What is your doctor doing to find out the proper way to approach your mental state to make sure that your recovery will occur?
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/04/positive-negative-thinkers%E2%80%99-brains-revealed?
The ability to stay positive when
times get tough—and, conversely, of being negative—may be hardwired in
the brain, finds new research led by a Michigan State University
psychologist.
The study, which appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
is the first to provide biological evidence validating the idea that
there are, in fact, positive and negative people in the world.
“It’s the first time we’ve been able to find a brain marker that
really distinguishes negative thinkers from positive thinkers,” said
Jason Moser, lead investigator and assistant professor of psychology.
For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and
asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was
recorded. Participants were shown a masked man holding a knife to a
woman’s throat, for example, and told one potential outcome was the
woman breaking free and escaping.
The participants were surveyed beforehand to establish who tended to
think positively and who thought negatively or worried. Sure enough, the
brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that
of the worriers during the experiment.
“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in
their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser
said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive
spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions
worse even when they are asked to think positively.”
The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to
suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex
differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the
results.
Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.
“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not
worry—that’s probably not going to help them,” he said. “So you need to
take another tack and perhaps ask them to think about the problem in a
different way, to use different strategies.”
Negative thinkers could also practice thinking positively, although
Moser suspects it would take a lot of time and effort to even start to
make a difference.
Source: Michigan State University
This reinforces my views of thinking positive.
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