Abraham Lincoln once said, ”Most folks are about as happy as they want to be.” Was he implying that, when it comes to our happiness, we actually have a choice? Apparently, yes. Research abounds on the impact of positive and negative thinking on ourselves and others, and the fact that we have the potential to transform ourselves by changing our habits of mind.
For years, it was thought that the brain was fixed and immutable—that we were stuck with what we were born with in terms of our hardware and its abilities. Then came research to show we were wrong, including Sharon Begley’s book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, which offered ground-breaking documentation to support the idea that we can even change our brains by changing our thoughts. The results are staggering. These breakthroughs in our understanding show it is possible to “reset our happiness meter, regain the use of limbs disabled by stroke, train the mind to break cycles of depression and OCD, and reverse age-related changes in the brain.”
So where do we start? What needs to be changed about the way we think, anyway? Let’s look first at the number and nature of our thoughts. We humans, it seems, have anywhere from 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. But according to some research, as many as 98 percent of them are exactly the same as we had the day before. Talk about creatures of habit! Even more significant, 80 percent of our thoughts are negative. This is important because of what we call the mind/body connection, psychoneuroimmunology in medical terms. You know what this is from your own experience. If you’re tired physically, it’s hard to think clearly. On the other hand, if you’ve been using your mind doing mental work all day, you’re likely to feel the effects physically, too.
Negative thoughts are particularly draining. Thoughts containing words like “never,” “should,” and “can’t,” complaints, whining or thoughts that diminish our own or another’s sense of self-worth deplete the body by producing corresponding chemicals that weaken the physiology. No wonder we’re exhausted at the end of the day!
The good news is, if you can recognize a negative or limiting thought, you can consciously choose to change it. Instead of saying, “I can’t meet this deadline,” try “I don’t know how I’m going to meet this deadline, but I know I can if I give it enough thought.” The chemicals produced by the body as a response to this kind of thought are more likely to support you in fulfilling your goal.
