A Positive Mindset Is Powerful Plus 11 Ways to Develop one.
It's not what happens to you - it's how you think about it that matters
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A Positive Mindset Is Powerful
This week an ad popped up on one of my social media sites, for an influencer urging people to take his masterclass in mindset. The influencer was a young man, he used as an exemplar to draw people in to sign up for his masterclass, the mindset of seventy-year-old women. He claimed he could teach anyone how to have such a mindset, saying that these women are positive and resilient, qualities he could teach.
As this young man has picked up, many women of my generation have this optimistic mindset and we are refusing to age the way the previous generation did. As a seventy-plus-year old woman, I’ve written articles on optimism, resilience and positivity which are all factors in my outlook on life. For those struggling with negativity, I’m setting out below an article I wrote in 2023 and recently updated, that is relevant today, about having a positive mindset and then, how you can cultivate one.
You Can Choose Your Mindset
There’s a growing movement of people who think a positive mindset is the most important asset you can have when you’re older; in fact, at any age, I’m one of them. If you have a negative mindset, you will see only the difficulties and negativity in life. Having a positive mindset means you see everything through an optimistic and hopeful prism.
If you are not naturally a positive person, you can choose to be so. It’s not something I’ve always been; I’ve had to work at it. I just decided in my sixties that I was going to be positive about ageing, otherwise, life could be miserable the older I got.
You may think that being positive means living with your head in the clouds, ignoring the realities of life and ageing. It doesn’t mean that at all. It’s about facing up to the changes and difficulties in your life with fortitude, dealing with them full-on, but not allowing them to create misery for yourself. Nothing lasts forever, you must assimilate the changes and move on. Your health will benefit if you do so optimistically rather than always assuming the worst.
Science backs that up. A study of 14,000 adults in the US over 50 found that people with the highest satisfaction about ageing had a 43% lower risk of dying over a 4-year period than those who were least satisfied. The study also found those who were most satisfied had lower risks of developing the illnesses and conditions associated with age.*
Having a positive mindset at any age will help you cope with life’s challenges. Midlife leads to physical and mental changes that have to be navigated. The reduction of hormones leads to menopause for women and andropause for men. A midlife crisis may disrupt a previously well-run life as you reassess where you are in the scheme of things.
Have you achieved all you had hoped to by this stage of life? Finding that you haven’t can lead to a sense of despair as you realise you might have lived half of your life and time is running out. I wrote about my mid-life crisis in my very first post on Substack:
Publishing My First Book at 75
Ageing is something we are all doing, all of the time. We start to age the moment we’re born. It’s not until middle age that we start to really think about what is happening to us. After forty the prospect of “growing old” starts to become a reality because we realise that we are most likely half way through our time. This can trigger a midlife crisis a…
By the time you are in your sixties, further changes will have left their mark. Positivity through all of this will help avoid despair and depression. There have been scientific research studies into mindset, finding those with a positive mindset live longer than those who see things negatively. If you’re an optimist, you’re more likely to look after your health.
A negative thinker will just think, “What’s the point?” and not bother with eating nutritious foods, but indulge their craving for overly processed fare. They fail to get adequate exercise and keep up with their health checks, so not only shortening their lives, but living the life they have in misery as disease or illness sets in.
Buddhists believe our emotions, which are affected by our thoughts, and vice versa, rule us. Learning to control how we think will help us find inner peace; a change of consciousness will bring about equanimity. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha reached enlightenment through a profound inner study of the mind and its workings during meditation under the Bodhi tree. He famously concluded,
‘Our life is shaped by our mind: we become what we think’.
In an interview, Ellen Langer, an American professor of psychology who has had a long career studying mindfulness (not the Buddhist interpretation), said, The way you choose to see the world has an impact on your health. Also: A cognitive therapist will help you reframe the way you see a bad event to a positive frame of mind, but if you see the event positively in the first place, you don’t need to reframe.
When people get older, they change the yardstick of what they can do. They tell themselves, now that I’m old, I won’t be able to do as much as I could do when I was younger, and so they give up trying. Their loss of muscle mass and motivation makes their prediction a reality. They cannot do what they used to be able to do.
However, scientists are telling us we don’t have to go into decline if we take control of our ageing process. By thinking positively and doing all the things we now know will help keep us fit and active well into older age, eat healthy food, exercise regularly, get good sleep and manage stress, there’s no reason we should give up previously enjoyed activities. (Unless, of course, we have an underlying condition that prevents us).
Victor Frankl (1905-1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist whose theory about life was developed before the second world war. He believed that each of us has to find meaning in our own unique life. During the war, he spent time in a concentration camp. Nearly all his family died in various of these camps. When I first heard about him, I thought him to be an inspiration. He has written several books, including Mans Search for Meaning, from which this quote is taken. :
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (pp. 74-75; Frankl, 1946/1992)
This illustrates the power of the mind and how we can capture that control if we so choose. The negative social narrative of what it is to be old the way previous generations were, can be changed to a more hopeful version if people choose to develop a positive mindset and show a different, more optimistic way of ageing, living life to the full.
It would help us as individuals because we’d live longer, healthier, happier and more fulfilled lives. It would improve society. A fitter, more independent older generation places less strain on an overburdened health service, and younger people wouldn’t dread growing older when they see more positive role models to aspire to. It would also counter ageism, which has to be a good outcome.
Quote Sources:
Zoe Podcast. 31st October 2023. How your mind can slow down the body’s aging, with Ellen Langer.
The British Psychological Society. 17th April 2020. Our life is shaped by our mind. Lee Clarke
11 Ways to Cultivate a Positive Mindset
Thinking positively helps build resilience, which was found to be an important factor in longevity studies. How do we cultivate and maintain a positive mindset? Here are a few suggestions:
Don’t think about yourself negatively. Banish negative thoughts instantly.
Try to spend time with positive thinking people.
Take time to see the good things you have in your life.
Learn not to care what others think or say about you. It’s not your business.
Develop self-growth. Learn how to become the best version of yourself.
Practice living in the moment. The past and future don’t exist. Only Now.
When things go wrong don’t judge, just accept and work out the best remedy.
Make the phrase Think Positive into a mantra.
Look after your physical and mental health; you’re worth it.
Avoid negative thinking people as much as you can
Meditate for 5 minutes: breathe in ‘positivity’, breathe out ‘negativity’.
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Fabulous article. Well written. Well researched. Insightful and so practical. Ty for this.
Thanks for reminding us about what we CAN do to make our lives better. My attitude about getting through anything or doing a job or dealing with difficult people is how can I do this (instead of questioning whether I’ll be able to do it at all). I’ve had the great fortune of having feisty, funny and creative elders in my life who’re inspirations to me.