The benefits of positive thinking

All anyone really wants is to be happy. Now that’s easily one of the hardest things to achieve. Everyone is chasing it, trying everything they possibly can to be happy. One way to get some happiness is by being resilient with everyday troubles or even past traumas. Resilience is needed for happiness, because it helps with mental health, will help with pressures from school, and changes the outlook of life positively.

Resilience is such a complex thinking that will change everyone’s life either in a positive light or negative light. Everyone’s mental health is important and one thing that always impacts one’s mental health is whether they are resilient and can bounce back from trauma. Gong states, “Psychological resilience is a personal character and a positive quality, which to a large extent determines how to face challenges and deal with stress in different environment and conditions (6).” This definition of resilience tells me that depending on how everyone bounces back from trauma, will determine the inner happiness we are working towards.

My definition of happiness is that it is a state of mind. When we are sad, it's because of negative thoughts surrounding our brain, muddying up what we are trying to achieve. With the power of positive thinking, even in the mist of trauma, we can change the course of destruction, which results in building up resilience that will benefit for the rest of everyone’s life. If we could change the way we think, would we? Answer that and we will learn what kind of thinking we do. Positive thinking is when we think good, and beautiful things that change our outlook on life.

Mental Health

Mental health is so important for overall health that we need to be doing everything we can to be at peace. Being at peace is crucial for happiness. Stress will cause a long list of medical issues, as well as anger, pain, and sadness from being either overwhelmed or being in traumatic episode. Being resilient will help with the issues stress brings us, by letting us deal with it in a healthy way. Konaszewski states, “Research concerning this approach focuses on how to reduce or eliminate negative mental health conditions such as maladaption, depression, and suicidal thoughts (4).” What he means about this approach is leaning on people and having a support system.Negative thoughts will not help our mental health, not when we want to be happy.

How can we change our mental health with positive thinking? Well to be able to do that, we need to build up our resilience. Cross states, “Resilience has been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as overall well-being, and can lower depression levels” Building resilience is honestly a lifelong journey that we all take. Cross also states, “Our research (which is not yet published) shows that resilience is not purely an individual characteristic but is also heavily enabled by strong relationships and networks.” This tells me that no matter what, it is always better to have people surrounding us in our time of need. Cross states, “people in our support systems can provide empathy or simply help us laugh and bolster our resilience by shifting perspective and reminding us we are not alone in the fight.” Resilience is not only about positive thinking, though that is a very important part of that, but it is also about the people we allow around us. Resilience is about how we handle the situation we encounter in life that is hard, and how we come back from it as a hole.

School Pressures

In school, everyone is experiencing high levels of stress, pressure to succeed. Not everyone is strong enough to handle the stress, so they drop out or burnout. Gong states, “Under the long-term learning pressure, students show withdrawal behavior or unwillingness to invest time and energy in learning, resulting in emotional, attitude, physical and other aspects of exhaustion, and gradually lose their learning goals and ideals (5).” Losing interest in learning especially when in school, is a sign of burnout. If we as a hole learned resilience when we are younger, we could avoid burnout in students.

Positive thinking and emotional support from friends and family have shown a decrease in dropout rates in the last 5 years (now that isn’t officially true, but there are reports of this). For example, Gong states, “When some scholars studied the factors affecting college student's burnout, they have found that social support can predict the burnout of college students (4).” Having someone to lean on durning times of struggle is really important for mental health of students. Just being able to talk about what’s going on in our life’s is really important, even if it’s a person who gets paid to listen to our problems.

Building Up Resilience

There is more than just one type of resilience that we see out in the world. These types are physical resilience, mental resilience, emotional resilience, and social resilience. Fleming states, “the term cultural resilience is frequently used to denote the role that culture may play as a resource for resilience in the individual.” Even though there are different types of resilience, they all coincide with each other. Fleming states, “Rutter identified three such processes: building a positive self-image, reducing the effect of the risk factors, and breaking a negative cycle so as to open up new opportunities for the individual.” Now that is a few ways to build up our resilience which will improve our happiness in ways we can only image.

Building resilience is sometimes easy for some people, and for others it is the hardest thing ever. The Mayo Clinic staff states, “if you lack resilience, we might dwell on problems, feel victimized, become overwhelmed, or turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as substance abuse, eating disorders or risky behaviors.” Like we’ve been told by very important people resilience is important for happiness and overall health, as well as growing relationships better. Some tips to help us grow our resilience comes from Mayo Clinic staff, “Get connected, make every day meaningful, learn from experience, remain hopeful, take care of yourself, and be proactive.” What they mean by being proactive is by not ignoring any problems that do come up.

Suggestions and Conclusion

Resilience is very essential for happiness, even if we don’t have it yet we want to get there sometime. Building it up can take a long time but we have a long life to live, its not about the time it takes but the journey along the way. In life we get mad if someone cuts us off in traffic, but don’t we do that to someone in some part of our life, what is the difference when we do it. Negative and positive thoughts are almost the same thing but have different outcomes. For example, if we think something bad is going to happen, generally we will make it happen by the sheer force behind the thought. That is why people who are very resilient tell us to have a positive outlook on life, or say speak it into existence.

I would say that I’m pretty resilience in certain aspects of my life, but reading everything I have for this paper, I’ve learned that I still have a long journey ahead to reach it. Positive thinking and the support of family and friends, will help us along the way. Writing out our thoughts in a journal or diary would be a great way to get started on getting everything in our heads out. Mental health is very important, and there are many different ailments associated with it, but with the right mindset and proper methods to help prevent it from happening we can avoid burnout and stress from keeping us down.

Works Cited

Agostini, L. “A Management Perspective On Resilience In Healthcare.” Bmc health services research, Vol, 23 issue 1 p.1-16, June, 2023.

Cross, Rob. Dillion, Karen. Greenberg, Danna. “The Secret to Building Resilience”, harvard business review. January, 2021.

Fleming, John. “Resilience, an Evolving Concept: A Review of Literature Relevant to Aboriginal Research”. Pmc, Oct, 2010.

Gong, Zhen. “College Students Learning Stress Psychological Resilience and Learning Burnout.” Bmc Psychiatry, vol, 23 issue 1 p1-7, June, 2023.

Konaszewski, Karol. “ Resilience and Mental Health Among Juveniles: Role of Strategies for Coping with Stress.” Health and quality of life outcomes, vol, 19 issue 1 p1-12, April, 2021.

Mayo Clinic Staff. “Resilience: Build Skills to Endure Hardship.” Mayo Clinic, July, 2022.

Petersen, Naomi Jeffery. “Teaching Resilience and Mental Health Across the Curriculum.” Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, vol, 25 issue 1 p329-332, 2023.