The impact of positive thinking does more for us than just feel good. Research has shown that the power of positive thinking improves mental health, resilience, relationships, and even longevity. Research has shown that positive mindsets broaden our perspective, build durable inner and social resources, predict success across life domains, reduce mortality risk, and can be strengthened through practical interventions.

Positive emotions of joy, interest, contentment, and love build resilience and broaden our momentary attention and thought-action repertoire. Over time, positive thoughts and emotions build enduring cognitive, social, and psychological resources. Happier people don’t just do well; actually, happiness helps cause success. Frequent positive affect is associated with and often precedes better outcomes in work, relationships, and health behaviors. Positive thinking and feelings are not a reward after results, but they are a driver of results, including lower mortality, which also adds to longevity. So positive thinking and behavior add to living longer.

Too many people are defeated by the everyday problems of life. They go struggling, perhaps even whining, through their days with a sense of resentment at what they consider the bad breaks of life that they have been given. Even though there are bad breaks in life, there is also a spirit and method by which we can control and even determine those breaks. It is sad that people should let themselves be defeated by the problems, cares, and difficulties of human existence, and it is also quite unnecessary. We cannot let this negativity dominate. We need to achieve a happy, satisfying, and worthwhile life through positive thinking and behaviors.

By developing a positive-thinking approach, we will have a more popular, esteemed, and well-liked life and well-being. We will attain a degree of health not hitherto known by us and experience a new and keen pleasure in living. We will become a person of greater usefulness and will yield an expanded influence.

Positive thinking is not a perk; it’s a performance and well‑being advantage with strong scientific backing. When leaders train their minds (and their cultures) toward broadening and building states, they gain clearer choices, faster recovery, and healthier, longer-lived people. That is resilience at scale and the heart of moving into a joyous life.

Lack of self-confidence apparently is one of the great problems besetting people today. This lack of positive thinking and self-confidence creates fear, shrinkage from life, inadequacy and insecurity, and mistrust of our ability to meet responsibilities or to grasp opportunities. Always we are beset by the vague and sinister fear that something is not going to be quite right. We do not believe that we have it in us to be what we want to be, and so we try to make ourselves content with something less than that of which we are capable, which turns out to be negative.

The blows of life, the accumulation of difficulties, and the multiplication of problems tend to sap energy and leave us spent and discouraged. In such a condition the true status of our power is often obscured, and a person yields to a discouragement that is not justified by the facts. It is vitally essential to reappraise our personality assets. When done in an attitude of reasonableness, this evaluation will convince us that we are less defeated than we think we are, and we develop more positive thinking.

So if we feel that we are defeated and have lost confidence in our ability to win, sit down, take a piece of paper, and make a list, not of the factors that are against us, but of those that are for us. If we think constantly of the forces that seem to be against us, we will build them up into a power far beyond that which is justified. They will assume a formidable strength that they do not actually possess. But if, on the contrary, we mentally visualize and affirm and reaffirm our assets and keep our thought on them, emphasizing them to the fullest extent, we will rise out of any difficulty regardless of what it may be. Our inner powers will reassert themselves and will lift us from defeat to victory.

Feelings of confidence and positivity depend upon the type of thoughts that habitually occupy our minds. Think defeat, and we are bound to feel defeated. But practice thinking confident positive thoughts; make it a dominating habit, and we will develop a strong sense of capacity that regardless of what difficulties arise, we will be able to overcome them. Feelings of confidence actually induce increased strength and “add life to years.”