How to Maintain a Positive Mindset in Today’s Crazy World

How to Maintain a Positive Mindset in Today’s Crazy World

It can seem difficult to resist the barrage of negativity in modern times, but there are only a few things you need to do to dramatically reduce the number of negative emotions in your life. By cutting out these sources of negativity and adding some external positivity, you can maintain a positive mindset in spite of the circumstances around us.

In the rest of the article, we are going to look at how to maintain a positive mindset in today’s crazy world by taking a break from social media, turning off the news, avoiding negative people, and embracing positive people into your life.

Take a Break from Social Media

One of the easiest ways to maintain a positive mindset is to avoid negativity. Maintaining a fairly tight circle of virtual friends on social media may help.  Even so, the platforms are rife with all sorts of negative emotions that is exceptionally difficult to avoid.

It could be you are reading third parties’ vitriolic political arguments.  They could be buried in yet another rant about everything that the poster views is wrong with the country.  Perhaps you are reading up on the latest tragedy or injustice across the world.  Truly all of this information will bring you down, and it will bring you down hard.

Another huge way in which social media is damaging to your ability to maintain a positive mindset is in the way it harms your self-esteem. You may find yourself comparing your life to only the best and brightest highlights of those around you.  This can really damage your perceptions of your own life and the circumstances around it.

The social media detox is a good first step if you are trying to figure out how to maintain a positive mindset in today’s crazy world. Unplugging will not only improve your state of mind, but also free up so much of your time to enjoy the beauty and the positivity of the world around you.  In turn, this helps in getting you closer to achieving the positive mindset you are after.

Turn Off the News

News media affects your mindset negatively in many of the same ways that social media does. In the news’ case, the specific mechanisms with which it damages your mindset are negativity bias, availability bias, and confirmation bias.

If you have ever wondered why you remember bad parts of your life more easily than the good times, this is negativity bias in action. There is certainly evolutionary benefit to this kind of thinking.  However,  modern news media exploits this by keeping only the most negative stories in the news. This keeps you watching, but it doesn’t make you feel good. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Another trait that is exploited by news media is availability bias. You will naturally attribute importance to factors that are more immediate. If you watch a lot of news media, all of those negative news stories will come to mind more often.  Then, your brain will think they are supremely important to you personally. This will introduce a lot of negativity into your mindset.

The last mechanism that sends your mindset down a negative spiral is confirmation bias. Once you start believing the negativity that you are used to hearing so often, you will begin to seek it out. In doing so, you will go back to the news often to feed into the cycle of negativity that is so detrimental to your mindset.

Avoid Negative People

Isolating yourself from media might not be enough if there are people in your life that bring you down. If you often find yourself in company with people that introduce overwhelmingly negative emotions into your life, it can be best to spend less time with them.

Remember that there is only so much you can offer to others. If your influence is not bringing someone to a more positive mindset, you should not let their influence bring you to a more negative one.

Embrace Positive People

This is an inversion of the previous tip, where you seek out people that seem to naturally inspire the positive mindset that you are after. If being around someone helps you feel more positive, then you have found the easiest answer.  You’ve already helped yourself in the quest of how to maintain a positive mindset in today’s crazy world.

Conclusion on How to Maintain a Positive Mindset

It can seem hard to maintain a positive mindset in spite of the barrage of negative emotions that we face at every step.  However, we have learned today how to work around this.  First, by cutting off social media for a while.   Second, by turning off news media.  And lastly, by avoiding negative people in your life, and spending more time with people that raise you up.