How Positivity Boosts Productivity
Neurochemistry of positivity
It’s not a question of faith anymore, science has proven that positivity increases your productivity and makes you more efficient at creative problem-solving. There’s a whole field of positive psychology that focuses on optimizing your mindset so that it enables you to become the best possible version of yourself.
Let’s say why and how it happens.
Most of us know about the happiness hormones or neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. While serotonin is the neurotransmitter that makes us feel happy per se, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released by our brain’s reward center. That means that our brain rewards us with dopamine whenever we do something useful from an evolutionary point of view.
However, it’s a little-known fact that it works vice versa too.
Dopamine is also a neurotransmitter of motivation. Whenever we focus and visualize ourselves being productive, our dopamine and serotonin levels increase. That way, we are given the willpower we need to truly restrain ourselves from procrastination.
Not only that, but willpower enables us to do what needs be done and that results with sheer productivity.
But why does a positive mindset help the release of these chemicals?
The answer may surprise you. It’s because our brains don’t perceive the difference between reality and imagination. Want proof? Just go watch a horror movie. You’ll feel the adrenaline coursing through your system.
It’s the same with these neurotransmitters that make you productive.
The higher levels of dopamine release, the more motivation you get | Image source
So now, let’s kickstart that productivity and explain how positivity can raise its levels of the charts.
Positivity has a major impact on productivity
It’s not new-age woo-woo we’re discussing here.
Positive psychology research at the North Carolina University has proven that a positive mindset makes you more efficient in problem-solving.
Barbara Fredrickson experimented with 5 groups of participants. The first two groups were exposed to video clips that were designed to produce emotions such as joy and contentment.
The third group didn’t watch any clips. The fourth and fifth groups were exposed to clips that produced fear, anger, and similar negative emotions. At the end of the experiment, all of the participants were asked what they would do in given situations.
These were the results of the experiments:
Participants who were exposed to positive imagery were able to think of significantly more solutions than the rest of the participants.
Participants in the last two groups provided fewer solutions than the participants who haven’t watched any clips beforehand.
We may conclude that people who were inclined to feel good were also motivated to see more possibilities and solutions to the problems they faced. That proves that positive thinking significantly increases the problem-solving capacity and makes you more creative and much more productive.
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Positive thinking motivates you to succeed
It’s not just perceiving more potential solutions that make people with positive mindsets more productive. Motivation is also a huge factor in productivity.
Simply put, motivation fuels willpower.
Without it, people tend to passively accept what happens to them. They simply react rather than taking a proactive stance and taking control of their lives.
It’s simple - If you don’t believe that you can succeed, you won’t even try and if you don’t even try, you’ll never score.
As Michael Jordan once put it: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Even if you take a shot and miss, that’s not where your journey ends.
Remember, it’s not really about the results, but about what causes them.
Stay positive and believe in yourself would motivate you to success
ACTION: Whether you “score” or “miss” when you take a shot, doesn’t matter. It matters only that you stay on the positivity track and try harder each time... even when you score. Even then, you should strive to radiate more and more positivity because it’s not likely to backfire and also because it simply feels good.
Staying optimistic is a form of mental hygiene and it takes discipline to practice it. However, your productivity levels skyrocket if you maintain a positive attitude so it pays off.
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Truly productive people are optimistic about their potential to influence their environment
Successful people don’t just analyze problems and complain about how hard life is. They look for solutions instead.
Faith in their potential to impact their surroundings is what distinguishes them from the rest.
Believing in yourself is what gives you the power to make the change you wish to see happening in your life.
People who are brave enough to defy the negative inner critic enjoy what they do more than those who focus on the negative aspects of their actions. That way optimistic individuals create a loop of positivity wherein they’re successful because they enjoy what they do and vice versa - they enjoy what they do because they’re successful.
ACTION: One of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn is to pay attention only to that which you can improve. Things that you can’t change, you accept and focus on their positive aspects. Things that you can change, you change.
By being only 1% better In what you do each day, in 1 year, you’ll increase your productivity levels by 37,78% by the end of it , right?
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Wrap up
Now you understand that might be productivity is not necessarily achieved the hard way. You need to take care of your emotions and attitudes as well to finalize the big picture of personal development.
Try giving yourself daily doses of positivity from self-care habits like morning routines and meditation. And if you haven’t felt like establishing new habits, start with Habitify and get the best guidance on habit building and productivity.
