Positive thinking, a pillar of good health

Positive thinking constitutes a pillar of good health, especially because it affects all types of health and that this field of positive thinking will certainly yield unimaginably great fruits that will contribute to good health. Positive thinking or positivity enables you to pass extremely difficult times successfully, equipping you with abilities to set aside time for deep reflection on your adversities instead of always pondering them. In this article, we will attempt to thoroughly define positivity. But we won’t demonstrate its huge role in our health; we will instead cover it in our next edition.

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Meaning of positive thinking and its related areas: emotions and feelings

As the name implies it, positive thinking involves keeping positive thoughts which also positively influence emotions and feelings. It signifies that when we nourish positive thoughts, we develop positive emotions and their corresponding feelings. Positive thinking entails optimism, so that an optimistic attitude also constitutes a synonym of positive thinking or simply positivity.

In other words, positive thinking signifies maintaining a positive outlook, even while we are facing intense hardships. But again, positive thinking doesn’t mean that we need to endeavor to ignore these hardships and their corresponding mental states which accompany them. As we will explain it more in one of our future editions, it instead means recognizing these mental states coming to our mind and then deciding how to respond to them. One of ways to respond could be to immediately take time to ruminate the causes and consequences of these negative mental states, in efforts to seek the solution. Another way could be to avoid thinking about them right now, and then determine the future time during which you will focus on them. We will come back to this technique too in the future edition.

As you can hardly find a field which doesn’t carry its opposite, positive thinking also bears its opposite which is negative thinking. In this respect, negativity includes pessimism.

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Take a little time reflect upon what you are thinking about now. Your current thought (s) is (are) governing how you are now feeling. Your current feelings have emotions which have caused them.

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Emotions are subdivided into two main categories: positive and negative emotions. Positive ones comprise pleasant mental states such as happiness with all its synonyms, satisfaction with its synonyms, quietude/serenity or inner peace with the synonyms, confidence/courage and the synonyms, love and its synonyms, hope with its synonyms, gratitude with its synonyms, interest and its synonyms, and amusement with the synonyms. Most of other positive emotions, if not all of them, are connected with those emotions mentioned.

Negative emotions consist of unpleasant mental states that constitute the opposite of positive emotions including those already mentioned, like anger with its synonyms, depression with its synonyms, bitterness with its synonyms, jealousy with the synonyms, disappointment with its synonyms, and fear with its synonyms.

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The psychologist, Paul Ekman, suggested in 1972 that there exist?six basic emotions?which are universal throughout human cultures. The emotions are fear, disgust, anger, surprise, joy, and sadness. In 1999, he enlarged his list to include a number of other basic emotions involving embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, and amusement.

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Ekman (February 15, 1934) is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.

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In the 1980s, Robert Plutchik,? brought another emotion classification system called the?wheel of emotions. ?This model illustrated how different emotions can be combined, much like the way an artist mixes primary colors to produce other colors. Plutchik (October 21, 1927- April 29, 2006) who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and was also a psychologist, was a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida.

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“Feeling” is a word which derives from the verb ‘feel’. The latter one carries a number of definitions two of which we have selected are (1) touch physically by means of a body organ like a hand or tongue/experience something physical, and (2) internally perceive/experience something emotional.

?Britannica furnishes more details, on the word, with which we concur. It says “Feeling, in psychology, the?perception?of events within the body, closely related to?emotion. The term?‘feeling’?is a verbal noun?denoting?the action of the verb?‘to feel’?which derives etymologically from the Middle English verb?‘felen’,?‘to perceive by touch, by palpation.’ It soon came to mean, more generally, to perceive through those senses that are not referred to any special organ.”

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Feeling includes internal sensations which you will experience out of a given event which has first created an emotion behind the feeling. When you are delighted, there is (are) a mood(s) or sensation(s) which you will experience inside you. This (these) sensation(s) constitute(s) your feeling (s) emanating from the delight. In other words, while experiencing a feeling, you will be feeling a certain sensation within you. While you’re suffering from a disease or sustaining pain, there are internal sensations which you perceive. These sensations are feelings.

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The National Institutes of Health [NIH] being the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research states “Emotions arise from activations of specialized neuronal populations in several parts of the cerebral cortex. Feelings are conscious, emotional experiences of these activations that contribute to neuronal networks mediating thoughts, language, and behavior, thus enhancing the ability to predict, learn, and reappraise stimuli and situations in the environment based on previous experiences.”

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Very Well Mind is a website said to contain trusted information about mental health. It says “Emotions are reactions that human beings experience in response to events or situations. The type of emotion a person experiences is determined by the?circumstance that triggers the emotion. For instance, a person experiences joy when they receive good news and fear when they are threatened. An emotion is normally quite short-lived, but intense.”

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It adds that emotions are also likely to bear a definite and identifiable cause and that feelings are influenced by our perception of the situation, “which is why the same emotion can trigger different feelings among people experiencing it.”

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“Take the example of disagreeing with your friend. You might both walk away from the conversation having experienced the emotion of anger. Your anger might feel like frustration because you feel that your friend never listens to you when you speak. Your friend's anger, on the other hand, might feel like jealousy because they feel you know much more about the topic than they do.”

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Our thoughts are powerful beyond imagination. Unfortunately, most people don’t know it, and you might not even be aware of it. It is your prevalent thoughts that dictate how you generally feel and act. When you think positively, you will seldom feel negative sensations, as you will scarcely feel positive ones, if you think negatively.

Thoughts, emotions and feelings in fact affect one another. Oxford Academic is?Oxford University Press's (OUP) academic research platform, providing access to over 50,000 books and 500 journals. In the abstract of its document published in February 2015 and titled “How Thoughts Influence Mood and Feelings—or Is It the Other Way Around?”, it states “The cognitive therapies rely heavily on the assumption that thoughts determine feelings. This assumption is explored by focusing on how both the content of our thoughts and the cognitive processes (such as inference and appraisal) linking experiences to affect influence the nature of our emotions in any given situation.

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Words trigger emotion through both the denotative meaning of concepts conveying information threatening to an individual’s security or personal goals and the connotative meaning whereby all words have a certain emotional (attitudinal) valence. But as a result of experiences stored in memory, emotions can also serve to evoke thoughts. Emotions are also themselves identified by means of words, and children acquire emotion competence as they gain the ability to identify, label, and describe their feelings.”

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The University of Minnesota states “Emotions can be triggered by something external (from seeing a friend suffer or watching a movie) or something internal (an upsetting memory). What we think impacts what we feel. Thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on one another. Thoughts can trigger emotions (worrying about an upcoming job interview may cause fear) and also serve as an appraisal of that emotion.”

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When you think about a pleasant thing like a person who has accomplished you a generous act or has performed a formidable thing, there certainly arise feelings. These feelings are positive ones. The feelings can immediately ignite joy, satisfaction, and even pride. Here, the word ‘pride’ doesn’t mean ‘conceit, haughtiness or arrogance. It instead signifies feeling satisfied because you or a person close to you has achieved a certain accomplishment which delights you.

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Positive thinking entails focusing on positive aspects of things and substituting negative thoughts with a more optimistic outlook. It involves positive self-talk, positive imagery, and building self-esteem, among others. Maintaining positive thoughts will enable you to assuredly develop positive emotions and feelings. Even while you’re struggling with hardships like chronic disease or financial difficulties, you should perform every endeavor for you to continue thinking positively. We reassure you that if you do so, it will alleviate your situation and it will even contribute for you to get out of the hardship. There are people who have been miraculously healed by just applying positivity. As already said, we will provide clarifications in our next articles.

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By Jean Baptiste Ndabananiye- Media, Empowerment& MBA.

Management and Journalism Professional/Consultant with a demonstrated history/experience of involvement in women’s empowerment, project/program management, peace-building/conflict transformation, training, public awareness campaigns, governance and budget transparency, advocacy, documentation, the broadcast media industry, and community justice, among others.

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He is skilled, among others, in English and French, Project& Program Management, Media Production, Peace-building, Leadership, Advocacy, and Kinyarwanda- English-French Translation, and Mind-Body Connection and its Link with Health through extensive reading and investigation about these two fields as well as Health Reporting and Communication. Strong management, media and communication professional with a Bachelor's and Master's focused in Journalism& Communication and MBA-Project Management respectively from University of Rwanda and Mount Kenya University.