Positive Psychology = Positive Medicine

So what is positive psychology and how can it help me? 

No one is 100% mentally & physically healthy. We are all born with the best possible set of brain and body cells. From day one life affects each individual in a unique and different way. It creates a very specific mental and physical framework for each one of us; a specific blueprint unique to the individual. I like to say that we are all a little ‘crazy’ in a very individual and beautiful way. Each one of us has a unique set of colours. That is what makes the world a very colourful and interesting place.

We all cope with a spectrum of psychological and physical imperfections or ‘dis-ease’ day to day across our lifespan. When we get stuck in a state of a disease we often feel like any healthy aspects of ourselves no longer exist. We become the disease itself. Whatever condition of disease we get into at any point in our lives, there are always healthy parts of us that can be activated and employed to help regain better health.

The human body and mind are an amazingly resilient and adaptable creation of nature that has strong natural tendencies towards regaining health balance. We are like an acrobat walking on a thin line constantly recalibrating our wellbeing. That is what life and health are. When we get too chaotic (which happens often nowadays when life gets too busy, crazy or unjust and difficult) or when we get too rigid (which can happen when we desperately try “to be good” and follow strict health regimes) we can lose access to our inborn natural ability to rebalance ourselves. An acrobat just needs to remember how to play the game to regain the stability. Sounds easy! Yet somehow it often seems so hard. Positive Psychology knows how to approach that puzzle!

Positive Psychology is activating your positive, healthy psychological resources (your strengths) to help reintegration and rebalancing of the healthy self. Positive Psychology helps us with our health because we can rebalance our lifestyle choices and habits to recover many diseased physical parts of our body.

Our bodies are constantly interacting with their environment and during that process our bodies change in response. During this process there are constantly millions of micro-processes happening inside our bodies and minds that are potentially leading to different forms of a disease at different times. This is normal phenomena and we are not consciously aware of it. Our bodies are naturally repairing those processes. When this self-repairing mechanism goes awry we are more susceptible to developing disease. Disease is a dynamic process of constant change; it is not static or frozen in time. When we consciously utilise our healthy parts and strengths we can start to recover and repair back into a healthy state. This process is called homeostasis.

If you are struggling with disease or health concerns Positive Psychology helps to approach your condition from the point of strengths and health that is always present inside your own self. Finding small or big “nuggets” of mental strength and exercising them, employing them to engage all other healthy functions of our bodies (eating, moving sleeping, communicating etc) in a naturally healthy and mostly enjoyable ways is the core of a Positive Psychology application in recovering from a disease.

We call it Positive Medicine.

Positive Psychology and Emotional awareness is about reconnecting and then befriending our emotions, becoming increasingly aware of their constant presence and acknowledging the transitory nature and significance of their presence. It is an excellent entry point to recovering your inner body and mind balance, that leads us towards an ease, and away from a disease.