or do nothing about it. It should be a part of finding something to enjoy in every day so you look forward to getting each morning even though otherwise your life sucks.

I don’t see positive thinking to be pretending about anything.

@Darwin Your response is more like what I see. @HasntBeen and some of the others are not really talking about Positive Thinking with a capital letter, but rather tilting at windmills and not really making any changes at all, trying to make negative into positive ones. It is not the same thing.

To be specific, when I wake up in the morning, I think about how I can make this day another good day. It’s not like saying “Well, I know I’m going to be miserable today, but I’ll try to pretend like I’m not”. I have already decided that I will be happy everyday, and now all I need to do is make it happen.

If something does happen to make me sad or upset, I take a few minutes to feel bad about it, and then I go on to see what positive things I can do with the rest of my day.

@YARNLADY You’re right, when I read the question my answer reflected how I feel about avoiding negative influences. I don’t think it’s a productive effort, face the bad, sad thing, feel bad, sad and then move on. Don’t dwell and don’t deny.

Always, always always – and it has changed my life

Yes. But it requires decades of training. Every year you get a little better at it. At the moment I’ve reached the level of being upset about “once per week”. I think I need another ten years to reach the “once per month” level. But it’s worth it.

@StupidGirl your answer although short is profound. Thank you Thanks to all food for thought