Benefits of a Positive Attitude when Facing Illness
The benefits of a positive attitude when facing illness are many. Maintaining your optimism greatly improves your prognosis. Also, it attenuates your symptoms and become a meaningful learning experience.
Thus, when a disease is serious, you may feel that your world is collapsing. Your first reaction, most likely: Why me? You may not have experience with such feelings and, when they appear, they can be hard to manage. Perhaps you feel too vulnerable and weak after the bad news.
You wonder what you did wrong and look for hope everywhere you can. This emotional state is energy depleting; it lowers your self-esteem and ruins your, otherwise, good sleep.
Maintaining a positive attitude is highly beneficial to your life. If you’re facing a serious diagnosis; then keeping yours is essential.
Diagnosis and your emotional process
There’s great suffering behind any form of a disease and being diagnosed with a condition or other demands require that we’re able to manage our emotions.
In such moments, choosing an appropriate coping strategy could be the difference between healing, pain chronification and/or the complication of the disease itself. It’ll also have a significant impact on the quality of your life.
In general, maintaining a positive attitude offers innumerable physical, cognitive, emotional and social benefits. Thus, a relaxed environment favors the prognosis of any disease.
“People who just can’t accept a diagnosis tend to suffer a lot more in the long run. This is mainly because, in life, it’s essential to find an emotional balance that’ll help them cope with pain.”
Five benefits of a positive attitude towards illness
Next, let’s see what are some of the benefits of maintaining a positive attitude when facing illness. Maintaining an optimistic attitude is easy when the dynamics that surround you are also optimistic. However, it gets complicated when luck is not on your side and everything seems to be against you.
Makes you stronger
Problems for those who think either positively or negatively are about the same in number. However, positive thinking facilitates a solution to many of these problems. It puts a person in solution finding mode. This focus makes a person stronger and more resilient in the face of adversity.
You remain optimistic
You should consider integrating tasks that’ll help you remain optimistic in your new routine. Write a diary or a blog. Fill your space with vitality by listening to music or getting in touch with people who may have gone through a similar situation. It’ll make it easier for your emotions not to be restricted to negative ones.
You gain acceptance of your new situation
Acceptance is a starting point. Only from it can you begin to figure out how to improve your situation. Without acknowledging and understanding that there’s a problem, then therapy and medication are kind of pointless.
Further, acceptance has nothing to do with catastrophism –practiced by some. It’s about accepting that it is what it is, not about feeling sorry for yourself or expecting the worse outcome by anticipating negative events that may not necessarily happen.
Helps solve the way you process your life
Although it seems like a contradiction, the presence of a disease is a great opportunity to separate what’s important from what isn’t. You may have been absorbed and deceived by a fast-paced life, often superficial. And so, the disease will open your eyes to it.
Changes your values
Your values are sustained and they support principles and priorities that will help you make better decisions. In this regard, traumatic events, personal crises or illnesses often lead you to ponder your existence and make adjustments.
According to a study in which the main objective was to record the possible change in personal values after a serious illness diagnosis, it was found that 87% of patients changed their priorities and values.
These patients gave greater importance to their personal relationships; family and leisure time, and overall well-being. Similarly, they showed higher rates of assertiveness, empathy, and dedication.