Power For Positive Living

Choosing Healthy Words

Wellness Psychology believes that our personal power of choice is one of the most significant aspects of us being human individuals.   With each and every hour of life, this power of choice often determines the degree of success for how you and I live with ourselves and with others.    The word choice each person makes tends to determine many of our personal thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviors.  Encouraging each individual to actively listen to him/herself with kindness and respect can assist many with evaluating what word choices are working well within a personal life journey and what word choices may be candidates for possible changes with redecision.

Self-Learning With Social Media    There are many ways for us to understand our personal beliefs and values systems.  One way for many is evaluating the choices we make with the various participation options available on social media.    With the choice of participation frequency, sharing of chosen content types and our selection of the specific individuals with whom we choose to interact, we tell ourselves and others more about the unique person that we are.   Understanding and evaluating the similarities/differences we have with others using social media behaviors supports our own introspective personality processes.

Describing and Interpreting Behavior    Whether we are talking and communicating with ourselves or others, the challenges to be accurate and effective remain for most of us.   Learning how to differentiate between the objective description of behavior, thought, attitude or feeling with the individualized interpretations we add can significantly improve our understandings and effectiveness.   Describing and interpreting go together to make our communications more individual and enjoyable.  Understanding the differences as well as how we combine them can lead us to appreciate a more positive experience when we "talk" with ourselves and/or others.

Wellness Psychology encourages each of us to more fully understand and appreciate the choices we make in developing and implementing our own individual self-esteem beginning as a child to becoming a senior citizen.

Beginning with words from the Book of Proverbs, "As he thinks in his heart, so is he", various approaches are presented to understanding the choices our heart implements during our daily living.  "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is another guideline for study.

 Discounting Behaviors    Discounting behavior is when we view someone (ourselves of another) as being of less value. Full value perceptions are often learned early with our childhood history.    Society encourages us to accept common standards as to what is or is not valuable.   We are encouraged to seek full-valued people in our friends, jobs, social organizations, life goals, etc.  Discounted persons receive fewer gifts like our attention.  These judgments of value seem to be seldom questioned and re-evaluated after they become habitual.   

Our Fear Triggers

 Survival tends to be the most basic of our human instincts.  Our ability to create and manage our personal fear triggers allows us to improve our chances for survival.  Our lives change from childhood to becoming seniors.  We choose whether we retain our individual fear triggers from an earlier age as we grow older.    Fear is the alert mechanism that allows us to become aware of danger in some form or degree.  Becoming aware of danger with fear triggers allows us to develop personal response strategies that strengthen our drive to survive.     The presence of fear in some type or degree is usually typical for all of us as humans.  Sometimes giving ourselves permission to be human can be the strongest fear of all.   

Needing Human Touch    We all arrive in this world with a strong need to be touched by other human beings.  The amount and type of human touch we receive as children can have a strong impact on our emotional and physical health as we grow into adulthood.   Also, as we each age and prepare to depart from this world, this strong need and desire to have touch contact with other humans becomes very evident.      Our adult years are spent trying to find a positive and healthy way to meet this human need for human touch beyond the behaviors of sexuality.   Few areas in our society seem to produce more complex variations on healthy and appropriate ways to meet this need.    Wellness psychology encourages our individuality in managing these areas through the personal choices we each make.   

Being Alone

 Many persons use the terms loneliness and being alone as interchangeable.  The first is missing an emotional connection with the people in one's environment.  The second is not having other humans or living things around self. Being alone is easily changed: add people or pets.  Loneliness is a more complex combination of factors to effectively connect with others such as self-esteem, interpersonal skills, emotional life history, etc. Feelings of loneliness are more difficult to change and are less noticeable to people in our world.  

Learning With Solitude and Isolation

 As humans, we tend to need the presence and active interaction with other humans to feel complete during our life journey.  There are also times when we can learn much about ourselves as individuals when we structure periods of isolation or solitude.  These experiences allow us to better understand ourselves and strengthen the unique friendship that each of us has with self.

Personal Holiday Celebration    Our birthdays can be a time for reflecting on the choices we have made during the past year as well as choosing the direction we wish to go during the coming year.  The past is gone except for our memories.  We each have the opportunity to take what we have learned in previous years of living life and focus our individual power of choice to produce a positive and healthy lifestyle going forward.     Making our birthday into a personal holiday for celebration allows us to appreciate our previous life path as well as focus on the choices we make for whatever time lies ahead.