You Are What You Eat

Get a daily dose of positivity

Your mind needs its daily helping of nutrition, just like your body. So what kind of nutrition does it need? It needs something positive for you to feel good about who you are and what you’re doing. You know what they say, “You are what you eat.”

Too often we sit down and read, or watch the news. Most of these stories focus on the negative. Crime, destruction and lack are common themes of most media outlets. To be more positive you need to shift your time away from these negativity snacks and towards a healthy diet of positivity and prosperity.

Choose what you consume

Filling your mind with positives will help you to reduce doubt and the feeling of helplessness. It is not something you can do just one time and expect lasting results, you’ve got to take your positivity daily. The world’s most successful people know this and they pay top dollar just to be in the presence of eternally optimistic people. You can do that too, inexpensively through video channels, podcasts, books and websites.

Whether you choose old masters like Zig Zigglar, Earl Nightingale and Wayne Dyer, or a newer breed of motivational experts like Nick Vujicic, Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle. You will find that starting your day with a spoonful of their positivity will help you to feel more confident throughout your day.

Positivity helps you to keep limiting beliefs at bay. Limiting beliefs like “I can’t do it”, “I deserve to be unhappy”. “This always happens, so why should I expect anything different?” create a deep pain inside you that traps in your situation. Here Tony Robbins talks about how limiting beliefs create negative cycles and how quickly you can change them using what he calls ‘The Dickens Effect’

Positive affirmations

Another way to infuse your day with positivity is through affirmations. Positive affirmations are self-talk that focuses on what you can do and what is positive in your life. Doing affirmations helps you to increase your optimism and feeling of achievement. These help to chase away limiting beliefs that hold you in patterns which restrict your confidence in yourself and what is possible in your life. Here are 10 examples of positive affirmations. Use these, seek out others specific to your situation or make up your own.

Day by day in little ways, I am getting stronger.
If my mind can perceive it, my will can achieve it.
I will be the best version of myself today.
The only thing that stands between me and success is me.
This day is blessed, it is up to me to use its precious gifts.
I am a winner.
By meeting life’s challenges today, I will be more prosperous.
I will defeat my demons today.
The challenges I face today will make me a better person tomorrow.
At the end of the day, I will find pride in something I accomplished today.

Spiritual reading

Spiritual readings are also beneficial. Create a habit to take in a few verses or pages a day. This will give you a broader perspective on the issues and conflicts you face throughout the day, opening your mind to a plethora of opportunities you may not have considered otherwise. Enjoy these readings by ingesting them slowly, word by word. Let the ideas and concepts that resonate with you stick in your long term memory so that you can recall their lessons in the future.

You'll start to notice a change

Once you have let positivity in, it is hard to close the door to it. Eventually, you will start moving the needle towards having a more positive outlook on life.To continue the momentum you need to share your newfound optimism. Spreading that good feeling will not only help others but yourself as well. You will find that your moods are contagious. So deliberately sharing positivity will help you to change your thought patterns and invite opportunity.

Increasing positive self talk reduces the space for negative ideas. Self talk, those ideas and internal dialogues you have, has a large impact on how you interact with your environment. Apart from listening to that conversation, actively change the way you frame those statements and questions to make them more positive ones. Here are some examples.

It’s too difficult. – How can I get this done?

I don’t think I’ll like that. – I don’t know if I’ll like it or not until I try.

It’s my fault. – Let’s explore why this did not work.

This always happens. – What can I do to make things better next time?

Summary

Finding ways to entertain positivity in your day will help you to have a more optimistic and happy disposition. It will support you in facing your challenges with a more creative approach. It will also make you more pleasant company, but it does take reinforcement to keep moving in the right direction. What you focus on expands, so choose to focus on the positive aspects of your situations and accept the challenges. They will move you forward.

According to the Mayo Clinic there are several benefits to being positive, those include: increased life span, lower rates of depression, better psychological and physical well-being, better cardiovascular health and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease and better coping skills during hardships and times of stress.

And that all starts with adding a dose of positivity to your life.