The Denting of a Wave' by Ralph Thompson

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Recommended: Personal experience about positivity

Right this very moment there are as many reasons to feel good in your life, to feel joyous and appreciative, as are there reasons to feel miserable. It's a matter of perspective, focus, intention and relentlessly practicing positivity until it becomes a habit that is too ingrained in your being to break.

While it may seem idealistic or dismissive to give such Pollyanna advice when a person is for example, suffering from an illness, financially strapped, losing their job, suffering with depression or anxiety, going through a divorce, battling with a sullen or seriously troubled teen or dealing with any negative life event, people can shift their downer day to a more positive place. The shift can take minutes, hours or even days depending on the severity of emotional or physical pain, but it can happen.

Choose to be Happy, Right Now, Right Here

Robin Lloyd in the 2007 LiveScience article "The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them," writes that while psychologists continue to discuss the "keys to happiness" with patients, many continue to adhere to habitual ways of negative or irrational thinking. It's believed that people can only change chronic patterns of thought when they actively, with intention, decide they want to. As Abraham Lincoln said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."

It's no accident that canned advice, corny or trite truisms like old Abe's words have been quoted for centuries as timeless healing salves for the soul. These ancient but simple beliefs work; they represent beliefs and subsequent attitudes that move people out of mental misery and into a better place in their lives.

An individual's attitude inevitably determines their altitude, which is not to inject a cold o...

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...ng is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose."

Rome wasn't built in a day and most people can't instantly reverse a bad situation or mental rut that grew over many years, but everyone can move towards feeling good by building a habit of genuine positive thought, through daily and momentary appreciation, by choosing to be happy, by focusing less on "why?" and more on how they want to feel now.

Joyful living is a practiced process of mental and external adjustments, a life of habitual positive thinking that manifests a better feeling life. It is a process of living that at first can feel like one step forward, two steps back, until one day, life feels like three steps forward and no steps back.

Sources:

* Lloyd, Robin, "The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them." LiveScience.com. February 27,2006.

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