What role does positive thinking play in managing anxiety? How can meaningful relationships and purposeful activities help reduce worry?
Experts such as Kelly McGonigal and Lissa Rankin have explored the connection between positive thinking and anxiety management. Their research reveals that, while maintaining an optimistic outlook is crucial, it’s equally important to acknowledge and process negative emotions in a healthy way.
Keep reading to learn three ways to use positive thinking for anxiety relief.
Positive Thinking for Anxiety
In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie argues that your attitude determines how you perceive and react to your circumstances. The more negative your attitude and the more pessimistically you approach life, the more anxiety you feel. You perceive small issues as large concerns, react by worrying incessantly, and focus on what you don’t have. On the other hand, the more positive your attitude and the more optimistically you approach life, the less power anxiety has over you. You find it easier to ignore small issues, react to real concerns rationally and productively, and remain focused on what’s going well in your life.
Physician Lissa Rankin (Mind Over Medicine) also discusses using positive thinking for anxiety, clarifying that being positive doesn’t mean ignoring or suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. If you believe you shouldn’t experience negative thoughts and emotions at all, when they inevitably arise, you’ll worry about your worries, which will cause you to spiral into chronic anxiety and stress. On the other hand, acknowledging any negative thoughts and emotions will help you process them more effectively and allow them to pass.
While experts recommend a variety of methods for using positive thinking for anxiety, we’ll focus on three main ways to stay positive and anxiety-free: Cultivate meaning and purpose, engage your mind productively, and nurture your relationships.
Method #1: Cultivate Meaning and Purpose
According to Amelia Nagoski and Emily Nagoski (Burnout), having meaning in life, or some larger purpose, enhances your well-being and makes you more resilient—you’re able to contextualize stressors and realize that in the grand scheme of things, they’re not that important. And if you do end up feeling anxious and stressed, having a larger purpose will give you the hope and direction you need to move forward. One of their suggestions for cultivating meaning and purpose is to embrace spirituality.
Rankin offers insight into how progressing down a spiritual path helps you live a more meaningful, worry-free life. Embracing spirituality—by acknowledging what is sacred in your life—expands your awareness and helps you transcend the superficial aspects of reality. This feeling of transcendence makes you more open, grateful, and forgiving—which in turn helps you overcome concerns that cause negative emotions and worries.
Carnegie provides more specific advice for embracing spirituality: Develop your spiritual connection to a higher power by engaging in quiet reflection and prayer. He explains that belief in a higher power coupled with regular contemplation and prayer alleviates anxiety because it makes you feel supported. It provides an outlet to share your fears and concerns and helps you articulate and understand the cause of your worries. This cathartic process calms anxiety and makes worries feel more manageable—making it easier to find solutions to your worries and maintain a positive attitude.
Method #2: Engage Your Mind Productively
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow), engaging your mind productively helps maintain a positive state of mind by inhibiting negative or worrisome thoughts. The more you direct your attention on a task, the more absorbed you feel in what you’re doing. This sense of absorption connects you to the present moment, making it difficult for your mind to wander and get distracted by thoughts about the past or future—which are the types of thoughts that cause anxiety.
While Carnegie also advocates keeping your mind engaged—for example, by pursuing a career you genuinely enjoy or adding interest and challenge to your daily activities—he also recommends scheduling frequent breaks into your day. Taking regular moments of rest before you’re tired prevents fatigue, increases efficiency, promotes constructive thinking, and makes you less susceptible to worry and anxiety.
Method #3: Nurture Your Relationships
According to the Nagoski sisters, having a steady, loving support system helps maintain positivity and alleviate anxiety because connection is a vital component of human existence—you can’t survive without it. In addition, caring for others reminds you to care for yourself. They elaborate that human emotion is contagious—you end up syncing your emotions, speech, and even heartbeats with the people you spend time with. So spending time with people you share loving and intimate relationships with recharges your emotional battery. According to the Nagoski sisters, supportive relationships are characterized by two things:
- A balance of give and take, where you trust the other person to reciprocate the resources (like love and attention) that you give them
- An empathetic connection where both parties can set aside their perspective (judgments, criticisms, personal needs, and so on) and see things from the other person’s perspective
In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal offers advice on how you can cultivate loving, intimate relationships: Be honest and open about the things you struggle with. For example, when you struggle with anxiety, admit when you’re feeling anxious to people you trust, or start a social media group that discusses anxiety. Doing this will help like-minded people feel heard and comforted, which will ultimately inspire them to be open and supportive toward you.
Carnegie suggests another way you might cultivate and strengthen your relationships and your positive mindset: Commit to doing at least one good deed every day. In addition to encouraging appreciation from others, thinking of ways to benefit others offers two advantages. First, it distracts you from thinking about yourself and your worries. Second, acknowledging your positive impact on others makes you feel good about yourself.
