Can Meditation Make You More Optimistic?

Meditation is the practice of changing the way your thoughts and feelings react to daily events in your life. Being able to practice mindfulness and center yourself is of great benefit to your mental and physical health. More and more people are practicing meditation to improve their lives every day with the goal of making themselves more optimistic and happier in general.

If you find that you are struggling against negative thoughts or unhappy feelings and cannot break the cycle of these feelings and thoughts, mindfulness and meditation practice can help you to unlock a more positive mindset. Many people who struggle with negative thoughts or general fear about things in their lives have experienced great success at retraining their brain to see life in a positive life through meditation.

What is Meditation?

Meditation is the focus on your body and your feelings in the present. It allows you to break free from your learned emotional reactions to events or people in your life and helps to free you from obsessive thinking or negative feelings.  Meditation comes in many styles and forms but the goal is always to help the person practicing it to live in the present and to shift negative thinking toward a most positive outlook.

At the most basic level, meditation is the practice of looking inwards and finding peace with your thoughts and your emotions. For some people, five minutes a day is enough and for others, an hour or two a day is more ideal.  There is no right way to practice and there is no pressure to practice in exactly the way another person practices. You can use an app to lead you in guided practice on your phone, or you can attend live classes and practice with other people and a teacher. 

Meditation is very flexible and can be added to anyone’s daily schedule with no trouble at all. If you have ever wondered why your optimistic friends are always so happy, you might ask them if they are meditating every day. It is very likely that they are and that their meditation practice contributes to their overall wellness every day.

Can Meditation Make You More Optimistic? 

Everyone knows someone that is a natural optimist. They see their glass as half full not half empty and they feel joy and peace towards almost everything and everyone in their life. If you are not an optimist, you may have felt envious of these people in your life for their ability to roll with the punches and always see the good in everything and everyone.

Thankfully, optimism is a learned skill and you can train your brain to view things the same way as your naturally optimistic friends do through meditation practice. Positivity has been linked to good health and to successful human interaction and many people who have learned to think about things in a negative light can unlearn this behavior.

Meditation has many benefits related to overall health and wellness, but mindfulness practice and meditation that guides you to change your outlook on daily events can offer some significant benefits that can turn you into an optimist, even if you are confirmed pessimist right now.

• Meditation makes you adaptable and flexible by teaching you to dismiss negative thoughts and focus on challenges as opportunities for growth.
• Meditation can help you to release pent-up anxiety and worries through simple breathing exercises and centering. Often anxious people just need to take a moment to calm their body down enough that they can sort out their thoughts. This can be particularly true for those who suffer from anxiety disorders or ADHD.
• Meditation will dramatically reduce stress levels and increase your overall health. When we focus on bad or unhappy thoughts, our health suffers. Being able to let negative experiences stay in the past helps us to see the happiness around us in each day and allows us to explore life with openness.
• Achieving a positive mindset allows people to seek successful outcomes and to find inner and outer happiness. Positive people draw more positivity toward them and the reverse is also true. 
• Meditation and mindfulness practice all your brain to default to a happiness set point. This means that all of your reactions to your life will come from this positive place rather than a negative place of pessimism or worry.
• Clinical tests have shown that meditation actually physically re-wires your brain and created new pathways that were not there before. This proves that the benefits of mediation are as much physical as they are mental.
• Meditation shrinks your amygdala which is responsible for our prey response and for fear and anxiety. This part of our brain is useful but does not need to be the primary force behind all of our decisions and choices.
• Meditation can reduce cortisol levels which are related to stress. Too much cortisol can make sleep difficult, can make you gain weight and can change and imbalance your hormones.

Meditation is a powerful tool that can be used to defeat anxiety, pessimism and overall worries.  Clinical evidence shows that meditation, when practiced regularly, can literally re-wire your brain.  Meditation comes in many forms and offers a lot of flexibility in the benefits it can offer to those who practice it.  It is the means by which many people have found happiness and peace in their life that was completely out of reach to them before they started practicing.

If you are tired of living with anxiety, fear and negative thoughts, mediation can positively affect your thoughts, make you more optimistic, improve your interactions with others and bring your life into a peaceful balance. Meditation has the power to make you an optimist, even when life throws you curveballs. You have nothing to lose by trying it out and you will no doubt find that every aspect of your life is improve by daily practice.