The Importance of Staying Positive

“What is down in the well comes up in the bucket. Fill yourself with positive things.” – Tony Dungy.

Wise words from a man who has faced his own share of personal hardships, from the inherent stress involved with coaching professional football teams to the suicide of his eldest son. Life is not a straight path forward - it takes unexpected detours and turns, and obstacles both trivial and monumental make the journey treacherous at times. Positive thinking allows you to keep putting one foot in front of the other on life’s path, has numerous health benefits, and can even redefine your perception of yourself.

Think for a moment about the depressing, hurtful, and demoralizing things that have happened in your life. Whether you have been alive for twenty years or sixty, every single person has their own cache of heartbreaks, personal failures, and losses. Now consider this: there is still more to come. Our parents and mentors age and eventually pass away, friendships and relationships falter, and careers and investments collapse. It is all part of that winding, treacherous path, but now think about all of the poverty, disease, violence, and other intrinsic injustices of humanity.

Faced not only with the misfortunes of our individual lives but those in the world around us as well, it is so easy to become despondent and negatively focused. That is why positive thinking is so important firstly as an endurance strategy - to help us process and accept the events of our lives and the world productively, so that we can continue down life’s path without being drawn off into the abyss of negativity.

Choosing to think positively allows us to visualize a way forward through our present situations. When you focus on the negative, nothing seems worth working toward because all you can visualize are negative outcomes - so why try? Why put in that job application when you have not heard back from the last three? Why ask the cute girl for her number when your last girlfriend cheated? When you think positively to manage the negative things that have happened, you are able to continue moving forward and visualize the next step. You open yourself to more opportunities simply by looking for them.

The year after Tony Dungy’s son committed suicide, the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl. He also continued to serve in his community off the field, and wrote a best-selling book. If he had let his grief consume him and filled his well with bitter thoughts and regrets, his bucket would have come up much differently. He may not have been an effective leader to his team, he may not have continued to involve himself in his community, and he certainly would not have written a book titled Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, and Priorities of a Winning Life.

As inspirational as Tony Dungy’s life and career are, he is just one person. Can positive thinking really have that impact on your life or mine? From a medical standpoint, the evidence is overwhelming. Positive thinking has been demonstrated to help various psychological diseases including PTSD and Bipolar Disorder, but almost more interesting is the evidence correlating positive thinking to physical health. The benefits of positive thinking have been documented in everything from stroke recovery to cancer, and more and more medical institutions such as Johns Hopkins are advocating for positive lifestyles.

One study published in 2004 showed that positive thinkers had an easier time coping with both medical and interpersonal issues. Another study published in 2006 found that participants who think positively about themselves and their actions have higher self-efficacy, and those participants were more likely to attend exercise classes than their negatively focused peers. Yet another study published in 2012 found that negative, stressful thinking prolonged the release of cortisol in the body and was related to longer lasting inflammatory symptoms. Even studies dating back to 1974 have found a correlation between positive thinking and reduced cardiovascular disease.

Positive Health is a concept developed by Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association. Positive Health theorizes that just as mental health is not simply the absence of mental illness, physical health should encompass more than just the absence of disease. Positive Health seeks to incorporate and quantify positive thinking as a measure of overall health, and is just one example of how the scientific community is trying to embrace the effect that positivity has on your whole body. The capacity of the brain to influence organ and bodily functions is still not fully understood, but there is more than enough evidence to suggest that positive thinking can have profound health and recovery benefits.

From a social standpoint, the empirical evidence is not as compelling but there are still plenty of theories as to how positive thinking could impact our lives. In 1902, Charles Horton Cooley developed the ‘looking-glass self’, a theory that states that we form our identities based on how we believe others perceive us. Cooley theorized that when we receive feedback from those around us, we internalize it and define our identity from it. If you incorporate positive thinking into your life, inevitably those around you will begin to see you as a positive person and reflect that back to you. According to Cooley, this will reinforce your perception of yourself as a positive individual and you will be even more likely to pursue positive thinking in the future.

Another theory backed by a 2016 study from the University of Kansas is that we are attracted to like-minded individuals, and seek to surround ourselves with them. People who are positive thinkers are more likely to associate with other positive thinkers, and this provides you with an invaluable support system. That winding path of life gets extremely perilous at times, and even the most positive individual can experience self-doubt, depression, and lose sight of the path in front of them. If you have other positive thinkers around you, you can rely on them to help you regain perspective and focus.

From the ability to manage the adversity of life to tangible physical health benefits, the importance of positive thinking in our lives cannot be overstated. To conclude, I leave you with Tony Dungy: “Life is challenging. I wish I could tell you that you’ll always be on top of the mountain, but the reality is that there are days when nothing will go right, when not only will you not be on top, you may not even be able to figure out which way is up. Do yourself a favor, and don’t make it any harder than it has to be. In those moments, be careful how you speak to yourself; be careful how you think of yourself; be careful how you conduct yourself; be careful how you develop yourself.”