Self-help gurus preach positive thinking and the Law of Attraction, which says that when you think about good things, good things will come to you.<\/p>\n
But a new research study reported in Time (7\/27\/09, p. 55) disputes the power of positive thinking, concluding that “trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect [and] simply highlight how unhappy they are.”<\/p>\n
In a psychological experiment, a group of subjects were supposed to repeat the affirmation “I am lovable” when a bell was run every 15 seconds.<\/p>\n
Rather than make those with low self-esteem feel better, as affirmations as supposed to do, their moods turned significantly more negative than the control group, who weren’t prodded to think positively.<\/p>\n
The study provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to get rid of them.<\/p>\n
I am waiting for a self-help book based on this approach, which if I wrote it would be titled “The Power of Negative Thinking.” \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
How about you?<\/p>\n
Do you swear, as so many seem to do, by the power of positive thinking and the Law of Attraction?<\/p>\n
Or do you agree with the study, which seems to indicate that merely thinking about good things won’t make them come true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Self-help gurus preach positive thinking and the Law of Attraction, which says that when you think about good things, good things will come to you. But a new research study reported in Time (7\/27\/09, p. 55) disputes the power of positive thinking, concluding that “trying to get people to think more positively can actually have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}