Last post covered the health of your Heart. In this one, we focus on longevity.
“Just as attitude affects the heart,…Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.”
(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)
How important is research like this that keeps coming out? Strongly and continually pointing to how positive emotions improve your health and help you live many years longer than negative based people. The overall research indicates clearly that attitude impacts your health in a very significant way.
So anything you can do to be more positive and feel more positive emotions throughout your day will improve your physical health directly and have you live longer.
In my experience, this is why people who keep a gratitude journal where you write in it what you were grateful for during the day tend to feel a big positive difference. So making this activity a habit can really help. Even if you just do it in your head, but do it everyday.
If feeling more regular positive feelings equals a healthy and longer life, it makes sense that you should jump on board and do it everyday. A lot of people can’t do this for very long because it is not always easy. For to genuinely feel positive emotions (and this is key) you must allow the negative ones to release. Otherwise you are just faking it and not really feeling anything of substance.
Going within, in a body mindfulness practice, helps you to face and release the negative emotions that cover up your natural positive ones. Once the negative ones (usually pain, anger and fear) are acknowledged in your body and allowed to move naturally, the positive health benefits can begin to surface and spread throughout your body.
This is the natural authentic way to positive emotions, with no push, pretending or force of willpower.