How Your Attitude Affects Your Health

People with negative attitudes are not as healthy as people who have positive attitudes. People who have positive attitudes also have fewer bad habits. When their doctor recommends certain lifestyle changes, or certain treatments, they jump into what the doctor has suggested full speed ahead, with a positive attitude. People with negative attitudes typically do not, and can be a very bad thing.

While a positive attitude doesn’t prevent or cure all health conditions or diseases, it does play an instrumental role in disease prevention and treatment. A person who sees everything in a negative light will have a harder time getting over an ailment than a person with a positive attitude.

For example, your doctor has told you that you have hypertension. You must take medication, but you must also make changes in your life. You must lose weight, you must stop smoking, and you must eat healthier. If you have a positive attitude, you will immediately take steps to stop smoking, which is the hardest thing that he told you to do. You will get on a proven weight loss program to get the weight off, and you may even meet with a nutritionist to learn how to eat right. You may even go the extra mile and do some research to find out what else you can do to deal with your hypertension. Six months to a year later, you are a picture of perfect health, and you no longer even need the medication for hypertension.

On the other hand, if you have a negative attitude, you may determine that you are soon going to drop dead from a heart attack, regardless of what you do. You may or may not fill the prescription, and even if you do, you won’t be very conscientious about taking it as directed. You will decide that since you are going to die anyway, you may as well eat what you want and continue smoking. It’s too late now anyway. You won’t be exercising – what’s the point? Within six months to a year, you are right – you will probably have a heart attack, and the chances are good that you will die.

A positive or negative attitude not only determines what we will do with the choices that we are presented with, it also determines how we feel – from a physical standpoint. A positive person may wake up with some pain, and tell themselves that the sooner they start moving around and getting on with their day, the sooner the pain will go away or subside. A negative person will decide that their pain is too great to even get out of bed. They cannot function, and if they do function, they are going to do it in pain. The negative person will carry their pain and discomfort with them all day. The positive person actually will – at the very least – notice that the pain has diminished a great deal, if it hasn’t subsided altogether.