Optimism Is A Choice: INPress Self-Help Series

By Alison Atkinson

The pandemic affects everyone, I know it is not easy to have lost someone dear to us, or our dream job, or our chance for education.  There is a need to take better care of our spirit and mental health.

And that is why I start writing this book.

 

Prolonged turmoil in family lives, social lives and financial stress will have long term damage to our mental health. But if we address these issues timely, we still have a chance to stop turning a season of mourning into a lifetime of grief.

 

I am lucky to be born as a millennial. So, like my peers, the society label me as such, and as usual, I rebel such labels as most millennials did.

 

Until, when I met my fiancé, and spent time in knowing his family, I get to understand more about the silent generations and the baby-boomers. Then, by comparison, I realize that the 'characteristics' of millennials, as described by the internet, are somewhat authentic.

 

In January 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic begins, I predicted this event would come to an end within several months, like most of the world's population did. These miscalculations did cost me a lot.  Borders between nations were closed, and my life was stuck here for two years, without any option and ability to move forward, and financial stress starts to become overwhelmed.

 

I never did imagine that one day I would become an author. It was the pandemic, this special situation that left me no choice but to pursuit a completely new career path, and thus, I chose to start writing books. The next question is, what topics to write?

 

Hence, I start writing about self help books. I think humanity as a whole has experienced something unique in our time of history, and such traumatic experience will take up several years even after the pandemic has past, to recover.

 

In any time and situation, being optimistic is the best choice. We cannot control the outside world; all we have control is ourselves. The danger and chaos are real. But being optimistic or pessimistic, is simply a choice that we have free will to make. This is what I learnt from my fiancé, during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

 

I hope this would help you to get through any tough situations.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: INPress International
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215689219

Book preview

Optimism is a Choice

So Why Not Choose to be Happy?

Alison Atkinson

INPress International

Copyright © March 2023 Utopia Online Limited

All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by: Utopia Creative Studio

Printed in the United States of America

To Everyone Who Has Lost Someone Important to Them

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction to INPress Self-Help Science

Preface- We All Lost Someone or Something Important to us Due to Covid-19 Pandemic. So There is a Ne

Part One: What are Negative emotions and How to Beat Them?

The reason why you feel Fearful And How to Beat It?

Anxiety is Simply Useless. So Beat It! Beat It!

What Are Emotions, Exactly?

Fear is a Choice, And So is Happiness

The Communication Between the Mind and the Heart

Part Two: The Power of Our Minds

We Actualize What is Programmed in Our Subconscious

You Can Always Choose Your Perspective

We Think What We Become

The Psychology Experiment of Placebo Effect

Open Your Mind to Endless Possibilities!

Part Three: Why You Want to be Optimistic!

Optimistic People Tend to have Better Achievement in Life

It Never Pays to be Pessimistic!

But It Pays to be Optimistic.

Some Ways to be Optimistic

Positive Thinking Is The Key to Change Your Life!

Gratitude = Abundance

Part Four: Positive Programming of Our Minds and Attitude

Can We Reprogram Our Minds?

Like We Have Said, Energy Can Only be Transformed. So We Can Transform our Minds to Positive Thinkin

The Psychology of Affirmations Works Like Magic!

Practice Positive Affirmation Everyday!

If You Change Your Way of Thinking, Your Life Starts to Change With It

End of Optimism is a Choice. Hope You Enjoy Reading!

Books In This Series

Introduction to INPress Self-Help Science

Remember, we only got to live once.

There is a need to draw our attention to our spiritual well-being. We spend years in schools to learn about languages we speak, and train our brains in acquiring knowledge for our professional career. We spend our most precious years of youth in training our brains to work for large corporations, how to use our brain to work for someone else, to help the already very rich people to become even richer and happier, to achieve THEIR DREAMS.

Despite of this, our schools and our societies did never teach ourselves how to use our brains correctly to achieve OUR DREAMS and our happiness.

What is missing in the educational system, in my opinion, is the importance of spiritual well-being and mental health of the students. Apart from enriching our brains, it is time for us to learn how to enrich our hearts and souls.

And that is why I start writing this series called INPress Self-Help Science.

Let’s face it. Our current educational system is no longer enough to support our society’s development needs. People born under the new generations seek for meanings in life, and hence several decades onward, I foresee that smart governments will eventually notice the importance of spiritual health and positive thinking in the school curriculums.

Preface- We All Lost Someone or Something Important to us Due to Covid-19 Pandemic. So There is a Need to Deal With Our Mental Health!

The pandemic affects everyone, I know it is not easy to have lost someone dear to us, or our dream job, or our chance for education.  There is a need to take better care of our spirit and mental health.

And that is why I start writing this book.

Prolonged turmoil in family lives, social lives and financial stress will have long term damage to our mental health. But if we address these issues timely, we still have a chance to stop turning a season of mourning into a lifetime of grief.

I am lucky to be born as a millennial. So, like my peers, the society label me as such, and as usual, I rebel such labels as most millennials did.

Until, when I met my fiancé, and spent time in knowing his family, I get to understand more about the silent generations and the baby-boomers. Then, by comparison, I realize that the ‘characteristics’ of millennials, as described by the internet, are somewhat authentic.

In January 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic begins, I predicted this event would come to an end within several months, like most of the world’s population did. These miscalculations did cost me a lot.  Borders between nations were closed, and my life was stuck here for two years, without any option and ability to move forward, and financial stress starts to become overwhelmed.

I never did imagine that one day I would become an author. It was the pandemic, this special situation that left me no choice but to pursuit a completely new career path, and thus, I chose to start writing books. The next question is, what topics to write?

Hence, I start writing about self help books. I think humanity as a whole has experienced something unique in our time of history, and such traumatic experience will take up several years even after the pandemic has past, to recover.

In any time and situation, being optimistic is the best choice. We cannot control the outside world; all we have control is ourselves. The danger and chaos are real. But being optimistic or pessimistic, is simply a choice that we have free will to make. This is what I learnt from my fiancé, during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I hope this would help you to get through any tough situations.

Books that Change Your Life

Part One: What are Negative emotions and How to Beat Them?

The reason why you feel Fearful And How to Beat It?

An equally complex reaction occurs when someone is threatened by an angry boss, a gang of thugs in an alley, or an attacking elephant. Someone queuing up on the bank or passing through a bridge or tunnel - without any obvious danger even on their own - suddenly experiences horror and undergoes all the physiological changes that accompany fear. Experiencing fear sharpens our senses, speeds up our thinking, activates our fight or flight response, and many other things. Like other animals, we often learn from our own experience of fear, such as being attacked by an aggressive dog or watching an aggressive dog attack other people.   

If the signal indicates that the dog is dangerous, approaching the dog will trigger a fear response. Both humans and animals have a fear of knowing what to avoid. This fear can be learned through interaction with other members of the community, or from the experience of the creature, species, or situation to be avoided. Fear is an emotion triggered by a perceived danger or threat. It can lead to physiological changes and ultimately changes in behavior, such as activating an aggressive response or fleeing from a threat. Fear has a variety of functional properties, such as persistence, learning, scalability, and generalization. It can distinguish emotional states from reflexes and fixed patterns of action, although the latter obviously also contributes to behavior.   

What's more, the same cells that deactivate the fear response may be responsible for activating positive emotions such as appetite or even addictive behavior. Observing other people's behavior and fear responses can cause emotional contamination or help to learn lessons from the environment.   

The reason fear is the most studied emotion in humans and animals depends on several factors, including the ease with which aversive affective states are awakened in rats, the similarity of the fear response model in mammals, and the agreement reached regarding the role of the amygdala in handling adverse effects. stimuli and conditioned reactions of fear. Threat-focused brain imaging studies have been used to study the neural substrates of emotion processing in humans, and usually involving the amygdala.   

Threatening stimuli such as predator species trigger a fear response in the amygdala, which activates the area involved in combat or flight motor function preparation. For example, whenever we see a human face with emotion, the amygdala is activated.   

Moreover, emotional manifestations elicit specific and complementary emotional responses on the part of observers; for example, anger induces fear in, while suffering induces compassion and help. By influencing how people express their emotions, culture also influences how people perceive them. Emotions and their regulation in all cultures serve the purpose of maintaining public order.   

If this is the case, if emotions are not regulated for public and social interests in a culturally defined way, it will be difficult for groups and societies to operate effectively, and even humans will survive as a species. If we have no emotions, we cannot quickly decide whether to attack, defend, run away, take care of others, refuse food, or approach useful things-all of which are functionally adaptive in our evolutionary history and help us survive. Negative emotions are also important, such as grief when a loved one dies, anger when insulted, fear of attacking us in terrible or unknown circumstances, or feelings of guilt or shame for others when our sins are made public.   

This is also true of the theories of emotion associated with brain science, which focus on basic emotions. However, those who follow the innovations of affective science (for example, we) think that deep emotions such as lust, anger, caring, fear, seeking, pain and play are not conceptually constructed, even though they can be conceptually designed as minds. with conceptual abilities. Constructionists such as Barrett allow low-level positive or negative valence of feelings (central affect), but then attribute discrete emotions such as fear and anger to the cognitive labeling of this low-level feeling.   

Contemporary theorists such as LeDoux suggest that fear is being misused to capture the totality of conscious feelings, behavioral and physiological responses, confusing and hindering progress in understanding the neural systems that underlie emotion. Moreover, there is a consensus on how people assess their bodily sensations of fear and anxiety, but these sensations can be misunderstood. Caution should be exercised when trying to discuss other aspects of emotion, namely subjective feelings, in animals, as there is no scientific way to test and measure these states other than in humans.   

The purpose of the main theories of emotion is to understand the subjective states of conscious experience that people designate with emotional words (fear, love, sadness, joy, etc.). One of the main theories about the function of emotions is that they have evolved to quickly organize aspects of our response to our environment. When our thinking brain provides feedback to our emotional brain and we perceive ourselves to be in a safe space, we can quickly change the way we experience this state of intense arousal, from a state of fear to a state of fun or arousal.   

On the other hand, if the experience is not fully activated for the emotional brain, or if it is too impractical for the thinking cognitive brain, then the experience may be boring. Second, even if we assume that some non-verbal tests reveal various aspects of non-human animal consciousness, given the unique capabilities of the human brain in language, hierarchical cognition, conceptualization, and forward-looking cognition, the nature of consciousness may be quite different. And self-awareness. ...I believe that these reactions lead to fear and other emotional experiences.   

Human research is also needed to study the conscious experience of fear and other emotions. These studies may show people’s social perception or semantic knowledge of the concept of fear, but they do not assess the actual state of fear. Such research shows that the fear chain exists in mammals, including humans.   

Like many other brain functions, different areas of the brain are involved in deciphering the fears of humans and other non-human species. Clinical researchers further divide fear into three different components: subjective perception of threats, physiological arousal, and behaviors that try to avoid threatening stimuli. However, people generally have a greater consensus on the basis of fear emotions, because mammals show basic fear responses even before they experience pain or danger, which can also prove this point.   

The above discussion of the amygdala and its role in fear and defense can be interpreted as a mini version of basic emotion theory, a version that focuses on basic emotion. Modern efforts are focused on specific emotional systems, such as fear or defense systems, rather than looking for general emotional systems.   

Thereafter, during the 1960s and 1970s, avoidance conditioning paradigms were used to study the effects of the amygdala on emotions, especially fear. Earlier, we began to investigate the effectiveness of genetic algorithms for modeling the phylogenetic evolution of the emotional system of animals, taken in its simplest aspect, and showed how a typical fear response is learning avoidance behavior.

The most effective way to overcome your phobia is to gradually and repeatedly expose yourself to what you fear in a safe and controlled manner. You can learn to be less afraid and deal with fear so that it doesn't interfere with your life. If you find that your fear is holding you back or creating big problems in your life, facing it can help you learn to cope better and eventually overcome it. Learning to overcome fear is very similar to any problem solving challenge in that you need to define a problem in order to overcome it.   

To better understand your fear, try the following exercises. Find the fearful moments in your life and see them as opportunities to learn how to deal with fear. First, to prevent this confusion from arising, identify what you fear before moving on to learning how to deal with them.   

To deal with anxiety, start by saying that you think the fear is largely driven by your thoughts. Changing your mindset can help calm fear responses and reduce anxiety. You can practice this by deliberately focusing on your emotions and accepting without judgment any thoughts and feelings that you are experiencing at the moment.   

In this way, we can begin to develop a self-awareness of patterns that fuel our fear and self-acceptance of who we are. One of the possible ways to overcome fear is to study fear in yourself and in others in order to better know and understand it. Since fear is the unknown in us, understanding our fear expands our perception of ourselves and can be a transformative experience.   

Knowing what scares, you and why it can be the first step in solving the fear problem. By practicing a variety of techniques, you can understand how fear affects your body and how to control your stress response.   

Controlling your physical response to fear affects your emotional response. If you hide your fear in your heart, let your brain control how you feel. If you have a phobia, you may know that your fear is irrational, but you still cannot control how you feel. The physical sensations of fears themselves can be daunting, especially when you experience them but don't know why, or they seem out of proportion to the situation.   

Even situations that do not pose an immediate threat can create feelings of fear. For example, fear of the dark or monsters under the bed can give way to fear of burglary or violence. The child's fear tends to diminish if he feels he has some control over the situation.   

Don't overestimate or worry about your child's fear of them or other people, in case they become more worried. By taking children's feelings seriously, encourage them to talk about their concerns, tell them the facts, and give them the opportunity to deal with fears at their own pace and with