The Power of Positive Thinking: Healing and Treating Diseases

Mood is a person’s emotional state. It is a state of enduring feeling dominated by internal factors regardless of external factors. In other words, a mood is an emotion, such as pleasant or unpleasant, that arises spontaneously in the mind and lasts for a while.

However, research has shown that thinking pleasant thoughts not only benefits your overall health, but also helps treat diseases such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and asthma. In a study of 756 patients, a research team at Weill Cornell Medical School in the United States proved that positive thinking and self-confidence lead to changes in people’s behavior.

The research team had the patients think of little things that made them feel better in the morning. For example, it reminds me of proud moments such as memories of seeing a beautiful sunrise or graduation from school.

The research team explained, “Even such a simple method could be a means for patients to fulfill the promise they need for their health.” For example, “Even when I don’t want to exercise because it’s raining, if I think of a pleasant thought, I wear sneakers and go out to exercise.”

Even when taking blood pressure medication or practicing an exercise program, there was a difference between the group that had pleasant thoughts, that is, the positive thinking group, and the group that did not. As a result of one year of observation, in the case of coronary artery patients, 55% of the ‘positive thinking’ group increased their amount of physical activity, which was higher than 37% of the other group.

In the hypertensive patient group, the rate of faithful adherence to treatment was 42% in the positive thinking group, while it remained at 36% in the non-hypertensive group. “The effect of positive thinking made a significant difference,” explained Dr. Charlson.

The results of this study (A randomized controlled trial of positive-affect induction to promote physical activity after percutaneous coronary intervention) were published in the American medical journal ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’.