Can Negative Thinking Make You Sick?

RoxieDawn wrote: »

I think negative attracts negative and positive attracts positive..

Glass half full or glass half empty...i learned this from a mentor I had a while go..it was pointed out that i was severely living "glass half empty".. took many years to correct that.

Totally agree that a negative outlook will attract negative vibes. If anyone one reads the 'Law of Attraction' it's basically saying that whatever you feed out to the universe is what you will get back.

If you go out and smile at people they will, more often than not, smile back, AND pass the smile onto someone else, if you scowl at them, they will pass on the scowl etc.

Not many people have a 'perfect' life - but we need to learn how to make the best of the one we have

I think this paragraph from the article is a more likely explanation for chronic health issues correlated with negative moods:

It could also be that people who feel bad—be it depressed, stressed, cynical, or otherwise—may also be more likely to smoke or drink alcohol, or less likely to be physically active, all things that can affect your health, of course. Or it’s possible that negative emotions might be an early symptom of a health problem, rather than a cause.

If you believe the world's a terrible place or everyone is out to get you, do you have as much motivation to take care of yourself?

I do think battling mental illness like depression or anxiety for a long time can lead to other physical issues, but I don't like lumping that into the same category of negative emotions the way this article does. Is there anything to suggest being cynical or bitter can be categorized as a mental illness, or is it the result of experiences and upbringing?

I wholeheartedly agree, and also think that the reverse could be true. I'm going through a very awkward, extremely personal physical health problem, and the toll it's taken on my mental and spiritual health is undeniable. A dear friend recently pointed out, however, that my emotional mess might be causing my physical issue not to improve as fast as it would if "my glass was half-full." Ironically, I was a very happy person before my situation happened.

canadianlbs wrote: »

i guess the way i feel is: distorted thinking can happen at both ends of the scale and idk if either is optimal. otoh, i'm not really a huge believer in mind-body determinism either.

msf74 wrote: »

I think it stands to reason that our bodies have a limited capacity to deal with stress

true enough, but on the other end of the scale i've seen some really determined perma-smiley-faces who were killing themselves to pretend everything's fine when it's not. repression is a major stressor as well, to a point where there's also plenty of literature out there about how that's not good for you either.

I agree with this -- repression is pretty much my key issue, after all, and not letting on (or even admitting to myself) that anything is not okay, ever, but I don't see this as quite the same thing as not sweating the small stuff or being optimistic.

The stoics practice negative visualization. They intentionally visualize the the worst case scenario. It dampens the blow if in fact the worst thing happens. They have already mentally prepared themselves. This is strictly an internal exercise. Stoics don't project this negative thought onto others. You wouldn't label a stoic as a negative nancy nor would you appoint them to head up a pep rally.

Are stoics particularly healthy? I have no clue. I believe they are less susceptible to the harm of chronic stress. Learning to not stress out is kinda their thing.

i thought about it in the shower last night and realised my voice-of-reason voice wasn't really interested in figuring out who's negative and who's a realist and handing out living-right stars to the various points on the scale. it was just saying what it usually says: question the source before you go changing your life.

i guess i'm 50. i know when i was in my teens and 20's there was live-this-way stuff all over the place all the time too, but it was static content with a much slower turnover. i remember feeling sort of bullied and bossed around by all the 'musts' and the 'shoulds' of my day too. but we weren't carrying the feeds around with us and checking them three times an hour, so we were way less inundated with 'studies show' information like this. and the standards for proof and clarity were higher, sorry-etc but it's true. my sister's a new-media journalism prof and she says she and her colleagues call this kind of thing churnalism. they strongly discourage their students from accepting 'internship' offers to go generate this kind of stuff for the various places that want to recruit them to do it for free. because they're really just about producing mind-candy, which isn't necessarily the same thing as reporting it.

i'm not knocking anybody's beliefs or psychological lifestyle with this. i just got myself thinking how sad it must be to be young these days and so overwhelmingly told all the time that thou shalt this and thou shalt not that, and so much of it seems to be about what will happen to you twenty or thirty or forty years down the line if you don't or you do. and i can't help wanting to represent a little for all the people who have genuine depression or anxiety or living in genuinely intolerable circumstances right now. they're basically looking at 'hah. and what's more, you're going to lose your mind when you're old because this just proves that the way that you are is not viable'.

i don't think 'when you're old' is really a good-enough reason, for me. do it for now, not just for some vague pie in the sky that might not even be found to be a real correlation by the time that you get to the age where your genes might be waiting to rise up and bite you.