Have you wondered what exactly positive energy is? According to Annie’s Hallmark, “Positive energy is a natural energy that supports life. Ancients commonly referred to this energy as “chi” or “prana,” but today, science refers to this as “vital force.”
Feeling low or negative is a normal thing that happens with all of the ups and downs that life has to offer. It can be easy to just wallow in those feelings, but we all hold the responsibility of bringing ourselves back from those negative feelings. Often, we tend to wait for positivity to happen to us, rather than learning how to bring positivity into our lives ourselves.
Dr. Judith Orloff, author of Positive Energy: Ten Extraordinary Prescriptions for Transforming Fatigue, Stress, and Fear Into Vibrance, Strength, and Love, says the following:
“We can’t stop the negative circumstances of our time–our cell phones will keep ringing, e-mails will keep coming, people will be rude, our children will be demanding, and bad things will happen in the world. But we can learn ways to protect our energy so that we can stay centered in dealing with the stresses that arise.”
Therefore, it’s important to know how to bring positive energy into your life so you can move forward as a better and brighter person.
“The worst times can be the best if you think with positive energy.” – Domenico Dolce
10 Reasons Why We Need Positive Energy More Today Than Ever
We live in a high stress, fear-inducing time in history. Life is full, there are many responsibilities and challenges every day. Because of this, it’s important to find ways to remain positive amid life. Your positive energy is one of the best remedies to fight stress and fear in your life. Here are some practical ways to infuse your life with positive energy.
1. We can reduce workplace stress (significantly) by thinking positive
You spend a good portion of your day at work. Because of this, your workplace must be a place where you feel comfortable. If your workplace or coworkers make you feel stressed, it affects your health. Studies show that negativity on the job increases your chance of heart problems, diabetes, and high blood pressure. It can also cause job burnout, lack of concentration and a feeling of general unhappiness in your personal and your public life. All these things point to the need to reduce your workplace stress.
2. Positive energy supports your ultimate success
As people, we enjoy setting and reaching our goals. Whether it’s a “to-do” list or making the dean’s list at the university, we have goals. It doesn’t matter how big your goals are. When you succeed at a goal, you enjoy the satisfaction of it and you have a more positive outlook on your life. If you lack goals, it’s self-defeating because you aren’t experiencing the fulfillment of achieving goals. You may feel you’re drifting, and it can bring negativity into your life. Negativity gives you a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom or failure. The old saying, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time,” holds true here.
The art of visualization
Athletes know the importance of setting goals to enhance their success. In a recent study, researchers found that when athletes visualize a positive outcome, they could perform better. If they felt like they were achieving some success, even if it was small, and they believed their next performance would be better, it was. In fact, it inspired them for the rest of the season. It was a boost of confidence, which enhanced their positivity and their performance. Set small goals for yourself.
Choose areas of your life where you want to improve-in exercise, at work, or in-home care. Start small. Making even small strides is healthy and keeps you moving forward. Write down your goals for the next year or the next five years. Check the lists every three months to see if you’re on base or if you need to adjust the goals. If you’re comfortable, ask a friend to keep you accountable.
How can you do this? Create a calm, peaceful atmosphere on your desk or in your work area. Plug in an essential oil mister, or burn a candle. Set a plant on your desk, hang pictures of your dog or your family members. These things can relieve your stress. During meetings, try deep breathing techniques to help you stay calm. Pray before you speak with a difficult coworker. Outside work, reduce your stress at home by doing your meditation. Keep work-related activities away from your home life, set boundaries for phone calls or emails. Take off a personal day once in a while.
3. Positive thinking increases gratitude
Gratitude gives you the ability to see some good in a situation. It’s seeing the glass half-full rather than half-empty. Gratitude is healthy for your mind, emotions, and your physical well being. A recent study defined as “appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself, it is a general state of thankfulness and/ or appreciation.” Looking for things in your life, you are grateful for makes you feel happier and more relaxed with your circumstances.
Make a list of the things you are grateful for and hang it on the fridge so you can see it every day. Change the list weekly or monthly. Try to slow down your day enough to step back and see the good stuff going on around you. It’s easy to focus more on the negatives and all the things that need to be changed. Taking a moment to stop and look around can be very helpful and give you more perspective on what is going right in your life.
4. Positive thinking reduces anxiety
You may have heard the saying, as you think so are you. It turns out, it’s true. Over analyzing and mulling over your thoughts can steal your happiness and reduce the positivity in your life. For instance, if you are alone in your house, dwelling on a situation or circumstance and someone calls you or stops by, this breaks your inward thinking. If, after the call or visit, you go back into your self-talk, you’re allowing yourself to listen to yourself rather than talking to yourself.
Speaking to yourself about what’s real and what’s true lifts your mood and makes you happier. Psychologists say that cognitive behavior therapy can help you gain the tools you need to move out of anxious self-talk and depression into healthier feelings.
5. Positive thoughts lessen our physical ailments
Positivity can lead to positive health. Positive emotions, researchers found, can lead to a better recovery from chronic illnesses. Your good mental health can help you live longer, which lowers your healthcare costs and helps your overall mental health. Being pessimistic can cause you to make poor health choices, and conversely, optimism helps you make proactive healthy choices.
That research underlines a proven association between a healthy mind and a healthy body. If you’re suffering from a chronic disease, increase your positivity with activities such as a gratitude journal, getting outside, or meditating. When you are positive, you can better cope with pain or other chronic health issues, and you’ll make better health decisions for yourself.
6. Positivity increases our mental strength
An Australian study showed that teens and young adults could use the Power of Positivity to overcome behavioral issues and stabilize their mental health. This can help them grow into mentally strong adults and overcome depression. Learning positivity strategies helps you become mentally strong, helping you cope with stress and life’s unexpected circumstances.
Positivity is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised regularly for the best benefits. Stay positive, resist the urge to focus on what’s not right in your life. Reach out to others if you’re struggling, volunteer at an animal shelter, or help a neighbor. It doesn’t need to be much, even small positive contributions to others can help you refocus and grow mentally stronger.
7. Positivity makes everyone a more creative thinker
Positivity opens you up to creative ideas and thoughts. It allows you to grow as a person and expand your horizons without fear. Negative thoughts and emotions cause you to spend too much time “looking at our navel,” so to speak, making you withdraw from life and refuse to launch out into new things. Creativity feeds positivity and feelings of confidence. It gives you the ability to feel successful and contribute to the world around you.
8. Positivity helps you when you need to bounce back from hardships
Experts have found that staying positive helps you bounce back from difficulties quicker. Resilience is a sign of good mental health and being able to hold on to positive feelings. If you have a sense of well being and purpose, you will be more emotionally healthy than if you don’t have these outlooks.
This emotional health keeps you strong when faced with difficulties in life’s difficulties like parenting, work-related issues, or other stressful situations. Positivity may come from having a strong faith or a good family support system. Whatever boosts your positive outlook is worth working towards.
9. Positivity helps you sleep more soundly
It’s easy to let your sleeping habits slip. Whether you’re staying up late to finish a paper or answering some last-minute work emails, your sleep gets cheated. Sleep is vital to your health, but just as important is staying positive because that can help you sleep better. If you’re negative, you’re apt to fret and worry about situations, assuming the worst. This will interrupt your sleep. Create a bedtime routine. An hour before bed, shut off all electronics, read a book, or take a shower to relax. This allows your mind and body to unwind and prepare for sleep.
10. Positivity fosters our connection with others
Staying connected to your friends and family enhances your health and can even make you live longer. Scientists found that having a community has a powerful effect on both our emotional health and our physical health. Staying positive helps us socialize and reach out to others. Here are some ways to stay positive and stay connected with others.
- Build relationships with your children.
- Be involved with family and friends.
- Get help from others if you need it. Ask for prayer or support instead of withdrawing.
- Take a course or class.
- Volunteer or help a neighbor
Here Are 10 Simple Ways To Bring Back Positive Energy Into Your Life
1. Know exactly what you need
This can be difficult, but it’s important to know what you need to bring yourself out of those negative feelings. It can be as simple as needing a support system, and then reaching out to friends and family. Or, maybe you need time away from a stressful situation. While it can be hard to know what it is we need out of life, learning to assess and figure it out is one of the first steps to bringing positive energy back into your life. As Buddha rightly pointed out, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.”
2. Focus on the positive and don’t think about negativity
We all know how difficult it is to not focus on negative energy. Switching your focus from the negativity in your life can be just what you need to start to overcome it. As Clifford Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford University, pointed out, “Some people do have a more positive outlook, but almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail.”
Therefore, when something negative happens, you’ll want to focus all your energy on the badness of the situation. Instead, it’s time to start taking those negative things and learning to see the silver lining. Focus on all of the positive things about a bad situation that you can, and figure out how to fix the negative.
3. Be honest with yourself
Learning how to be honest with yourself is one of the things that many people struggle with, and it can take time to learn. But once you learn to be honest with yourself, you’re going to be a much happier and positive person, because you’ll be able to acknowledge the hard truths about both yourself and your negative situations. Once you learn to be honest with yourself, you can start making the changes that you want to make in yourself.
4. Remember to breathe!
It’s important to take a moment to breathe when you’re in the middle of a negative situation. We’re frequently so caught up with running around trying to fix everything that we get caught up and forget to take a moment to ourselves to relax. So, remember to pause and take a deep breath. Both mentally and physically. Breathing exercises will help keep your mind and body aligned and focused on positive energy.
5. Remember to laugh!
Even if something seems hopeless, it’s important to remember it’s okay to laugh at yourself, or the irony of a negative situation. The very act of laughter will release some good, positive chemicals and help you stay emotionally balanced. If you can learn to laugh at life, you’ll be good to go with replacing negative energy with positive.
6. Pay positive thinking forward because of the little things that matter
When you get positive energy, remember to give positive energy. This will have the side-effect of giving you even MORE positive energy! This means reaching out to people, from friends to family to even strangers.
Here’s what the author and founder of Success Consciousness, Remez Sasson said about being nice to people, “Acting kindly and being considerate will make people treat you in the same way, and this will lead to feeling good, happy, and therefore, becoming more positive.” This means that thinking positively about those around you, will extend your positive energy to your community. You’ll feel good about paying forward that positivity while also receiving positivity from others.
7. Learn to let go no matter how hard it can seem
This is one of the most difficult steps that we all have to learn one way or another. Letting go of our negativity and sadness and anger can be so hard, but it’s always worth it in the end. You can only control yourself and the energy that you give out. If you find yourself hung up on a grudge or an old argument, you may be feeding negativity energy right into your life without knowing it.
Here’s what Catherine Pulsifer mentioned about trying to bring back positive energy into your life. She states, “It takes effort and belief to persevere and stay dedicated to accomplish your goal. When you find yourself doubting whether the effort is worth it, visualize how you will feel and what you will have once your goal is completed.” Learning to let go means you can begin the healing process and start feeling more positive energy.
8. Connect with nature
Nothing gives more positive vibes and relaxing energy than just reconnecting with Mother Earth. Going to the gym or the spa are good ways to relax your body and mind, but it’s also a good practice to just go for a walk through the woods or sit by the river and experience all of the majesties and wonder that the Earth has to offer. It can help remind you that you’re just one small part of the grand scheme of things.
9. Learn to feel your emotions
Sometimes, we bottle our emotions up deep inside, especially if they’re negative or inconvenient to us. However, you have to learn to feel your emotions authentically and as they happen. When you feel sad, you have to let yourself feel that sadness. Because once you feel it and experience it, you can move on from it and return to your positive feelings. Bottling up your emotions only means that you’re going to be constantly feeding on negativity.
10. Clean your space and become clutter-free
Clutter can sap you of positive energy. If you’re living in a cluttered environment, it can be harder to truly let yourself feel the positivity that flows around you. According to the author and certified eco-designer Debra Duneier, “This changes the energy and prepares the space to celebrate the wonderful things that are about to come into your life.” When you start to clean up your living space, you’ll feel so much lighter and calmer. It’s also a good way to relax and to rearrange your life, so you feel less stressed.
Final Thoughts on Bringing Positive Energy Back into Your Life
You never know when there will be something that causes a low point in your life, and being able to focus on yourself and bring positive energy into your life again will help you cope with whatever negative feelings are happening to you. Hopefully, these things will give you a better handle on how to bring positive energy back into your life.
Just remember. Life can be stressful. This affects you mentally, emotionally, and physically. Staying positive in your life is worth the effort. Whether it’s reducing your work-related stress, revisiting things you’re grateful for, or visualizing your goals for success, there are many ways to bring positivity back into your life.
Choose one or two ways to bring positive energy back into your life. There’s no need to do everything at once. That would be overwhelming. Start small and work your way up, one at a time, until you are feeling more positive and happier.
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