Think Happy Thoughts

Several times, I’ve discussed the importance of lowering stress and monitoring your thoughts to promote health and prevent disease.  I even cited the studies showing negative thinking changed the expression of our DNA (in a bad way).  Massive amounts of medical research have been performed in the last few years looking at this brain-body connection.  The basis of this research is that the brain runs the body and what the brain puts out will be expressed in the body.  This is precisely why many experts are now coming to believe that our thinking may be the most important lifestyle factor even over diet and exercise. 

With the use of functional MRI, they have identified the origin of negative and positive thinking and have discovered that positive thoughts originate in the front of the left side of the brain and negative thoughts originate from the same spot on the right side.  The importance of this discovery is when they had someone think a negative thought and then asked them to stop thinking that, nothing changed on the MRI.  Researchers quickly learned that the only way to turn off the right side of the brain associated with negative thinking is to turn on the left side associated with positive thinking.  This means that feelings of depression, anger, frustration, fear, and regret cannot just be turned off!  They have to be replaced with feelings of joy, peace, love, faith, and gratitude.  My belief is that these thought patterns, positive or negative, are habit forming.  Like anything, we get better at repeating these patterns with practice.  What are you practicing?  Even if you are practicing the negative thoughts that have a devastating effect on your health, you have the choice to change even just a little at a time.  Next week, I will share some tested strategies on how to start making this change.