Chapter 1: Understanding Positivity

While we hear the term ‘positivity’ and “being positive” all the time, the truth is that few people understand what it really means. Most people think of positivity as looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses. Only the most naive or innocent people are positive, it is indicated. This is reinforced as a result of not having had any negative experiences, limiting their exposure to negativity.

However, you must understand that being optimistic does not imply that a person’s life is without challenges. In some ways, it’s assumed that upbeat people haven’t dealt with life’s harder realities. This is not the case. Being optimistic means that instead of seeing the glass as half-empty, positive people prefer to see it as half-full.

Everyone has their own series of challenges. What distinguishes us is whether we believe we are strong enough to overcome them or whether we are afraid they will overcome us.

The more we learn about optimism, the more we discover that it is found among those who have faced some of life’s most difficult challenges. It is not the absence of hardship and challenges that makes a person positive. Rather, it’s their willingness to sail through the hardships in the hope of a better tomorrow that makes a person truly positive.

We often hear people relaying stories of cancer patients and how they lived way more than their doctors predicted due to their positive outlook. According to research conducted by the British Psychologists Society Conference on women who had cancer, it was observed that positive thinking had resulted in the generation of white blood cells which could help in building a more robust immune system to defend the body from cancerous cells.

Some of the women were taught relaxation techniques and given lovely visuals to help them calm their minds and think positively while others were not. In the end, the researchers discovered that women who received these extra approaches for a positive mindset had a stronger immune system than those who did not.

Having cancer and going through treatment is one of life’s most painful, challenging, and unpleasant situations. It completely changes one’s life. Despite this, these patients maintained a positive attitude throughout their surgery and rehabilitation. How? It doesn’t seem to fit with the assumption that positive people lack practical life experience. Life was as difficult as it could be for these cancer patients. Despite this, they discovered the power of positivity deep inside themselves. The positive attitude not only helped them overcome their fears and anxieties about the future, but it also helped them battle the sickness far more effectively than their doctors had anticipated.

Such anecdotes demonstrate that being optimistic in life has nothing to do with what happens to you, but rather with how you cope with it. It is a factor that is unaffected by external events and directs your life based on the strength of your thoughts. It lies deep within your mind and heart.

Everyone has problems in their lives. Everyone experiences ups and downs in their lives. What distinguishes each of us is how we respond to these ups and downs. It all depends on how we describe and define what’s going on in our lives. Let us look at different people’s explanation styles to see how we might incorporate positive thinking into the explanatory framework.

Explanatory styles

Explanatory styles can be defined as the manner in which we describe what is going on in our life. Whenever a situation arises in your life, you have to explain to yourself what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. The ‘why’ part is the crux of finding your explanation style.

Your explanation style is heavily influenced by your view of a life event and how you see it affecting you. How you feel in any scenario is determined by your explanatory style. It is the reason why we see some people worrying in the most basic of situations like meeting a new person or going for an interview yet some might feel self-assured in the same situation.

This is because, in their minds, they have described the current or upcoming situation in such a way that their respective reactions have been triggered. A panicked individual has justified their tension by explaining to themselves that the situation merits it. The calm and assured person, on the other hand, has convinced themselves that they can handle the issue and that there is no need to panic.

Because of the difference in how they make themselves understand the circumstance, they have a completely contrasting reaction. How we process each incident in our lives is heavily influenced by our explanation style.

Understanding and mastering our explanatory style is the key to living a more positive life. In the broader scheme of things, our explanation style often decides whether we feel stressed out in a scenario or not.

According to psychologists, there are two types of explanatory styles. The first of them is the positive explanatory style. The person of this type is positive and gives themselves credit for all the excellent things in their lives. They are prone to blaming external reasons for their problems. Their perspective of any situation in their life is that it is transient and not permanent. They trust that things will eventually change.

We have a pessimistic explanatory style on the other end of the spectrum. In this manner, the person blames himself for any misfortunes in their life but refuses to recognize themselves for any achievements. They view unfavorable events as having a long-term impact on their lives, causing stress.

To figure out your explanation style, look at how you think when you have a difficult experience and how you view the problem. Knowing your explanatory style might help you develop better habits and methods to live a happier life. This would result in less stress and more contentment in your life, which would help you live a calmer, more serene life.

Now that you’ve learned about the sorts of explanatory styles, let’s look at how to figure out which one you have and what signals to look for.

Determining your explanatory style

Now that we understand how positivity can help us live a stress-free life and how our explanatory style influences how we approach any event in our lives, it’s crucial to understand how to recognize our explanatory style.

The characteristics that determine your explanatory style are listed below, and they will assist you in determining your style.

The permanence of a situation - Do you consider an event, good or bad, in your life to be permanent? If you get a promotion, for example:

1. Do you anticipate being satisfied with it indefinitely, or,

2. Do you understand that your needs and wants will change throughout time and that it’s fine to want different things from life at different times?

Similarly, if you are fired from your job:

1. Do you feel defeated and insecure about yourself? Do you believe that this is the end of the line and that you have nothing further to offer the world? Or,

2. Do you believe that this is only transitory and that your situation will change with time?

If you replied yes to the first questions in both cases, you have a pessimistic explanatory style. You hold yourself responsible for any misfortune in your life. You have an optimistic explaining style if you answered yes to the second question in both cases. You believe that neither happiness nor sadness is permanent, and you view every occurrence in your life in the same light.

Reason of a situation - The next step in determining your explanatory style is to figure out what justification you give yourself when confronted with a problem or disagreement. Do you believe you are the source of the dispute or do you believe that a problem others have with you is their problem, not yours?

You have a pessimistic explanatory style if you are more inclined to the first type of emotion in the example above. Regardless of the circumstance, you place blame on yourself. If you think the second kind of emotion is more inclined with your style, then you have an optimistic explanatory style. You take things less personally, and as a result, you are less likely to get hurt in any situation.

It’s also crucial to realize that, while it’s wonderful to be stress-free about a scenario and not blame yourself for it, there’s a need for some introspection if the problem is consistently blamed on you. However, reflection must be conducted in a practical and objective manner. This will constantly assist you in bettering yourself from who you are without you getting discouraged by life’s setbacks.

Encompassment - Understanding how you see an event affecting your life is the third step in determining your explanatory style. You probably have a pessimistic explanatory style if you believe that one terrible incident will set off a chain of misfortunes in your life. On the other hand, you have an optimistic explanatory style if you feel that a bad incident is only the result of a bad day and that you will recover tomorrow.

You may discover your explanatory style using the techniques above, which will go a long way toward helping you learn more about yourself and how you deal with life’s situations.

If you have a pessimistic explanatory style, any event in your life, especially if it appears to be unpleasant, will trigger negative thoughts in you, increasing your tension and making you feel hopeless about your future.

Now, having negative thoughts every now and then is fine, even natural, but having negative thoughts on a regular basis can have serious consequences in your life. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how negative thoughts and mindsets can affect you.

Positivity does not imply that you abandon your pragmatism or adopt false worldviews. That isn’t healthy, and it’s certainly not what a positive outlook entails. Despite having realistic views of the world, people with a positive outlook are enthusiastic about the future. It’s about being grateful for what we have rather than despising our lives because of what we want but can’t have. It’s about believing in yourself, even when the setting and circumstances aren’t perfect.

In the face of adversity, having a positive outlook might help you resist giving up. They give you hope that you will be able to conquer the challenges that you face.

A negative perspective leads you to assume that your challenges/obstacles are far larger than you and that you will never be able to overcome them. A positive perspective makes you recognize that you are much stronger than the issues surrounding you. They rely on optimism, faith, and hope to persuade you that, despite the challenges, you can overcome whatever is in your way.

Fear of failure and rejection prevents you from reaching your greatest potential, whereas a positive mindset motivates you to go for the stars. You will have complete faith in your abilities and capabilities, believing that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The former will limit your exposure, experience, growth, and development, whereas the latter will propel you to new levels of happiness and contentment.

You’ll feel at ease with who you are, where you are, and who you’re with. Because having a positive mindset will help you believe that you are exactly where you belong and that there is no better place for you right now than where you are. It will encourage you to believe that better things are on the road for you and that your time will come.

Now that we’ve established what positive is and how your explanation style can assist you in identifying your mentality, let’s look at how it can affect your life.