Positive ‘Mindset’ to Beat Stress
Turning negative situations into positive ones with ‘Wonyoung Thinking’… Helps reduce stress and improve physical and mental health
Optimism in interpreting the other person’s intentions in a positive way… The secret to maintaining a close relationship for a long time
“You need to discover the positive value of stress and practice connecting it to a good mood.”
“I’ll give you a new one, yay!”
Jang Won-young, a member of the idol group ‘IVE’, shouts this when the person in front of her buys all the bread at a bakery. She should be annoyed by having to wait for the next bread to come out, but she actually likes it. She adds, “I was so ‘lucky’ to get freshly made bread,” and “Luck is on my side.”
Fans who were ‘shocked’ by him turning a negative situation into a positive one in an instant even created a term for it, ‘Won-young’s accident’. ‘Lucky Vicky’, a combination of the English word ‘lucky’ and Jang Won-young’s English name ‘Vicky’, became a trendy expression used in lucky situations.
People who have the habit of thinking positively, like the original thinking, have excellent stress management skills. In a situation where they are waiting for bread to come out, they can focus on the positive aspect of ‘eating more delicious bread’ rather than the negative aspect of ‘it’s a waste of time’. Since it has come to this, they consciously recognize the benefit to themselves more.
This does not mean that you should force yourself to say, “I’m fine, I’m happy.” In order to cultivate true positivity, you need to make an effort to change your “mindset,” which is a psychological framework and way of thinking that looks at the world, to something a little more positive. Let’s look at how to think, “I’m so lucky,” when you’re stressed, and what changes will occur in your body and mind.
● Chronic stress… makes you age quickly and die early
In fact, it is much easier and faster to complain when you are stressed. However, if you complain all your life, stress becomes chronic and it accelerates aging, shortening your lifespan.
Rajita Sinha, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University in the United States, announced the results of a study in Translational Psychiatry, a psychiatry journal of the scientific journal ‘Nature’ in 2021, showing that stress accelerates the aging of the body and shortens lifespan. The results of the study, which collected blood from 444 adults aged 19 to 50, showed that people with higher chronic stress had higher physical aging indicators. In addition, they had higher insulin resistance, which led to excessive insulin secretion, which in turn increased the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease.
However, there were people who did not have high physical aging indicators or insulin resistance even when they were stressed. These people had excellent emotional control and self-control. This means that they had the psychological ability to cope with emotions without being swayed by them or acting impulsively. Zachary Haveneck, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University who participated in the study, explained, “If you practice the skill of controlling emotions, you can slow down the aging of your body and reduce the possibility of early death.”
● ‘Labor vs. Movement’ What kind of thinking would be helpful?
However, it is difficult to freely control emotions. If it were easy to control irritation, anger, anxiety, depression, etc., there would not be many people who get sick and die early due to stress. In order to improve the ability to control emotions, it is effective to change the mindset that accepts stress. Instead of focusing only on the anger and irritation that stress causes, look for something that is even a little beneficial to me.
In fact, when you change your view of physical work as exercise rather than labor, you will see a real diet effect. Alia Crumme, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, recruited 78 female housekeepers from 7 hotels. They cleaned an average of 15 rooms a day, doing various physical activities such as lifting mattresses, folding bedding, cleaning bathroom tiles, and vacuuming.
To examine the contrast effect, only the employees working at four of these hotels were informed of the calorie-burning effects of cleaning. They were informed that according to the standards of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making a mattress burns 40 calories per 15 minutes, cleaning a bathroom burns 60 calories, and vacuuming burns 50 calories.
They also explained that even if it is not necessarily intense exercise, if you burn 200 calories a day by moving diligently in your daily life, you will lose weight and become healthy. They did not tell the other three hotel employees this information. And they recorded their weight, body fat, waist and hip circumference, blood pressure, amount of exercise outside of work, commuting method, diet, smoking and drinking habits, etc.
When the same survey was conducted again four weeks later, surprising changes occurred. Employees who had been educated about the exercise effects of cleaning had decreased body weight, body fat, waist and hip circumference, and lower blood pressure compared to four weeks ago. Everything else, such as the amount of exercise outside of work and diet, remained the same, and the only thing that changed was the idea that ‘labor can be exercise.’ On the other hand, employees who had not received any education were the same as four weeks ago. The research team said, “Employees who considered cleaning as exercise seem to have been directly and indirectly affected, such as moving more vigorously,” and “We don’t know the exact cause-and-effect relationship, but just changing their mindset showed clear changes in their bodies.”
● The secret to long-lasting couples is optimism?
The power of positive thinking is also evident in relationships with those close to you, because you know how to look for the positive side of others’ negative reactions rather than exaggerating them.
Sanjay Srivastava, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, studied 108 couples in their 20s whose average relationship lasted one year and four months. He evaluated their personalities, relationship satisfaction, emotional support, and conflict resolution patterns to see which traits help maintain a good relationship.
The research results showed that the higher the optimism, the more stable the romantic relationship, the faster the conflict resolution, and the more satisfied the partner. Here, optimism means ‘a cognitive tendency to expect good results that are realistic’ rather than unrealistic and vague expectations.
When I checked again after a year, out of the 101 couples I had contacted, only 67 were still together. When I compared their personalities with the 34 couples who had broken up, they were also high in optimism.
The reason is that optimistic people tend to interpret the other person’s intentions more positively. Therefore, they perceive the other person as more accepting and supportive of them. Even if the other person is annoyed or angry, they think that it is because they are temporarily upset by a specific situation and that they can fix the situation sufficiently. On the other hand, pessimistic people tend to blame it on their overall personality, saying, “That person has a strange personality,” and become dissatisfied. Naturally, the latter is more likely to experience conflict. This is the same in relationships with family and friends as well as lovers.
● Need for ‘metacognition’ about stress
This doesn’t mean you should force yourself to see only the positive aspects. The key to positive thinking is recognizing both the positive and negative impacts that stressful situations have on you and actively ‘choosing’ positivity.
Professor Crum compared the differences between students who were taught to think only of the positive aspects of a stressful situation and those who were taught that stress has both positive and negative aspects, but that it is more beneficial to look at the positive aspects. Immediately, both groups showed an increase in stress resilience.
However, when we looked back eight days later, the students who had been taught to only think of their strengths had lost their ability to overcome stress. This was because they had intentionally ignored their weaknesses, and when they encountered unexpected adversity, they immediately collapsed. On the other hand, the students who had been taught to choose between their strengths and weaknesses continued to have the same effect on overcoming stress.
Knowing both the pros and cons of stress like this gives you the freedom to step back and re-evaluate the situation. This is like developing metacognition to judge your thoughts. You can discover positive values that you didn’t know about when you were immersed in negative emotions, and choose to feel them more. Professor Yoon Dae-hyun of the Department of Psychiatry at Seoul National University Hospital advised, “It is very natural to feel negative emotions due to stress,” and “You should think about what other positive values stress gives you, and try to connect them to positive emotions.”
Then, you can reduce the mistake of over-interpreting stress. For example, it may be a natural reaction for a hotel cleaning staff to feel that ‘cleaning is too hard and annoying’. However, going to ‘why is my life like this’ is an attitude that increases stress. On the other hand, if you find positive value such as ‘work is hard, but I heard it is exercise-effective, so I will be healthy’ and connect it to a good feeling, you are effectively utilizing metacognition about stress.
Professor Yoon said, “Ultimately, the secret to maintaining a positive mindset lies in your language habits,” and added, “You need to correct the negative language that frames your life as being unhappy and ‘self-gaslighting.’”
2024-09-07 01:05:35