How to Increase Your Levels of Optimism
The way in which you achieve your goals, face challenges, and overcome failures depends largely on your levels of optimism. Although not everyone sees life in the same way, you can always train your mind to generate or maintain optimism.
Your brain is an organ that you must train. Just as you exercise to maintain a healthy heart or lungs, your brain requires certain changes to exploit its full potential. However, you tend to pay more attention to or retain more negative information.
Nevertheless, this isn’t all bad. Because by taking into account and facing your failures, you acquire the skills to find better solutions in the future. On the other hand, if these ideas take up all of your attention, you revert to pessimism and negative ideas.
Consciously increase your levels of optimism
You have a tendency to unconsciously focus on negative aspects. Therefore, it’s important that you work to change this. The following three tips will help you change your perspective.
1. Change your negative thoughts
Your mind takes in negative memories and makes them bigger and more significant than they really are. Therefore, every time you have a negative thought, you should counter it with a positive one. Furthermore, to downplay your negative thoughts, you must analyze and view them more objectively.
The next step is to reduce them by comparing them to related or similar memories that are more pleasant. In this way, you radically change them and select new thoughts. This requires a learning process that’ll take some time to practice. However, with patience, you’ll achieve the desired results.
2. Express gratitude
Negative events are compounded by your mind unless you consciously balance them. When you face a challenge, it’s advisable to take stock of what’s going well. By taking the time to do this, you allow yourself to register the positive aspects that you experience.
To help your brain store these positive events, you should take time each week to analyze what you should be grateful for. The next step is to let your loved ones know that you love them and that you’re grateful to them.
3. Repeat positive affirmations
One key element for increasing your levels of optimism that you get with the previous two steps are positive affirmations. In fact, these messages that you repeat to yourself most regularly are the ones that you believe in and that determine your vision of life. They must be repeated with true conviction and be a constant in your daily life.
You can start with one or two affirmations that represent the values you want to live by and the goals you want to achieve. For example, tell yourself “Every day I’m improving” or “I’m living my best moment”. The repetition of phrases similar to these will allow your mind to interpret negative events differently. Furthermore, it’ll make you stronger in the face of them and you’ll maintain your optimism.
