While it’s hard to muster positivity, positive thinking has power over our long-term emotions and outlook. According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers found that how a person’s brain evaluates fleeting, negative stimuli can influence their long-term psychological well-being. The study found that the longer you accept negative experiences, the unhappier you become. In short, how well you think you’re doing in life depends on whether you’re the type of person who lets a dropped cup of coffee ruin your day or someone who won’t give it another thought after cleaning the mess up. Indeed, it’s necessary to cultivate positive thinking in our daily life. How we react to our life situation and act about the things we’re responsible for are often tied to positivity — which can help us grow into better people. So, here are three must-read self-improvement books that can help you develop positive thinking habits:
The Happiness Advantage
Common wisdom from culture and society teaches us that happiness is achievable through hard work, significantly when we attain professional and personal accomplishments. Once we achieve our desired weight, receive a promotion, or marry an attractive person; we’re all set to be happy. Shawn Achor’s book called The Happiness Advantage begs to disagree. Achor digs into positive psychology research and tells us that we have things backward: happiness is the secret ingredient to success.
According to Achor, our brains are bombarded with too much information, so we can’t make much sense of everything. To keep us safe, the brain scans our environment for danger and threats first — leading us to dwell on the negative side of things and leaving no room for gratitude or positivity. The Happiness Advantage teaches us how to retrain our brains to focus on happiness first rather than waiting for the “right” conditions. When we’re happy, open-minded, and optimistic, we become more creative, productive, and energetic to take life on and not worry about things we cannot control.
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life
Often, people think in a defeatist, adverse way, and we feel helpless whenever we confront a problem. In his book called Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life, author Gary John Bishop says that this negative self-talk holds people back from achieving wealth, success, happiness, and purpose. Because we set our obstacles with negative thinking, we must figure out ways to overpower these thoughts and achieve real change from within. While there are no instant fixes to getting out of your head, Bishop’s book challenges how we think about ourselves and other people. Unfu*k Yourself will show how the language we use to describe our circumstances can dramatically affect how we confront daily situations and encourage us toward a positive, confident mindset.
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
Psychologist Martin Seligman believes that we can choose what we think about and how we think about it with some training. In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman shares insights from his research on learned helplessness. In a series of experiments, dogs can be conditioned to remain passive — even if they could escape their situation. However, a third of people could not be made to feel helpless; Seligman found that the difference was whether they were optimistic or not. Throughout Learned Optimism, Seligman walks you through how to unlearn self-defeating thoughts and embrace the habit of optimism. As discussed in our post, Does Going to a Yoga Class Make You a Yogi? Uncomfortable experiences have a lot to teach us about ourselves. Even in bad things, there is constantly something for us to win. The key is to look on the bright side and claim happiness for ourselves.
