The Evolution of B+ >>

9 min readOct 15, 2020

Positive Thinking & Optimism

OK, Let’s take a look at this ‘prescription’:

How to Develop the Skill of Positive Thinking
BONUS: Here are 5 quick tips for developing more positive thinking.
1. Feed Your Brain with Positive Stuff. Read good books. Listen to positive podcasts. Watch uplifting television. The compound effect of this one tip will shock you.
2. Protect Your Brain from Negative Stuff. Garbage in; garbage out. Enough said.
3. Build Your Gratitude Muscle. If you want to grow in gratitude, you have to exercise your thankfulness muscles. One of the best ways to bulk up your thankfulness muscles is to write 3 things you thankful for in a Gratitude Journal. Try to do this daily. The more you write, the more you will realize how much you truly have.
4. Exercise. Research shows regular exercise makes you happier and smarter (along with 11 other positive benefits).
5. Play. Date your spouse. Create fun family traditions. Follow your favorite college football team. Invest in a hobby. Carving out time and space for play will add positivity to your life.

Can you show me your ‘Gratitude Muscle’? Is this what you need to switch to positive thinking? -mmt

All that I find simply humiliating( humiliating-adjective:making someone feel ashamed and foolish by injuring their dignity and pride).-mmt

With positive thinking there will still be challenges, but you can dramatically improve your coping skills and the ratio of ‘good’ days to ‘bad’ days. You will also be more successful as good moods are essential for productivity, creativity and personal growth.
Positive Thinking: How to Stop Negative Thoughts, Develop a Positive Mindset, and Be Happy
Negative thoughts have an easy time reaching people in this busy day and age. Whether you lose your job, or experience a change in your marital status, experiencing negative thoughts is common. However, for some people, negative thinking gets in the way of living a healthy and productive life.
Being positive is directly connected to how you think. Positive thinking impacts your job, your health, your relationships, and your life in every way. It affects how you see things. When you are cheerful, pleased, and feel appreciated, you see added possibilities for your life.
This book will help you understand the power of positive thinking, and will show you how you can overcome negative thoughts and begin to live a happier life. By reading this book, you’ll learn:
• how negative thinking can ruin your life;
• the benefits of positive thinking;
• how you can use the Law of Attraction to keep good things coming in your life; and
• how to deal with your past and believe in yourself.
You will also discover:
• how to turn your thoughts from negative to positive in just a few steps;
• constructive ways to handle criticism;
• useful tips for how to make positivity a part of your day to day life; and
• how mindfulness leads to happiness.
Download Positive Thinking now!

What do you say for that book synopsis?

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Anyone who studies the importance of positive thinking comes to realise that the more positive our thoughts the more positive our life will be. Some see this as the practical outworking of psychological principles: It is almost impossible for someone to allow into their life something they feel they don’t really deserve — they will find a way to sabotage themselves if they ever do attract that thing into their life.

Others see it as a “Law of the Universe”, and that we are all affected by the “Law of Attraction”, or the “Law of Vibration”. Many consider the effects of the Power of the Subconscious Mind and how a person’s unconscious beliefs affect their life and their ability to achieve their goals.

Amongst these varieties of approach to Positive Thinking there is the underlying idea that our thoughts and feelings need to be “positive” in order to create more positive experiences in our life. However, there is a problem…

The problem is that even if we realise the importance of being positive that is often not enough to help us stay positive. We may be overcome with a dark mood, or a sullen frame of thought. We may get caught up in anger and resentment. We may feel bitter about things that have happened to us in the past, or we may feel ashamed or guilty about things we have done. All these can cause our efforts to think higher and better thoughts to be very difficult sometimes.

Perhaps we read something inspiring and uplifting and feel better for a while, but often for many of us the change does not last and we struggle to keep ourselves feeling good about life.

13 Life Rules to Keep You Motivated

We all have rules we live by. Some of them are inherent, such as smiling when walking past a stranger or shaking someone’s hand when introducing yourself. But others we have to develop over time until they become habit.

The happiness conspiracy: against optimism and the cult of positive thinking

“There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”

“Why Must the Show Go On?” “And if you lose hope,/Take dope,/And lock yourself in the john,/Why must the show go on?”

We are no longer allowed to be dark, ironic or, indeed, pessimistic. Neo-optimism is now as brutally enforced. “In America, optimism has become almost like a cult,” the social psychologist Aaron Sackett told Psychology Today. “In this country,” says another American psychologist, “pessimism comes with a deep stigma.”

As with any cult, even reluctant individuals are forced to conform. In the same Psychology Today article, B Cade Massey, a professor of organisational behaviour at Yale, says: “It has gotten to the point where people feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way.” Massey’s research shows that, when assessing the risks of investments or surgical procedures, people make predictions they know are overly optimistic just because they want to belong, even in life- or wealth-threatening crises, to the clan of idiot grinning optimists who seem to be in charge.

You can feel this pressure wherever you go, notably on the internet, the multiplicity of which is anchored by a single, ferociously imposed neo-optimistic orthodoxy. The “Like” button on Facebook is one weapon of the neos. As a University of Leicester study found, it “directs debate on the social media platform in the direction of the blandly positive”. Social media, with their chattering pursuit of “likes”, followers, comments and shares, are overwhelmingly biased in the direction of an airheaded, cringe-inducing positivity. Look at the breathless Twitter feeds that babble about the sheer wonderfulness of everything, or the groups on Facebook and elsewhere consisting of people gathering together to save the world and spread niceness by, er, gathering together. Daily I get email demands to “help X celebrate” their birthday/promotion/whatever. “Help celebrate” — really?

This is not just irritating, it’s sinister. Clickbait websites are infecting once serious news media simply because they have the ability to rack up clicks in the millions by making people feel optimistic with or amused by pictures of cats.

What is truly sinister here is that the internet, thanks to its useful idiot users, is being turned into a gigantic corporate shill. Be optimistic and then buy stuff and look at our adverts. Or, to put it another way, become increasingly exhausted, ignorant, poor and depressed.

Traditional media are just as bad, if less covert. There are talent and “reality” shows in which it is necessary to be overwhelmed by the joy, the glory, of taking part, even in defeat; a TV trope imported from the US where to be anything other than infuriatingly upbeat is to be deeply suspect.

But the most insidious and effective import of neo-optimism came in the form of management “theory”. The standard text on this is Barbara Ehrenreich’s caustic, funny, readable and withering Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. She points out that the neo-optimism to which we are now subjected is not, as many claim, some foundational American value. The US Declaration of Independence and the US constitution are neither pessimistic nor optimistic: they are realistic — above all, about human nature. Furthermore, as Max Weber understood, there is nothing intrinsically optimistic about capitalism; it is grinding, risk-laden, hard work, worthwhile because, to the Protestant imagination, it is God’s work.

This began to change in the 19th century with the rise of what came to be known as positive thinking; a rejection, Ehrenreich says, of the austerities of Calvinism. This did have distinguished origins in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. In our time, however, it has descended into cultish hucksterism.

Modern-day positive thinking, This view of the world makes perpetual economic growth and infinite life enhancement seem not only possible, but also ordained. The cruel flip side of this is that failure will be seen as a refusal to think positively and, therefore, the poor and the excluded are not unfortunate or persecuted: they are guilty.

“If optimism is the key to material success,” Ehrenreich says, “and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure.”

Political quietism combined with a futile and febrile pursuit of material fulfilment is the result. As she then points out, this attitude must ultimately be founded on the preposterous idea that your state of mind can change the world and overcome the contingencies of life, if not (yet) death. This is superstition, as is the entire positive thinking industry, the scale of which is chilling. Americans apparently spend more than $100bn a year on motivating their employees using various positive thinking techniques.

That this has got dangerously out of hand is obvious to the most intelligent.

Dumb optimism is now the default mode in politics. Who, now, could say like Churchill, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”? And note the word “nothing”. This was not a temporary state of affairs: there was no optimism available.

There are two areas in which neo-optimism seems to be more firmly grounded — medicine and history. There have been many medical studies in which the attitude of the patient appears to affect the course of an illness. In some cases this has inspired yet more superstition; when mood was found to have a marginal effect on the immune system there was a rash of claims that optimism could cure cancer.

Cracks are emerging, however, in the façade of medical optimism. People are noticing that the ways of measuring such traits — pencil-and-paper tests — are dubious and that the assumption that these are inborn traits that follow you through life may be wrong. People may be strategically optimistic or pessimistic according to the situation in which they find themselves.

Optimism is a pressure — it is stress-inducing and intelligence-lowering. Pessimism is a release: it is relaxing and mind-expanding. Read the Book of Ecclesiastes (“To every thing there is a season”) or Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (“The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly . . .”) to see how beautiful and peaceful zero expectations can be.

The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking

“The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,”

“Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.” — THE NEW YORKER