staying positive in a negative world

one of the hardest things for me to do on a daily basis is to stay positive when there is so much negativity surrounding me.
i’ve had my fair share of bad days. i used to be in a bad mood 99% of the time when i had anxiety & depression. it’s hard for most people to believe (unless you were really close to me and had to experience some of my freak outs…sorry) that i used to not be so happy and positive on the inside.
random note: did you know that for every negative you tell yourselves or others, it takes 9 positives to recover the damage?
ever since recovering from my anxiety/depression, i’ve been able to look optimistically at the world around me and continue to smile and stay positive through just about anything that comes my way. anyone can do this on their own…no need for anti-depressants. (i’m not totally against them especially for serious cases, but they did terrible damage to me personally, so i’m kind of a meds-hater).

so in this post i’m going to give some tips on things i’ve done and still do to stay positive when you feel like shutting down and all you can think about is the negative side of everything.

1) Smile.
Simple as that. Everyone knows I smile all-the-freaking-time. Members at the gym I work at think it’s weird that even though I’m putting myself through an awful makesmewanttopuke workout, I’m still somehow smiling through it. Or even if something bad happens (like when i got stuck in the snow and had to pay $125 to get a tow), I end up laughing or smiling through my tears.
I’ve gone through some heartbreak in the last few years…things I never even saw coming. Does that stop me from smiling? Nope. I don’t want to bring everyone else down with the pain and hurt that I feel inside from what’s going on….and smiling just to make others smile ends up putting me in a better mood anyway.

2) Don’t engage in negative conversation/Surround yourself with positive people.
No need for unnecessary drama and gossip. What is it ever going to solve to talk bad about other people? I’m not saying I’ve never done this, because we are all victims at this..(sometimes life gets boring, so we talk shit. just saying.) But if your conversations turn into a big gossip fest about other people, how is that ever going to make YOU happy? Sure, there are going to be people you don’t like. get over it. there’s a million other people in this world.
Whenever someone is engaging in a negative conversation, don’t be afraid to excuse yourself. No need to even explain. I often just walk away from conversations that I don’t want to be involved in if I think it’s going to create negative thoughts in my head.
You’d be surprised how much someone else’s negativity brings me down. If someone is in a negative/bad mood, it brings me down. I don’t like feeling that way since I felt that way for so many years, so I try to avoid it as best as I can.

3) Focus on what you can change. Let go of what you can’t change.
This is the most difficult for me. I like to be in control of my life. If something isn’t going my way, it freaks me out. Well, it used to. I think anyone with a past eating disorder can relate to the fact that they thought they were capable of changing anything. This brought upon so many negative thoughts in my head, I can’t even tell you how many. My biggest problem, when dealing with bulimia & overexercising, was that I focused far too much on things I couldn’t change. No amount of calories coming out of me was going to change my bone structure. No specific number on the scale was going to make me all of a sudden happy. No amount of running was going to make all the stress of life disappear.
Instead, I focused on things in my life that I could change.
I quit a job that was causing more stress than good.
I broke up a boyfriend that made me feel like I wasn’t worth anything.
I started to really take a look at my health and focused more on fitness gains than counting calories and losing weight.

So end this day however you feel, but wake up tomorrow starting on a more positive note. You might feel a bit better about life. Even if it’s just for a day.