Positive Emotion: A Step Toward Longer Life

One of my major motivations for writing this blog was to address the issue of health and wellbeing in holistic way. Up until now, the focus of my posts has been on the physical component of health. However, one should never forget that we, as sentient beings, are composed both of body and mind! As such, the concept of mental wellbeing is an equally important factor to consider for those of us invested in personal wellness.

Today, I want to share with you a secret that can potentially increase your life by up to 10 years!!

That secret is positive emotion. It has been said that the predominant quality of successful people is optimism. Your level of optimism is the very best predictor of how happy, healthy, wealthy and long-lived you will be. To exemplify how important positive emotion is in our lives, one needs only to look at the research of Danner, Snowdon & Friesen (2001). Their study analysed the short autobiographies of a group of nuns to their reverend mother. Results showed that the nuns whose life sketches contained the most sentences expressing positive emotions lived an average of 7 years longer than nuns whose stories contained the fewest. What’s more, the nuns whose autobiographies contained the most words referring to positive emotions were found to have a lifespand of nearly 10 years longer.

Alright, now that I’ve established the importance of positive emotion … how do we ensure that it’s a stable part of your life?

Explanatory Style

Positive emotion is all about your explanatory style (how you interpret challenges or problems). You can either have an optimistic of pessimistic explanatory style. While I don’t like to take a ‘right or wrong’ approach, if there was a wrong approach - pessimism would be as close as you could come to it. People who are pessimistic have decreased stress resistance and find it more difficult to have hope when faced with difficulties. They experience increased feelings of powerlessness and have trouble seeing the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. A more healthy way is to interpret difficulties and challenges is through the lens of optimism.

Optimism … Your Key to Success

So how can we leverage optimism in our lives? The three ways optimists interpret their challenges and problems (which differentiate them from pessimists) as are:

1. Transient (it will pass)
2. Limited to one situation
3. Controllable

Using Optimism

This definitely comes down to you developing your personal brand of introspection. Unfortunately, we tend to get bogged down in our indidivual thinking styles and not all of these are healthy. However, here are some steps to take to help you break free from the gloom: 

• Print off posters containing the words ‘Transient’, ‘Limited’ and ‘Controllable’ and place them around your room to remind you that no matter the problem - its not the end of the world.
• Learn to see the positives in a situation and acknowledge that whatever it is, it won’t last forever.
• Don’t catastrophize - take some deep breaths and stop your negative self-talk snowball! Learn to see and address the challenge at hand rather than making a mental checklist of all the things WRONG.
• Understand that YOU are the MASTER of YOUR destiny.

So, invest in your health and wellbeing and start seeing the glass as half-full!

Reference:

Danner, D.D., Snowdown, D.A., & Friesen, W.V. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(5), 804-813.