Does the Power of Positive Thinking Have Limits?

If you have a positive attitude, your health does better. Conversely, anger contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Over time, fear stresses the adrenal glands. Sadness or feelings of hopelessness negatively affect the immune system. A recent study even suggested that “the association between emotion and physical health was more powerful than the connection between health and basic human physical requirements, like adequate nourishment.”

Emotional attitude also has an affect on success or lack thereof in business. Aside from attracting customers and business partners after the mode of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, positive attitude also helps in plowing through the dips and allocating resources. And arguably the ascents and descents of market indexes are caused by mass emotional swings.

But can a cancer patient’s death necessarily be blamed on failure to say enough positive thinking affirmations? Is a person who lost a limb responsible (legally or otherwise) to grow it back by thinking positively? Are there boundaries to the ceilings and floors of markets which attitude alone cannot penetrate?

Of course, part of the difficulty lies in defining what is positive and what is negative and what is success. Sometimes anger or fear is a positive thing in some sense. Is being happy about cheating or harassment really positive? Sometimes success is measured by intangibles or was most fostered by a setback.

That aside, for we have some agreement on what is good and bad regardless of fuzzy edges, the broader issue is philosophical. How deterministic is the world in which we live? Are we free to choose and responsible to do so? Or is there an interplay between the two, for example, DNA determinism on the one hand and the circumstances of social interaction on the other.

My proposal is that both function in our world in some way. There are limits to what can be accomplished by positive thinking. There are boundaries that make some beliefs impossible to fulfill (e.g., that we can raise the dead or that all humans can be billionaires). At the same time, in many ways we do not make full use of what we could and have yet to witness how high the ceiling of accomplishment goes.

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Tags: positive thinking