Читать книгу A Life Full of Glitter - Anna O'Brien - Страница 9

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

I used to think of positivity as so lame. I can’t think of a better way to describe it—“so lame” suits the way my teenage brain processed it all at the time. Do you remember those men in fresh pressed suits on big stages with tiny headband microphones, selling us the power of positivity on late night infomercials? They’d wave their hands around until they were drenched in sweat from preaching the power of optimism. They looked so mature and chiseled (albeit caked in perspiration)—totally un-relatable to a teenage girl who felt misunderstood. How could a real-life aged-Ken-doll fathom the struggles of a chubby, geeky girl with acne, bullies, and a crush on every boy? I was convinced it was all a sham. I’d shut off the TV, envious that Ken got to live his perfect life, complete with a custom-made Italian suit and fancy mini-microphone, while I still had to make a diorama explaining the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird out of toothpicks and crushed dreams.

I should note that when I was thirteen, I was angry and deeply sad. My home life was challenging, I definitely didn’t have the media-driven “cool teenager” body, and I was awkward. I was really awkward. Eventually that sadness spilled out into my life through anger. I cussed, I fought and I got in too much trouble. I was so unruly that I was sent to a special school for wayward children. Perhaps this sounds like the plot of a well-orchestrated children’s novel. It’s not. People simply began to lose faith in me and as a result, I began to lose faith in myself.

On the outside, I became the neighborhood child that parents didn’t want their kids to play with. On the inside, I was a mixed bag of negative emotions. I felt lonely, angry at the world, envious of those with simpler lives, and confused as to who I was. I was desperate to turn my life around, but given the circumstances it all seemed overwhelming and hopeless.

I remember very clearly sitting in this classroom of unruly children pondering my future. To the left a teacher was literally tackling a student who’d begun a violent outburst. To the right, another student was slowly punching the front of their forehead over and over; sometimes the person we bully most is ourselves. In this terrible moment, I realized something had to change. Maybe it was some sort of divine intervention or, maybe just maybe, I was sick and tired of the person I was. I couldn’t change the circumstances around me, so I would have to be the one to change. If I didn’t, my life would be a complete waste. It was then that my story began to evolve.

Maybe that’s how you feel right now. Maybe that’s why you’re reading this book, because you too realize something in your life has to change, but you’re not sure what or how to do it. It’s a process. It would take me a few years to get my footing and to fully integrate positivity into my life. I want to start this book off with honesty. The change you want does not happen overnight, even though I would love for that to be the case. Miracles are not worked in an hour of light reading. It didn’t happen that way for me, and I am pretty confident that it doesn’t happen that way for most people. You have to put in the work to change.

By the time I got to college, my life was unrecognizable from who I previously was. I entered university on an exception—my grades had been too poor during my rebellious days to go to most schools. However, my new found positivity was a force to be reckoned with. I found an exceptions committee, prepared my case, and found my way into a good school anyway. I went from a C-minus student in high school to an A student in college. Once an awkward loner, I became a social butterfly.

I attribute the majority of my growth in those years to positivity. I was committed to the belief that things would get better, I would get better, and as a result the world would get better. That belief in a better life molded me into the lady boss I am today. I fought to recognize and appreciate many more things in my daily life. I became more present in my reality, and as result I saw and believed I was worthy of so many more opportunities. I developed a deep sense of gratitude, so when bad things happened I was able to acknowledge them as a temporary part of the cycle.

When I tell you that optimism can change your life, I tell you as a person who personally experienced it. I am who I am because I chose to live a more positive life. It may seem impossible at first, but if you invest the time, you will see a whole new world of possibilities open up to you. It will give you the ability to recognize and take advantage of all the amazing things in your life you may be overlooking, help you find the power to overcome hardship more quickly, and it will become your rock-solid foundation for a happier life.

I can see you sitting there, reading my story and making me out to be an exception to the rule. I got lucky. I was an anomaly. I can’t blame you; old me would have done the exact same thing. Maybe I come across like a modern version of that dapper man and his tiny headset. However, I want to stress to you that my growth is not unique. I’ve rounded up a bevy of research that helps to support that my story can become your story as well. You too can choose to live and receive all the benefits of living life on the sunny side. In fact, it is the scientifically expected outcome of a life lived with zeal. Studies have shown that people that incorporate positivity into their lifestyle better cope with stress, have stronger immune systems, better overall health, and are more resilient when crises do happen. Optimists are also statistically more likely to notice opportunities in their social and work lives.

Positive Thinkers Cope Better with Stress

Have you ever been at work or school and gotten a message that you needed to meet with a boss or teacher and then worried the entire day about what the meeting could be about? Maybe you failed. Maybe you’ve done some terrible awful thing you somehow managed to forget. Maybe a terrible rumor about you has spread like wildfire and you’re going to have defend yourself. So you spend the next several hours until the meeting running over every possible negative reason for the meeting. Your palms are sweaty. Your mind is cloudy. You are engulfed in your own anxiety. Then the big sit-down finally rolls around and you find out you just forgot to submit some paperwork or some other mundane thing. The stress you felt all day was unnecessary, and as a result a huge amount of your precious emotional energy was wasted. Most of our day-to-day stress—just like in this example—is self-created.

According to research, stress itself doesn’t exist in an event, but rather in our perception of an event. In simple terms, it means that no matter what happens in life, you have the ability to be in the emotional driver’s seat. Pessimists often approach commonplace life situations with the expectation that they’ve done something wrong. In the previous example, many of us frequently assume that the only reason a boss or teacher might ever speak to us is because we’ve done something wrong. This type of thinking not only creates additional stress, but closes us off from opportunities and friendships, and it can affect our ability to manage stress in the long run. Optimists, on the other hand, do not adopt a sentiment regarding a given situation until all the facts needed to fairly assess it are available. It’s not that the optimist is assuming that something amazing is going to happen at the meeting. They’re not sitting anxiously, counting down the hours until their office pow-wow so they can get some super fun prize. They’re simply not assuming anything at all.

If the event is negative, the positive individual benefits from the fact they haven’t been mulling over every possibility and creating a million-and-one negative scenarios in their head. This makes them more prepared to manage the real results of the situation, less likely to overreact as result of pent-up emotion, and generally more able to resolve any issues that they are faced with. In this way, positive people are problem-solvers and rely on coping skills versus venting or fixating on the issue at hand.

I should share that this has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn. In the early stages of my career, when a problem would arise, I would have to tell no less than every single person in my office, the doorman, and several strangers I wrestled into conversation on the street before I could put the issue to rest. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. I’d find myself like a car caught in quicksand—spinning my wheels with all this excess emotion, but getting nowhere. Venting our issues, while seemingly harmless and perhaps even possibly therapeutic, can cause us to fixate on the negative aspects of an incident rather than invest our energy in resolving its challenges.

I remember talking with my boss about an issue I was, once again, ruminating on. He stopped me dead in my tracks, looked me square in the eye, and said: “Is talking about this actually making anything better for you?” It wasn’t. I apologized, and he grinned. He stood up from his desk, spread his arms wide, leaned back, and started to sing. “Let it go… Let it go-oh-oh-oh.” To this day, whenever I find myself obsessing over something that does not deserve my emotional energy, I stand up, spread my arms wide, and sing that song. It never fails to turn my mood around. It took a Disney princess for me to break one of my most resilient pessimistic habits.

Let this story help you to remember that you have a choice as to where you invest your energy. Perhaps when things go awry, you too can be like Elsa, the famous ice princess from Frozen—let it go and remember that most of the stress in your day-to-day life can be avoided or even reduced by keeping an upbeat attitude. Research has found that optimists not only create less stressful situations, but also experience less overall stress than non-optimists. As I grow into my own optimism, I find I tend to let go of negative events more quickly. This keeps stressful situations from piling up and becoming overwhelming.

I’ve also been able to build better support systems, because I’ve stopped assuming the worst about every situation I enter. When stressful situations arise, I’m able to reach out to my friends and rely on them to help me through. When you start to see the good in things, you have better relationships and less stress, and you can let go of some of your unnecessary baggage. I think we can all agree that the world could use a few more people who leave their baggage at home.

Positive Thinking is Good for Your Health

I remember one morning in my childhood when I desperately wanted to avoid going to school. I had a brand new Sega Genesis video game system, and school was an obstacle to my short-term happiness. I wanted to be sick so badly that every day I would dramatically cough whenever my parents were around. I would complain about how my throat hurt and then dramatically fall backward onto the floral cushions of our living-room sofa. I was in agony, or so I wanted my parents to think.

Eventually my mother was annoyed by my theatrics and informed me that we would be going to the doctor for a professional opinion. She had called my bluff. I was done for. She was going to find out I was lying and then punish me. Nothing is scarier than a mother who proves you wrong. I remember I was so fearful of impending mom-wrath that I rummaged through our freezer to find a popsicle, downed it, and literally scraped the back of my throat with the popsicle stick in a desperate attempt to create the appearance of an illness that I 100 percent did not have.

As we sat in the doctor’s waiting room, I remember the tension being unbearable. It was one thing to be at the doctor’s (the worst place ever!), but being caught doing the worst thing ever (lying!) at the worst place ever?! I was stress-ball-wrapped in worry, not to mention being dusted with a whole lot of regret. By the time we actually were called in to be seen, I was sweating and unpredictably tired. The doctor swabbed my throat and I awaited my inevitable disastrous fate.

To my surprise, the test came back positive. I had strep. I fervently believe when I look back on that scenario that I worried myself into that sickness. I told a lie, got in too deep, and the sheer fear of being found out broke down my immune system. Now that I’ve learned a bit about how negative thinking can destroy the effectiveness of our immune system, I realize that this isn’t that far-fetched an idea to believe.

Some of the top medical research centers in the US are actively researching how negativity affects our overall health. The Mayo Clinic has found that negative thinking can increase your need for medical care, raise your chances of heart disease, and even lower your ability to fight serious illnesses. To illustrate just how powerfully positive thinking and behaviors can alter your health, here are three studies on how positivity affects health that I find mind-blowing:

As part of a study at the University of Missouri, students did positive journaling once a day, three times a week. At the end of three months, they reported better moods and had fewer health center visits than those who did not journal.

Researchers at John Hopkins University spent twenty-five years keeping track of a group of people with family histories of heart disease. Over that period, participants who lived a positive lifestyle were one-third less likely to have a heart attack or other cardiovascular event.

A study of post-operative breast cancer patients conducted by Indiana University found that those who lived a positive lifestyle saw less of a dip in their levels of natural killer cells, which is a type of white blood cell that can kill tumor cells or cells infected with a virus. These cells are vital to the long-term healing process, meaning that a positive lifestyle left post-op patients with a more robust immune system.

These are just a small sample of the hundreds of articles that I came across that link a cheerful disposition with better long-term health. I learned that optimists experience less pain, have improved heart function, live longer, and have stronger immune systems. I should note that being a positive person doesn’t mean you should obsess over living a perfect healthy lifestyle. In fact, simply choosing to live your life on the sunny side of the street will naturally make you tend toward making healthier life choices.

One major change in my day-to-day life, versus back when I was an angry “Negative Nancy,” is that I smile more. Usually, when my eyes catch a stranger on the street, I flash them a grin. I started doing this because I decided that I wanted to treat the world the way I hoped to eventually be treated. Back then, not many people looked at me and smiled; I was determined to change that.

Now, I didn’t adopt this habit for the purpose of improving my overall physical health, but rather as an attempt for me to try build a better connection with the people around me and, as a result, with the world. However, I have learned that even small positive gestures, like my goofy grin, can make significant impacts on your overall health. A study by the University of Kansas found that smiling—even if it’s a fake, totally forced smile—reduces your heart rate and blood pressure during stressful situations. This is a great example of how resolving to act in a more positive fashion can turn out to be a physically healthy choice, without your even knowing it!

Simple Ways to Boost Your Health with Positivity

1.Keep a daily journal of positive things happening in your life.

2.Take a short walk around your neighborhood and smile at the people you pass.

3.Every time you find yourself in front of a mirror, say something kind to yourself.

4.Call someone you love and tell them how important they are to you.

Positivity Makes You More Resilient

When I was a teenager, a book series called Chicken Soup for the Soul became overwhelming popular. In this series, people could read heartfelt stories of people who overcame struggles in inspiring and tear-jerking ways. You could read about a three-legged, blind dog that saved children from a burning building, a homeless man who became a billionaire by selling tube-tops out of the trunk of his rundown car, or a barren woman who adopted children who then went on to become professional foosball players. Psych! I made those stories up, but these are the kind of mind-blowing, heroic stories you can find in a whole plethora of inspirational books which follow the Chicken Soup model.

The individuals in these beloved stories experienced the same traumas we experience every day, but managed to bounce back even better than before. Many of us crumble when we experience a negative event. Not in these books. We love reading stories of shocking heroism: “Most dogs would run away from the blazing fire! But not you, Rocky the pup with no eyes and all the heart—you just kept going! Wow. Just, wow.” We loved these stories, because they were inspirational; somehow, these people (and animals) beat the odds. We saw their strength at the forefront of their resilience, but if we had only looked a little closer we might have seen something else. Our paperback “chicken soup heroes” were, more often than not, positive people.

Many believe resilience is a personality trait: you’re either born with it or you’re not. However, I believe that it’s actually a dynamic learning process, and the research backs me up. The more optimistic you became about yourself and your life, the more you are able to not sweat the small stuff and the better you’ll make it through the big, scary, heart-pounding stuff. You must learn to logically analyze situations in moments of stress and place whatever crazy incident you’re experiencing in the context of the bigger picture. This will help keep you focused and allows you to understand the actual importance of the whole episode versus the catastrophic story that unmitigated shock automatically tells you is going on.

Plus, even in life’s crummiest, saddest, and most devastating moments, there is usually a silver lining. Drawing on skills such as problem-solving and self-assessment, you have the opportunity to learn and grow from each negative event instead of focusing on how utterly unbearable the situation is making your life in the short-term. When you do this, each stumbling block becomes an opportunity to grow and evolve.

Improved resilience isn’t just as simple as looking on the bright side when bad things happen. Let’s say I am having a really amazing day—one of the best days of the year. I’ll tell my best friends and maybe my parents. Perhaps, I’ll mention it in conversation with others if it comes up, but it’s just a short mention, a blip on the timeline of the day. Conversely, if I have a bad day…I tell everybody. I explain every single gory detail of that rotten day, ad nauseam. I’ll tell you every single detail: what people were wearing, the looks on their faces, what the cafeteria was serving that day…I may even provide sound effects to help orchestrate the terror of it all. I can talk about it for hours. Heck, years down the line I might even revive that story to tell again in all its awful glory. Want to hear about a bad day I had in November, 2002? I am more than willing to tell you, but I’ll spare you.

Barbara Fredrickson, a professor of psychology and modern leader in the study of positivity, found that previous positive activities prepare us to better manage future stressful situations effectively. Negative events take up more of our brain space. Fredrickson found you need at least three positive experiences to counteract one negative incident. You need these positive experiences to serve as a buffer; otherwise, negative emotions will keep you from problem-solving and long-term thinking. If we haven’t built a solid bank of positive events and actions, we are more likely to be overcome by negative ones.

I didn’t realize just how much building my positivity bank account had improved my ability to cope until my apartment flooded earlier this year. I came home to find my entire living room drenched, my filming equipment ruined, and some priceless heirlooms demolished. In this moment of chaos, I found myself surprisingly calm. I realized that getting stressed-out or angry over it wasn’t going to fix it. It also wasn’t going to give me any of the answers I needed. So even though I definitely felt stressed-out (stress is somewhat inevitable in these types of situations), I kept that sensation to a minimum. I instead found myself investing all that extra nervous energy into finding solutions. When I spoke to my building manager, I remember his response. “Usually people get very angry and that just makes resolving the situation even more challenging.” Pause. Not only does useless negativity wear us out, it keeps us from moving forward.

How to Build a Positivity Bank Account

Keep track of positive things that happen in your life in a journal or spreadsheet. When stressful things happen you’ll have a premade list of positive things in your life to draw on to help you through.

Positive Thinking Helps You Recognize Opportunities

In one of my favorite episodes of the popular documentary series The Experiments, Darren Brown does a series of experiments to better understand what makes people lucky. In one of these tests of kismet, Brown creates several “lucky” situations for a supposedly unlucky individual, Wayne. First, Brown sends a fake scratch-off prize card to Wayne in the mail. If Wayne would just give that lucky card a scratchety-scratch, he’d find that he’s won a brand spankin’ new TV. What does Wayne do? He throws the scratch card in the garbage. Next a fake interviewer is placed on the street offering a cash prize to anyone who could answer “today’s special question.” Brown designed this question specifically for Wayne. It would have been a piece of delicious, free money-cake for him to answer. However, Wayne pushes off the interviewer claiming he’s “too busy” and quickly moves on. In the final test, fifty dollars is left smack dab in the middle of Wayne’s path home from work. Wayne manages to walk home but completely ignore the money—even though it was directly in his line of sight.

I found this whole series of events fascinating, and a harsh reminder of one truth: “You create your own destiny.” Through our actions and choices, we start to perpetuate the reality we think we deserve. In Wayne’s case, he assumed unpredictable situations can only have a negative result. Therefore he avoided anything that wouldn’t be a guaranteed success. Wayne no longer looked for opportunities, because he had convinced himself they didn’t exist. When you take on negative attitudes, you restrict your access to life’s advantages on a day-to-day basis by refusing to acknowledge your potential skills, engage with the community, and/or take risks. Simply put, you can’t expect to fly, if you’re afraid to leave the ground.

In another experiment, the impact of positive emotions on the brain were tested. Subjects were divided into five groups and shown different clips of people that were each chosen to trigger a specific emotion. After viewing the clips, they were asked to imagine themselves in a similar situation and write down how they would react. Those who were exposed to clips showing positive emotions wrote down significantly higher number of actions they could take. Now this area of research is fairly new, but it goes to show that if we recognize and experience more happy things each day, we’ll also recognize and acknowledge additional opportunities. You’ll reach a little bit harder for the stars, because they simply won’t feel so far away. I look at it this way: your ability to achieve a goal is directly related to how much you believe that goal is attainable.

When I was a teenage rebel, I focused on the negative. I didn’t believe I was able or capable of becoming anything more than what I was. My own fear held me back from recognizing not only opportunities, but also my own talents. I believed I was worthless, and as a result that’s what I became. It’s amazing how in a few short years I was able to completely turn my life around, create lasting meaningful relationships, and find myself on a journey to the best me I could be. It wasn’t because I was destined to be a special story to be told in a Chicken Soup for the Soul storybook, it was because I worked hard to create a more positive lifestyle. In the following chapters, we’ll address how you too can build positive habits to help you live your happiest, healthiest, and most fruitful life.