Is your glass half empty or half full? Do you while away minutes, hours and days lamenting your sorrows or do you flip the pancake of life onto it's less burnt side and cover it in sugar?
Being able to see the glass half full is important to those who are recovering from injury or illness. It's important for your quality of life in general but also because thinking positively helps you rehabilitate more effectively.
I've talked about this before in my post *written in the stars* . The way we interpret our experiences can have a huge impact on our feelings, our relationships with others and what path we chose to take next.
I can hear you groaning at me from your sofa. It's easy to say and not so easy to put into practise, you point out. I know that not everyone can naturally exclude positive rays in the face of dark, dismal events. I know that sometimes you want to fall down the rabbit-hole and run away with the cheshire cat (who is, incidentally, always grinning.) Well, recently I read about a psychologist, Yves-Alexandre Thalmann who believes in adult fairy-tales.
He believes that we should exchange negative thoughts for nicer, more friendly explanations, more likely to result in a happy ending. For example, you might be stuck in traffic. When you get to the office you're in a bad mood. When your colleague is short with you, you get really irritated. It's a bad day all round.
The nicer version might see you sitting in traffic, thinking how nice it is to get some time to listen to your own thoughts or perhaps your favourite radio station. When you get to the office, you've been bopping away to Bon Jovi so you're feeling in a darn good mood. When your colleague hasn't much to say you ask them if they're ok, perhaps they slept badly or had a falling out with their partner. Your day's course has been changed because you rewrote the story as it happened.
Why don't we simply kick the negative thoughts to the kerb for the foxes to snuffle though and think positively about the situation we are in? It's not easy, so we assume that some characters have it and some don't. This isn't the case. People who see the glass as half full are people who have a natural aptitude for looking on the bright side of life, but this doesn't mean they have an inbuilt function the rest of us are missing. Anyone can turn some thoughts around if they become conscious of them.
Although the fairy tale seems to whisper eternal happiness if you think of rainbows and butterflies, when the truly difficult times happen, they can't be rewritten. Sometimes terrible things take place and to try to see the positive in them would be condescending. Yet like any wicked witch casting enchantments, the time will eventually come when the spell will break and the clouds will clear once again. That horrible time, that bit of grit that wormed its way into your life just to make you squirm in horror and discomfort, will slowly become smoother and smoother, less and less of an intrusion. And one day, when you least expect it, it will offer you what's left, that pearl of wisdom.
_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg)
Being able to see the glass half full is important to those who are recovering from injury or illness. It's important for your quality of life in general but also because thinking positively helps you rehabilitate more effectively.
I've talked about this before in my post *written in the stars* . The way we interpret our experiences can have a huge impact on our feelings, our relationships with others and what path we chose to take next.
I can hear you groaning at me from your sofa. It's easy to say and not so easy to put into practise, you point out. I know that not everyone can naturally exclude positive rays in the face of dark, dismal events. I know that sometimes you want to fall down the rabbit-hole and run away with the cheshire cat (who is, incidentally, always grinning.) Well, recently I read about a psychologist, Yves-Alexandre Thalmann who believes in adult fairy-tales.
He believes that we should exchange negative thoughts for nicer, more friendly explanations, more likely to result in a happy ending. For example, you might be stuck in traffic. When you get to the office you're in a bad mood. When your colleague is short with you, you get really irritated. It's a bad day all round.The nicer version might see you sitting in traffic, thinking how nice it is to get some time to listen to your own thoughts or perhaps your favourite radio station. When you get to the office, you've been bopping away to Bon Jovi so you're feeling in a darn good mood. When your colleague hasn't much to say you ask them if they're ok, perhaps they slept badly or had a falling out with their partner. Your day's course has been changed because you rewrote the story as it happened.
Why don't we simply kick the negative thoughts to the kerb for the foxes to snuffle though and think positively about the situation we are in? It's not easy, so we assume that some characters have it and some don't. This isn't the case. People who see the glass as half full are people who have a natural aptitude for looking on the bright side of life, but this doesn't mean they have an inbuilt function the rest of us are missing. Anyone can turn some thoughts around if they become conscious of them.
Although the fairy tale seems to whisper eternal happiness if you think of rainbows and butterflies, when the truly difficult times happen, they can't be rewritten. Sometimes terrible things take place and to try to see the positive in them would be condescending. Yet like any wicked witch casting enchantments, the time will eventually come when the spell will break and the clouds will clear once again. That horrible time, that bit of grit that wormed its way into your life just to make you squirm in horror and discomfort, will slowly become smoother and smoother, less and less of an intrusion. And one day, when you least expect it, it will offer you what's left, that pearl of wisdom.
_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg)
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