What are you choosing to focus on?

About focus and positive thinking

Do you know how a camera works? How you can focus a camera? You know you turn the front or, you know, you push a button on your phone or whatever. Anyway what happens is that you can choose which part of what you see will be in sharp detail, and which parts will be blurry.  You can choose to look far, far away in the distance, at the mountains, or the horizon over the ocean. And you can make that clear and sharp. Or you can choose to focus right up close on these flowers or these bugs or the garden or a house or an animal or children, that are right near you. You can adjust your focus and make them sharp.

You can focus on both at once

When you make the things that are close sharp, you can’t see the background. The background blurs away. When you focus in on what’s far away, you can’t see what’s close because that blurs away. We choose with the camera what we want to focus on.

Positive thinking

We do the same with our thoughts. We can choose what we want to focus on in our thoughts.

Do we want to focus on the things that are going wrong? The things that might go wrong? The things that we’re scared of? The things that are bad?

Or do we want to choose to focus on the great things? The good things? We get to choose what we focus on. This is one of the techniques for dealing with negative thinking.

It’s natural for us to focus on the negative

It is so easy for us to see the negative things and focus on the negative things and remember the negative things. That kind of comes naturally. I watched a video by somebody else – Maria Forleo – the other day.  She said that this is called negativity bias. And that where we are wired to do that because in our caveman days we needed to not brush away the scary things, we needed to always think that maybe the worst would happen. So we could be safe.

Those kinds of dangers are not part of our lives today

We don’t need to do that anymore. These days we’re pretty much safe. There ain’t no saber-toothed tiger that’s going to jump out and kill us. These days we tend to worry more about things then we need to.

To balance negativity bias we need to actively choose the positive

Today we actually need to actively try to bring in and focus on the positive things. This allows our bodies calm down.  How does this work?  When we are anxious and worried and trying to protect ourselves, our bodies go into this mode where we have increase of some hormones that make us alert.  These keep our eyes wide open and our heart beating fast and help us be ready to fight or keeping safe by running away: the fight-or-flight reflex.

Today’s threats are different

Unfortunately most of the things that threaten us today aren’t like that. They aren’t things that we can fight or run away from.  The result is that our bodies are always on high alert. And because we never actually fight anything or run away, those hormones never get to do their job and then dissapate.  They stay high and accumulate. It’s part of the reason why we have so many problems with anxiety.  Negative thinking can also contribute to depression.

A negative or positive state of mind

The thoughts we choose to focus on will affect the overall state of our mind.  it can be a generally positive place, or a generally negative place.  This will then affect how we react to the next thing that happens.  How we respond to the next person we see.  It affects the choices we make and the risks we are willing take.  These in turn affect the physical reaction in our bodies, and the cycle continues.

By practicing and learning to focus on the positive we can change the way our body reacts. We can get our body to come down from their high state of alert and we can get it to relax. We can break the cycle.  

Do you know people who are examples of these?

Now I bet you know some people who always focus on the negative and I bet you know some people who always are optimistic and focus on the positive possibilities.  Which of those people do you prefer to be around?  Which ones help you to see the world more positively?

Positive thinking

We want to focus on how many green lights we got on our way to work today not that one red light that hit us sitting waiting for five minutes. We want to focus on how well things went. We want to focus on how many people smiled at us today as we walked around town or drove to work or did our work, not the one person who looked grumpy. Because maybe they were grumpy with someone else and not you.

You can choose to look for the positive and the happy and the good and the things that went well, which we probably might never even notice without making the choice to look for them. Instead of focusing on, often the one thing that went badly or that was wrong. Or the thing that really wasn’t a reflection on us but was maybe due to other things.

You can choose

Choose where you focus. Choose where you put your focus. You could do some artwork about that. You could keep a little gratitude journal or something like that. You could write down all the good things that happen. That’s not really artwork but it’s a good thing to do. Some people find keeping a gratitude journal is a really good thing to do. I don’t personally like that, but some people love it. It’s a good thing you could do.

You could also do a collage. You know, with pictures from a magazine of things that you’re grateful for or good things that happened today.  There’s my suggestions for you today, around focusing on the positive.