Power of Thought
The power of thought is amazing. Practically everything that you experience in life was first a thought. It all begins in the mind. Refrigerators, planes, space shuttles, elevators, kombucha drinks, laptops, and even something simple like paper all started initially as thoughts, dreams or visions in people from various parts of the world who had the tenacity to make their dreams come true and their thoughts a reality. The great thing about this is that you can do the same thing too and often you do even when you don’t realize it. You can make your dreams come true. Both good and bad.
That’s the power of thought.
However, thought not only creates delicious daiquiri drinks for you to sip poolside, cars for you to carpool to work, or planes for you to fly to take your vacation and everything else you see in the world we live today. Thoughts help guide your attitude and emotional state and your thoughts have a major role in directing your physical health and overall well-being. If you are not careful your thoughts can get the best of you. Your thoughts are powerful and you must take care of them. Otherwise your thoughts if not taken care of will be all over the place making a mess like menacing little gremlins.
While this article by no means provides a comprehensive detailing of the power of your thoughts my hope is that it gives you some insight to your strength, potential and provides answers to questions you have on the journey of life. Prentice Mulford is attributed to popularizing the idea in his book of the same phrase that thoughts are things. They are and they can have serious impact.
Impact on Your Body
When it comes to physical health society for the most part places heavy emphasis on your heart, your lungs and your diet. However, your brain and most importantly what’s inside of it, your mind plays a vital role in your well-being mentally and physically.
Your endocrine system, which regulates body activities and glands such as your pituitary, thyroid and hypothalamus and your involuntary nervous system which regulates things like your heart rate and digestive system both are triggered by and react to stress. Your thoughts either positive or negative have direct effect on blood circulation, oxygen circulation, your heart rate and much more. Negative thoughts and strong impressions of stress can cause adverse reactions while positive thoughts can relax the body, calm your breathing and ease your heart rate.
In addition to having a direct impact to things like your heart rate and breathing your thoughts affect you immune system too. Depression, stress and anger can compromise your immune system and allow you to become susceptible to illness. This is also true in case of severe mourning due to a tragic loss or any other event with strong emotional force. In contrast, when a person maintains an overall positive outlook on life events or personal circumstances and does not become severely crippled mentally their immune system remains strong and they keep good health in comparison.
Impact on Your Mind
Despite how many times you talk or text your best friend, the person who you talk to the most is yourself. Sometimes we have good things to say but studies have shown that often we fill the internal conversations we have with ourselves with negativity. Often we do this unnecessarily. Frequently we set unattainable goals or have ideals in place only to fall short and to pounce on our own selves in an instant. Harsh words and ideas that would never escape from our lips can run amuck unchecked in our minds bringing emotional trauma, anxiety, stress and overall bad feelings.
These bad feelings brought on by negative thinking have a severe impact on your performance in life. By performance I do not simply mean your work performance. I mean the doing, the living and being of your day to day existence that extends beyond a paycheck and into the mundane things of life. Things like surfing the web, sorting through the mail or flipping through TV channels late at night while eating your favorite ice cream. Unfortunately the ice cream no longer tastes as good, and not because of a new recipe. The recipe of your mind changed and with it so does everything else in life.
However, there is hope because you can in time change negative thoughts to positive thoughts if you know how to do so. With all things practice makes perfect and in time just as you know how to push your buttons to get yourself down in a rut, you can learn to pick yourself up and be blissfully happy.
Steps to Control Your Thoughts
One of the first things to do is to observe, learn and honestly acknowledge how you communicate with yourself. Once you take note and become aware of your thought habits and thinking patterns you will be able to better address them and cut them off before they grow and take root permanently in your mind. When you feel a self-defeating negative thought coming on and you begin to hear that pestering voice begin to speak unkind to you, tell it to stop. Stop it before it begins if you can. Internally yell it out if you need to and force yourself to change the conversation mentally.
Now aside from making sure that you develop a good sense of humor through laughter, maintaining routine physical exercise and having highly nutritious eating habits there are a few key mental steps that you must take to control your thoughts. These steps will have a gigantic impact in helping you steer your thoughts in the direction that you want. Not only will these steps help change your old negative thinking patterns and take you from negative thoughts to positive thoughts. They will help you maintain new thoughts to keep you thinking positively and enable you to better enjoy your life.
Think of Success and Think Positive
No matter what is going on right now, what happened yesterday or last week tell yourself something positive. Speak your victory into yourself. Each day is another opportunity for you overcome obstacles in your path, solve problems and be a success. You love yourself, and tell yourself all the wonderful things that will and can happen. You can pass the test. You will get the job. You will find a place to stay. You will repair the relationship. Ignore the negative thoughts and think of success.
Positive thoughts help you feel good, help motivate you and help reduce stress.
Compliment Yourself
Complement yourself daily because you are wonderful. You are not a loser or a failure, you are not stupid, you are not dumb, undereducated or any of the wonderful terms you may call yourself. Even the very colorful terms that I will not mention here. Stop being mean to yourself. You are awesome. You may need to improve in several areas but that is fine. Room for improvement is room for growth and growth is good except for bad credit card debt, garden weeds and mold in the refrigerator. Even if you just lost a race, you are not a loser you are a winner in training.
Take Life One Day at a Time
You can only live one day at a time. Focus most of your thoughts on today’s agenda. Ask yourself, “What can I do today to achieve my goals?” Do not fret over things in which you have no control. Stressful and negative thoughts tend to creep around the edges of history (yesterday) and mystery (tomorrow). One is gone and the other is not promised. Use what I like to call the Albert Einstein Theory of Living, which is to learn from yesterday, to live for today, and to hope for tomorrow.
