Change your thoughts and change your life

Norman Vincent Peale stated: “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” He further suggested that the nature of our thoughts determines the quality of our life, whether it is sad, or happy and contented.

Happy, optimistic, positive thoughts, emotions, and feelings generate an excitement in our system which makes the blood flow freely and heart beat joyously. These positive thoughts create a spring in our feet and spur us to action. As the age-old saying goes, the mind (thoughts) can move the mountains in our lives, but pessimistic, sad and gloomy thoughts, on the other hand, create passivity and stagnation and force us to stay bound to our beds.

Believing, therefore, that our actions are the practical manifestations of our thoughts, it is quite clear, that we must bring about a change in the way we think in order to create happiness and sense of fulfillment in our life. A good thing about our brain is that it willingly adopts any changes that we bring about in our thinking patterns.

Here is a list of 15 ways you can change your thoughts and give a positive direction to your life.

1. CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH BY CREATING POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS: Affirmations, both negative and positive, impact the neurological functioning of the brain. Positive affirmations are like mantras. They have a sacred and spiritual force about them. Creating positive affirmations should not be normative or weak. Thoughts, such as I ‘should’, ‘ought to’ or’ abstain from’ are normative. Affirmations should be forceful and determined, such as ‘I can’, ‘I will’, or ‘I am going to’. As mentioned above, our brain is always adapting to our thought patterns and directs our organs to act accordingly.

2. LEARN TO APPLY FULL STOP: At all costs, avoid mulling over the misfortunes and mistakes in our lives. It is not profitable to be thinking over and over about the persons who hurt us; or what we should have done differently to avoid certain outcomes. This is not to suggest we should not learn from our past mistakes or plan our future intelligently. The only thing is we should stop thinking over and over once we have learned from our past and decided about our future.

3. LET GO OF THE NEED TO BE MASOCHISTIC: Quite often we love to wallow in our misery. We enjoy creating self-punishing thoughts or being gloomy and pessimistic. Here is an example:

“I was born unlucky. Nothing good will ever happen to me.”

Such thoughts not only cause a harmful impact on the mind, but they adversely affect your physical health as well. The self-pity ends today…It is a new day of hope and new opportunities. Be the change you desire to see.

4. CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS BY COUNTING YOUR JOYS AND BLESSINGS: Most people take their joys and blessings for granted and start grumbling about what they do not have, or, when they are faced with problems and troubles. Just think of those who are less fortunate than you. Or, think of a situation that could have been worse than it is now. You are crying because have hurt your knee in an accident. What if the leg itself had broken? See the filled half of the glass for satisfaction and the empty half with a resolve to fill it.

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” ~ Melody Beattie

To be continued