Since we were born, our parents and friends have taught us how to be happy either by helping us solve our problems or by finding silver linings in our tough situations. People who are close to us love to see us happy and most times want to see us be the best we can possibly be. We know that when we see our loved ones in tough situations they stop taking care of themselves, or shut down for a while, something is usually sacrificed in a hard time. It is human nature to want the people you see all the time to be successful and on top of the world, and happiness plays a huge factor in that. When we are happy our best work gets done, we have and/or maintain the best relationships, and we are more motivated to take care of ourselves because we are so overwhelmed at the greatness of life. We are all obsessed with being happy and that’s not a coincidence, we want to be happy because we know we are the best to ourselves and those around us when we are content and at peach within.

For generations on end humanity has told us if we think happy we will be happy, and that good things come to positive people. Does the way we think/our mindset affect how successful we are in our health, work and relationships? The more positive we think correlates with the amount of success we will have in our relationships, careers and even in our physical aspects. The more positive we think the more ways our brain finds to be resilient from bad situations and expands to give us more ideas and thoughts making everyday life more interesting.

Barbara Fredrickson, professor in the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina shares examples of actual studies conducted on positivity. She explains that people who tend to think more upbeat generally have a bigger pool of actions and internal ideas. In a problem solving experiment with a carefully selected positive and neutral/negative thinking group Fredrickson found “Studies that show that positive affect broadens the scope of thinking can be taken as indirect evidence that positive affect will also broaden the scope of action” therefore the positive thinkers were quicker to come up with the actions to solve the problem (Fredrickson). This explains why when we think more optimistically we get more done and become more successful because we think quicker and have more options on how to react to certain situations and learn how to more efficiently control our outcomes.

This is not an argument of nature vs. nurture, sometimes we think the way we were raised correlates to how we think later in life. That the events that happen to us are how we are going to be shaped into having our permanent thought process, but it really all depends on the way we respond to things that happen to us. Julianne Chiaet, successful newspaper reporter, writes how science proves it’s achievable to train our brains to be able to create honest long-lasting cheerfulness. By doing so, we can become more motivated, creative and productive, as well as better at handling unplanned life events and rebounding from failure or tragedy. She quotes psychologist Shawn Anchor “When the brain is negative, it splits resources between the problem you have in front of you and the negative emotions you’re feeling” which leaves us exhausted and most time with a prolonged unsolved situation (Chiaet). What she really stresses is that the brain is just another muscle we have to strengthen and we can everyday by being more resilient to obstacles throughout the day. Every time we problem solve our brain expands and we become more positive people. She says “negative emotions stifle creativity and restrict a person’s ability to come up with different options” which explains why when we dwell on a problem, it seems to get worse and we are blocked (literally) from a solution because our brain is actually shutting down in some parts (Chiaet). When we think positively with our problems we are quicker to come up with a resolution.

The way we think correlates with how we act, so if we are more optimistic we are more likely to be a joy to be around. Keith Harrell, motivational speaker recognized by the Wall Street Journal explains how we are in control of our own thoughts and our actions are direct results. He is a motivational speaker so he is for positive thinking having a positive impact. He even lists ways to think more positive, so he would disagree that your attitude has nothing to do with our success. He explains it like this “Your mind is a computer that can be programmed. You can choose whether the software installed is productive or unproductive. Your inner dialogue is the software that programs your attitude, which determines how you present yourself to the world around you” and whatever we chose to put into our brains is what’s reflected back into the earth (Harrell).

Maria Konnikova poses the age old assumption mentioned in my introduction of if we think happy we are happy. She pulls examples of tests done to test this theory. The author has many articles in the New Yorker which is an impressive and credible newspaper. She describes a study consisting of depressed and not depressed college students and how they react to how much control they think they have in various situations. In a specific case the students had to push a button and see if a light would come on, it was designed so that each group would have about half the kids would experience success. When they finished the experiment and interviewed the kids they found that “the depressed individuals were much better at identifying those instances when they had little control over the outcomes, while the non-depressed students tended to overestimate their degree of influence over the light” the positive kids expected success which the negative kids didn’t (Konnikova). 

James Clear, popular journalist writes about emotion studies performed by a source mentioned above, Barbara Fredrickson. He begins by telling us that now scientists are actually able to execute reports on how positive thinking affects us in the long term. Fredrickson, in a study, found the broaden and build theory which explains how when people experience positive emotions, their minds broaden and they open up to new possibilities and ideas. He summarizes the experiment by saying “Negative emotions prevent your brain from seeing the other options and choices that surround you” (Clear). Clear goes on to tell us different ways we can expand our brains therefore gain more skills that make positive thinking a constant and easily achieved experience.

On the flip side of things, Olivia Goldhill, psychology writer, pushes onto her audience that being positive thinking has turned happiness into an unattainable burden. She believes we need to act like we think and respond to negative events and be able to be sad and be down for a couple of days if needed. She goes onto justify her claim by stating “Guilt and shame are essential to a sense of morality. Anger is a legitimate response to injustice. Sadness helps us process tragedy” and it shows she is a realist (Goldhill). While this is a good argument, it mirrors how too many of us are living. If we stayed positive, from all of the sources in this paper we know we are more resilient. What if through every hard time, we thrived and looked at it as an opportunity to strengthen our minds whether than break down and mope. While the above qualities are essential, I believe they are to be achieved in other ways. We gain morality by being raised up right, and clinging to our faith or whatever makes you second guess your decisions. We learn how to process tragedy by talking things out with people who care for us and always looking for hope, even when the tunnel looks dark, because that’s what positive people can do! 

