Prescription for a Healthy Holidays: Exercise the Freedom to Choose Your Attitude!

The holiday season is not always the most relaxing time of year. In fact, for many people, it can be highly stressful; for others, it can even be downright depressing. In most cases, how we choose to deal with and experience the holidays is a question of attitude. Indeed, having a positive attitude is a prescription for a healthy holidays!

Here is a quick exercise that can help you exercise your freedom to choose a positive attitude during the holiday season (and, of course, afterwards).

Whenever you confront a situation that is especially stressful, negative, or challenging for you, I want you to take a deep breath and list “ten positive things” that are or could be associated with (or could/did result from) this situation. That’s right, I said ten “positive” things! Stretch your imagination and suspend judgment, listing whatever comes to mind, no matter how silly, far out, or unrealistic your thoughts may appear to be. Feel completely free to determine or define what “positive” means to you and recruit family members, friends, colleagues, PeopleJam members, etc., to help you with your list, if necessary.

After you’ve completed your list, look at it closely, and let the positive become possible in your frame of reference regarding the situation. Sometimes this is very hard to do. It requires a letting go of old ways of thinking, pain, remorse, disappointment, frustration, perhaps even grief and anguish.

Experience has shown that this simple exercise opens you up to deep optimism no matter how challenging your circumstances. In all cases, people come to acknowledge that they are free to choose their attitude and view their circumstance(s) from many different perspectives. And, no matter how desperate the situation or condition confronted, everyone ultimately acknowledges that something positive could result from it. Importantly, through this exercise, people learn an effective way to release themselves, at least partly, from their self-imposed thought prisons.

Although we may not be totally free from the various conditions or situations that confront us--in our personal and work lives--the important thing is that we can choose how we respond, at the very least through our choice of attitude.

And even if you don’t see the cognitive or emotional benefits of maintaining a positive attitude toward a situation you are facing, please consider the physiological benefits. One of the real powers of positive thinking is that it is good for your health! With this in mind, I wish everyone in the PeopleJam community a Healthy Holidays!

Meaningfully, Alex

NOTE: More information about this particular exercise, including illustrations of how it has been and can be used, and the core principle upon which it is based, is available in my book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts.

 

(c) 2007 Alex Pattakos, Ph.D.