The Superpower of Optimism: 8 Amazing Benefits of Positive Thinking

It’s tough to overstate the monumental impact of positive thinking. What many are quick to wave off as simply ‘being cheerful’ is really a daily practice that can have a wildly transformative effect on one’s life. 

This post is not just about putting a smile on and cheering up on hard days. Healthy, open-minded optimism has a catalytic effect on your personal and professional success, as well as drastically improving your relationships with others, and yourself. This post is about the importance of positive thinking, which too many people overlook. 

Forget about how full the glass is or isn’t. What I’m talking about is a mindset that reframes your entire worldview and has a direct, practical impact on how your life plays out. There are so many powerful benefits of positive thinking that I am still often awed by it.

Whatever you envision in a better life for yourself, be it material wealth, professional success, emotional security, or peaceful contentment, positive thinking will always be a central prerequisite. 

8 Practical Benefits of Positive Thinking

1. Subjective Experience

How many good things have happened to you in the past week? How many bad things? Likely you can tally up a fair mix of both. 

Now, if I asked the same questions of someone else who had lived through the same week as you, would their answers be the same? What if it were ten other people? And how would we know who was right?

The trick is, they’d all be correct, and so would you.

Exceptionally little in life is objectively good, bad, or otherwise. In almost every case, it is within our power to choose how to experience it. Most of the time, if you see a moment in your life as good, it is. Same if you decide it sucks. 

You cannot control all the events of your day, but you can manage how you think about them. And usually, how you think has a much more significant impact on how you feel than the original circumstances do.

It is up to you how to interpret nearly everything you encounter. Most of the time, whether or not you have a good day is entirely up to how you choose to experience it.

2. Attracting Positive Outcomes

Great stuff loves positive people. Whether it’s exciting opportunities, interesting people, big personal wins, piles of money, or anything else, great stuff finds optimists irresistible.

Years ago, when my dad taught me how to drive, he had one peculiar lesson that has always stuck with me: Don’t stare at the lines on the road. It seemed like weird advice to me. Don’t you need the lines to keep the car steady? 

He explained that the lines are helpful on your periphery, but when you stare right at them, you gradually but near-unavoidably drift toward them!

Your attitude works the same way. Where you look, there you will go. If you put your attention to the negative, to all that hurts, frustrates, and upsets you, you’ll never stop listing toward it. Just like the lines on the road, it may seem worthy of your close attention, but I assure you, it’s not.

When you focus instead on the positive, the things you love, and the places you want to go, that will be your guide. That will be what pulls you toward it.

Where you put your attention, there will you direct the course of your life. Great stuff loves positive people, and building a positive attitude will invariably attract that great stuff right to you.

3. Increased Capacity for Self-Love

When you take a positive attitude toward life, you will naturally develop a more positive attitude toward yourself! 

A positive, supportive relationship with yourself is how you build self-love. And healthy self-love is something that a happy life always needs. People who love themselves feel happier, accomplish more and aren’t nearly as weighed down by life’s challenges as everybody else.

Learning to love oneself is essential to loving and sharing positivity with others. Beyond that, it is the beginning of a chain reaction of happiness and positivity that can hardly be controlled.

4. The Cycle of Positive Thinking

When you start to practice optimism, you set a self-sustaining process of positivity in motion.

You see, positive thinking is a natural way to increase your serotonin, making it easier for you to feel happier and view things more positively.

Think of it like this: getting a car from 0-60 mph takes some work (mainly for the car, but y’know). But, once you get up to speed, it’s easier to keep moving. Sure, you’ve got to lean on the pedal a bit here and there, but for the most part, it’s smooth sailing. In unison with your own continued effort, you have inertia moving you along.

That’s one of the things I love about building a positive attitude: it’s an investment. It takes a bit to get started, but once you’re cruising at 60 miles per hour, it does much of the work independently. Positive thinking becomes easier as you go; you just need to keep giving it those little pushes along the way.

5. Being Known as a Positive Person

People like to be around people with a positive mindset.

It is better to be someone who faces a problem and asks, “how can we solve it?” than to complain about the situation and jump immediately to why no one can solve it. People like to be around the former. They will view that person as upbeat, fun to spend time with, and, most importantly, someone who can get things done. And they won’t be wrong on any of these.

Those with a persistently positive mindset naturally and almost invariably attract the respect and appreciation of others. This dynamic leads to stronger relationships with others and an increase in personal and professional opportunities finding their way to you.

Remember, when you approach each new situation with fierce optimism, you are far more likely to achieve your goals. And new opportunities fly to those who are prepared to handle them.

6. Healthier Relationships

Just as a positive attitude can transform your relationship with yourself (like in #3), so too can it give new life to your relationships with others.

Look no further than the relationships you have today. Think of the people you love to spend time with. The ones who make you feel happy, appreciated, and loved. It’s fun to be around them, and you usually walk away glad you got a chance to see them. From dollars to donuts, these people typically have positive attitudes.

Of course, these are not people who never have bad days, never get upset with life, and are incapable of causing others pain or discomfort. But they typically choose to see the good in events and people. They don’t let unfavorable circumstances overtake their world, and they have healthy relationships with themselves, which helps them be a better connection to you.

By naturally reinforcing the positive thinking of the people around you, you help create a virtuous cycle of healthy, positive people lifting each other up. Positive thinking is genuinely infectious.

7. Smiling in the Face of Adversity

At no point can you skip over life’s ugly stuff. That’s not what I’m selling here. I’m selling a positive attitude that refuses to let bad things define your life.

This morning I woke up with a headache. I soon found out that my refrigerator door had been slightly ajar overnight and that all of my perishable food had embodied the name by perishing. A fly landed in my coffee, and I broke my favorite headphones. I then got an email that the utility company would cut power to our whole neighborhood for most of the day.

Several of these things even happened while I was in the middle of a conversation with my wife about positive thinking and writing this article. 

Stuff happens — from a series of annoyances like these to a string of life’s heaviest and most difficult struggles. It’s not for us to know what the universe has in store for us or to always be able to take it with a smile. That’s not what optimism is. 

Optimism is taking the lemons life gives you and making the very best of it you can. Make room for hurt feelings to happen, and let the positive perspective in to find your way forward. Of course, we can’t stop the challenges from coming, but one of the tremendous benefits of positive thinking is the ability to handle adversity, take the next step, and not let it decide our fate.

8. Leading the Charge up the Mountain of Positivity

Leadership is an interesting word because it can mean many different things. To many, it is a concept of explicit power over others. Some feel it is more about recognition of success, a reward to the greatest among us for hard work. In the corporate world, it is usually a strictly hierarchical term.

Leadership is much bigger than all that. Leadership is about boldly embodying your values and setting a solid example. It is a position of humble service to those willing to follow.

One of my favorite benefits of positive thinking is this manner of leadership. It has nothing to do with control, recognition, or power. Instead, it has everything to do with making a lasting beneficial impact on others by living your beliefs to the fullest.

And trust me, when you flood your life with open-minded optimism and begin to reap the benefits of positive thinking, others will be unable to help but follow that example, much to their delight and success.

Optimists naturally spread optimism. And for all these reasons above, and many more, it’s a bug worth catching.

Avoiding the Disadvantages of Positive Thinking

In fair contrast to the far-reaching benefits, it’s also important to note some of the potential disadvantages of positive thinking:

  1. Blind optimism can lead to unrealistic expectations and harsh feelings of disappointment when reality feels short of these expectations.
  2. Excessive or disingenuous positivity with others can draw misunderstanding, envy, and even resentment from others.
  3. Trying to be exclusively positive in the face of your own (or others’) negative feelings can create an environment of toxic positivity.

And that’s the bulk of it. There aren’t many disadvantages to positive thinking, but they can be problematic if not adequately addressed.

Fortunately, all three challenges share a common thread and are reasonably easy to manage.

As a general rule, think of positivity as a compass. Use it to navigate and interpret situations, and help you decide how to act. Optimism doesn’t become problematic until you try to use it to replace negative feelings and steamroll the attitudes of others. Life will always have difficult moments and unpleasant emotions. Healthy, positive thinking can help you navigate these moments but never ignore or replace them.

So long as you take care to be earnest and empathetic in your positivity, you’ll have everything you need.

How Can I Develop Positive Thoughts?

Assuming you’re ready to take advantage of outrageous optimism, how do we do it? Fortunately, it’s much simpler than you may think. 

For all its amazing short-term and long-term payoff, positive thinking is little more than a simple, healthy habit. That is to say, it takes a little effort to get it going if you’re not already in a bit of a rhythm with it. But once you establish that rhythm, it takes on a life of its own. It grows, evolves, and adapts to fit your situation. And as I’ve said already, positivity is self-replicating. So get it going, and it will keep you going.

If you’d like a little help getting started, you can start with these 7 easy ways to unleash more positivity into your life. 

It only takes some initial kindling and a little tending as time goes on to turn a tiny spark of positivity into an overwhelming blaze of joy, enthusiasm, and accomplishment.

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Hey, I’m Sam. I created Smarter and Harder to explore big ideas, both old and new, about building a better life. My mission is to evolve the conversation about personal growth and have fun doing it.

6 thoughts on “The Superpower of Optimism: 8 Amazing Benefits of Positive Thinking”

  1. LOVED this post! To reinforce the power of positive thinking, I’m tapping into the power of radical acceptance. It’s a brilliantly empowering agent!

    Reply
  2. This is such a good post and I think the world really wanted me to see it because I’ve been really fighting to be more positive for a while and, but my stress has been getting the best of me for a while! It really makes sense to try and adjust your mindset and choose to react positively in difficult situations (something in struggle with A LOT), but it can be really hard sometimes. I loved this post though, it was really helpful and gave great insight. Thank you for sharing!

    Reply
    • Very relatable. Negative thinking, particularly in naturally difficult situations, builds up so much momentum behind it. It makes it really tough to build up the habit of questioning it and looking for the positive. But it does get easier! Positive thinking can build up its own momentum too, it’s just a matter of which one we feed!

      Reply
  3. Engaging in positive think is important, and these tips are great for that, but don’t count out negative thinking completely. Being too positive can mean you overlook things that may blindside you or not prepare you for the reality of the stress and difficulties some goals you want to achieve might be. A bit of negative thinking can help you predict where you might get blindsided and prepare you for how difficult your journey might be

    Reply
    • I’ve been learning lately about this idea of toxic positivity, and some of the harm we can cause ourselves and others by trying to steamroll everything bad that happens with optimism. So I do think there are some considerations for how to be consciously (and conscientiously) positive. That said, I do still adhere to an unwavering belief that positive thinking is a tremendous force for good, and one that is woefully underrepresented in most of our lives. What you call negative thinking, I see as helpful emotions doing their jobs. I do think it is important to feel hurt, afraid, or angry when the situation calls for it, but I’m not really looking to give those emotions any more power than they already have, because I think that in most of us, they’re overrepresented already.

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