5 Ways Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Health

Our emotional world has a remarkable power to determine not only our mental health, but also how our physical well-being.

"Positive characteristics, such as optimism, vitality, meaning, and subjective life satisfaction are immensely important in their own right," psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman wrote in a recent Scientific American blog on optimism and heart health. "The related fields of positive psychology and health psychology focus on rigorous scientific investigations of how people adapt to life’s inevitable challenges, and how that is related (or even leads to) a better quality of life." 

And a growing body of research in psychology, medicine and public health is demonstrating the health benefit of positive emotions and their effect on physical health. When past studies have looked at the effect of emotions on physical health, it has tended to focus on the deleterious effect of negative emotions like anger and mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. 

Here are five positive emotions that have been shown to improve physical health and prevent disease. 

Optimism may protect the heart. 
While we usually define optimism as a sunny outlook towards the future, it also encompasses much more than that. The hopeful emotion acts as a coping mechanism that can help individuals to prevail through life's challenges by maintaining a conviction that things will work out in life.
A growing body of research has suggested that cultivating this quality can have a protective effect on the heart. According to a 2012 review of literature , a number of studies have shown that people with optimistic personalities are at a reduced risk of cardiovascular events. More recently, a fascinating study found that language used on Twitter could predict mortality from heart disease -- specifically, language related to optimism and resiliency ("overcome," "stronger," "faith") was associated with a lower risk of mortality within a particular community.
Optimism's benefits for physical health also extend beyond heart health. Here are a few other ways that a sunny disposition may improve health outcomes, including improved immune system function and increased longevity.

Experiencing awe reduces inflammatory markers associated with autoimmune disease.
Hiking through a beautiful natural landscape, listening to moving classical music, or participating in a religious or spiritual ritual are some of the experiences in life that make us feel most joyful and alive. Research has shown that experiences of art, religion and philosophy are the most common experiences that evoke a sense of awe -- that sense of wonder and connection to something larger than ourselves. 

According to new research from the University of California at Berkeley, awe is not only pleasurable but also enormously beneficial for one's physical and mental health. The Berkeley study found that those who had recently experienced awe had lower levels of cytokines, inflammatory markers that, in chronically high levels, have been implicated in the development of autoimmune diseases, as well as other health problems including including heart disease, Alzheimer's and depression. This suggests that awe promotes healthier levels of cytokines and may prevent disease.

"Rather than seeing a walk through the park or a trip to the museum as an indulgence, we hope people will view these kind of experiences as important ways to promote a healthy body in addition to a healthy mind," one of the study's authors, Dr. Jennifer Stellar, told the Huffington Post. "Folding these kinds of positive experiences into your daily routine may be more important for health than we previously realized. 

Compassion and care for others can improve vagus nerve function.
Compassion -- a loving concern for the well-being of others -- can make us feel positively towards both ourselves and other people, and may improve our physical health in at least one important way. 

Positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson has conducted research on the effects of lovingkindness meditation (LKM), a traditional Buddhist practice that involves meditating on love and extending compassion to oneself and a progressively large group of others. Frederickson found just six weeks of LKM training to have a positive impact on the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain stem to the heart, helping to regulate emotions as well as bodily systems including the cardiovascular and digestive systems. 

In boosting feelings of compassion, the meditation led to improvements in resting vagal tone (which can be used to assess the degree of activity in the automatic nervous system). In an interview with Emory University, Frederickson explained that the vagus nerve plays an important role in both a person's physical health and their feeling of love and connection to others. 

“In a way, our bodies are designed for love, because the more we love, the more healthy we become,” she said. 

Gratitude may also benefit heart health and immune system function.
Like optimism, an "attitude of gratitude" -- an appreciation and feeling of thankfulness for the blessings one has in life -- carries significant mental and physical health benefits. Gratefulness, like optimism, has been linked with improved immune health, and has also been shown to improve sleep quality. 

Gratitude may also improve health and well-being in a variety of ways insofar as it lowers stress levels -- stress being one of the main contributing factors to many chronic diseases. Research has shown that among older adults, feeling a sense of gratitude towards God acts as a buffer against the negative health effects of stress. 

Self-compassion improves health-related behaviors.
People who cultivate kindness towards themselves are also kinder to their bodies, potentially helping them to prevent or manage a range of negative physical and mental health outcomes. 

A 2013 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examined the relationship between self-compassion, reactions to illness, and a range of health-related behaviors, finding that self-compassionate people sought medical attention sooner for symptoms that they were experiencing than people who were lacking in self-compassion. Self-compassionate people also tended to be less depressed about health problems they were experiencing, and also to take a more proactive approach towards their own health. 

"It is fine to experience the pain of a negative event," cognitive scientist Dr. Art Markman wrote in Psychology Today. "But, after acknowledging the pain, it is also important to get up and try again -- to remember that failures and illnesses and bad relationships are not a verdict on your worth as a person, but just another hurdle to be overcome."


 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/optimism-heart-health_n_6744052.html

The Secret of Happiness No One Talks About -Deepak Chopra

The peculiar thing about happiness is that everyone wants it but no one agrees on how to get it. Our prosperous times have been hard on achieving happiness. Continual monitoring by the Gallup Organization, for example, looks for how many people in every country are thriving. It's no surprise that in nations where political turmoil exists, the number of people who are thriving is very low. But it's less obvious why in rich, peaceful societies like the U.S. the percentage is somewhere between a third and half the population.


If being rich and peaceful doesn't make us happy, why not? Agreement on this question is hard to find. In general, psychology hasn't studied happiness, being concerned instead with mental disorders from depression to psychosis. America has a record number of people taking antidepressants and tranquilizers, another index of how unhappy we are. By some estimates, half the population should be seeing a therapist.


In the new field of positive psychology, which has begun to study happiness, the findings are mixed. A large contingent of researchers seems to believe that lasting happiness is unrealistic to pursue. We are bad predictors of what will make us happy in the long run, it turns out, and after getting a better job, a nice wedding, a baby, a big house, and more money, people's initial burst of happiness fades, leaving the problem of lasting happiness as baffling as ever. Some psychologists suggest that happiness is accidental and incidental, happening briefly and at random.


This position, and the general gloom about lasting happiness, contradicts long-held spiritual traditions both East and West. Which hold that happiness is the object of human life, that existence is tailored to make us happy, and that we become unhappy because of our own error and lack of understanding. Here is where a secret comes in.


It seems natural to associate happiness with pleasure. Our brains are set up to register the sensations of pleasure and pain. We like the one and dislike the other. So there is a tendency to say that happiness consists of maximum pleasure and minimal pain. This position, once called hedonism, has become scientific in our day, thanks to brain scans that can pinpoint the pleasure-pain centers and the chemicals they release. With such evidence at hand, we have entered a new phase of hedonism, and indeed people spend a great deal of time, money, and effort, backed by the massive machinery of mass media, to gain a pleasurable life.


But science is only a thin disguise for the same old mistake, equating pleasure with happiness. The secret known to every spiritual tradition is that pleasure and happiness are not related. There are miserable people who can afford to fill every hour with pleasure. There are people afflicted with painful circumstances who manage to be happy despite their situation. The pleasure and pain centers of the brain don't control us. Look at the physical pain of a marathon runner crossing the finish line. It is secondary, even irrelevant, to his sense of accomplishment.

But accomplishment isn't the answer either. Happiness is actually rooted in something subtler: fulfillment. It's fulfillment that people seek when they pursue happiness, of what they should seek if they want happiness that lasts a lifetime. So where does fulfillment come from? Meaning and purpose. Where do meaning and purpose come from? That’s the real question you need to ask yourself.


Nothing is intrinsically meaningful as an experience. This is hard to realize and perhaps harder to accept. Pleasure can turn to pain, love to indifference or even hate (ask any divorce attorney), good health can turn to illness, and so on. Such is the human mind's intricacy that even the anticipation of bad events can create unhappiness. So can painful memories, guilt, anxiety, and other mental states destructive to happiness.


Having considered the problem for thousands of years, the world's wisdom traditions concluded that the only source of happiness, the actual secret, must exist in the mind itself. Even though the mind creates all the states of misery just described, only mind can rescue itself from its self-created illusions, false hopes, ill-considered choices, self-destructive habits, wrong beliefs, and other missteps. A journey must be undertaken to a place where mistakes have been corrected. The good news is that a person doesn't have to correct each and every mistake individually. To do that would require years, even decades, of concentrated effort.


Instead, the spiritual journey delivers happiness by taking you to a level of the self that is free of mistakes by its very nature. I've often labeled this the true self, but labels are irrelevant. The important thing is the process of transcendence, or going beyond the illusion. As long as you remain in the illusion, the best you can hope for is to upgrade it. To actually escape the causes of pain and suffering requires more than an upgrade. You must find the underlying reality that removes your allegiance to pain and suffering. To do so is to know the secret of happiness, and having found the secret, actually acting upon it. While everyone seems to be talking about happiness in terms of maximum pleasure, wisdom tells us to look where no one is talking, because that's how you take the first step toward reaching the goal.

Deepak Chopra
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141023233206-75054000-the-secret-of-happiness-no-one-talks-about