Confidence
Research at the University
of Pennsylvania
According to psychologists, confidence is healthy optimism
resulting from successful achievements through determined effort. Healthy
optimism boosts your immune system, protecting you from disease. Healthy
optimism is self-efficacy – an innate belief that a certain behavior will
result in a certain outcome. With that belief, you are more determined to
pursue your goals and to overcome the challenges in life. With self-efficacy,
you will have a more confident attitude towards taking on the challenge of a
healthier lifestyle, thus resulting in being younger and healthier for longer.
The following behavior patterns may indicate a lack of
confidence:
Constantly trying new clothes to
improve your image to make yourself acceptable
Too much preoccupation with what
others may think of you
Always comparing yourself with
others
Letting others put you down
Becoming disillusioned too easily
There are many ways to boost your self-confidence for
healthy optimism to keep yourself younger for longer:
Choose your own healthy eating lifestyle. Do not let
society (or culture) or people around you influence what you eat and drink.
Personal efficacy is to be in control of your own life. Being in control of
your own decisions and their consequences is the attitude that allows you to
stay younger for longer.
Be more self-expressive. Do not repress the expression of
your needs. The more self-expressive you are, the more self-efficacy you
demonstrate in your life, and the younger and healthier for longer you will be.
Emotions play a role in your immune system.
Take action to realize your dreams and goals. Spend more
time on the first steps to prepare you for ultimate success. The more prepared
you are, the more control you have, the less stress you feel, and the younger
you become. Remember, success breeds success.
Choose supportive friends, who encourage you instead of
putting you down. You generally respond to others’ expressed expectations – a
kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Self-efficacy is managing your disappointments and
frustrations, which are inevitable in life or any endeavor. Introspection and
self-analysis help your learn from your mistakes, turning failures into
success.
Sharing success with others, and helping others to succeed
not only help your self-efficacy but also sustain your success.
Unstoppable self-confidence makes you not only feel
younger but also look younger.
Creativity and imagination
Life is full of challenges and setbacks. Creativity and
imagination are important for overcoming obstacles in life. When you find
yourself in a difficult situation, creativity, such as thinking outside the
box, often helps you in finding new ways to overcome obstacles and new ideas
that will bring you new perspectives of the situation.
Martin Rossman, M.D., confounder of the Academy
for Guided Imagery, says, “The imagination is probably a person’s least
utilized heath resource. Your imagination can have an impact on your body, such
as sexual fantasy or worrying with the worst scenarios.
According to Dr. Rossman, the use of guided imagery can
help you remain healthy and young by directly affecting your physiological
processes in a positive direction, such as your heart rate, blood pressure,
hormone levels and immune functions. Guided imagery is essentially changing
your mindset through visualization.
Spend several minutes each day in creating a new image in
your mind, exploring and playing with it. Before long, you will have
transformed this image into a new reality that remains in your mind for the
rest of the day. You are simply transforming old mindset into new ones, and
thereby creating new mental associations.
According to Dr. Rossman, if you are used to worrying
yourself sick with the disastrous scenarios, you can do positive
visualization—it is the same process, only in the opposite direction.
Use your imagination to change long-established mind-set,
such as the popular notion that “growing old gracefully”, which essentially
implies accepting and giving in to the inevitable without a fight. This
mind-set is a self-fulfilling prophecy. According to psychologists, your brain
fitness has to do with your neurons becoming “psychologically” weak, eventually
leading to memory loss as you age.
Don’t let the fear of feeling old transform into the fear
of looking old. Mark Twain rightly
said: “I want to die young so I’ll have a good-looking corpse.”
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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