Are you typically an ahole or a nicehole to yourself every day?
Show me a person with a complete absence of stress and I’ll show you the magic key to turning water into wine. Unfortunately, neither can occur instantaneously.
Grapes contain water, a necessary ingredient to make wine. Just like stress is an aspect of our humanity necessary to get out of bed in the morning.
Let the grapes ferment too long, and the wine will be bitter and distasteful. Lingering on negative thoughts and stressors often lead to bitterness and anger.
Treat the wine as a precious substance, full of character, nuance, and potential joy — and you’ll end up with one of the best-tasting liquids that could ever kiss your lips.
Treat yourself in a similar manner. Every single day. Before long you’ll be the best possible person you could ever imagine.
How can you turn yourself into a fine wine from the fields of France? One amazing way is with a built-up habit of positive self-talk.
And it can be life-changing. If you let it be.
What is positive self-talk?
Self-talk is the nearly constant but unspoken stream of thoughts meandering through our heads all day long. The sad part? If your natural stream of consciousness leans upstream towards the negative, it can lead to a torrent of problems.
Limited thinking and viewpoints
Perfectionism and a neverending cycle of failure
Problems in relationships
Feelings of depression or worse
On the plus side, doing almost the exact opposite, as much as possible, can lead to a much brighter and happier life.
The Mayo Clinic says consistently positive self-talk can lead to:
Increased life spans
Lower rates of depression and distress
Better psychological and physical health — even being more resistant to colds
Better cardiovascular health from an increasingly active lifestyle
The main problem, as always, is it can be difficult to change your thinking patterns.
But like many things in life, if you practice positive self-talk as much as possible, it will eventually change the way you think. More importantly, it can change how you feel.
The good news?
You can help swing your brain back in the right direction with a few easy steps, if you really boil it down. Personally, I like to remember a few simple yet powerful statements to remind myself of reality.
The reality that life isn’t really so tough as our brains tend to think. The reality that one step forward is often the best way to go. The reality of a little mental slap to the face to snap out of rumination.
Since I’m a huge fan of small but effective tools to use, maybe you’ll find some use in them too. Feel free to read more about them here if you’d like to.
In other news, I’ve started doing some side contract work for a friend’s company. It’s paying the bills but definitely putting a cramp on my usual output. But hey, we all need to eat so duty calls! Apologies for those that look forward to reading my wordlings every week—I’ll try my best to keep up.
And as such—for those history buffs—here’s a couple recent pieces on some randomly weird (but interesting) history:
Two of the Most Famous Pirates in History Were Secretly Women
Ultra Rich People Used to Hire Real-Life Garden Gnomes to Live on Their Estates
Both of them are getting some interesting feedback from people, but for some reason the Medium curation gods decided not to show up last week, so they didn’t spread very much. Oh well, back to praying at the altar next week!
Oh, and if writing is your thing, and you’re human and have emotions, this last piece might stir up some cuckles in your psyche—insane tragedy and massive success combined into one true story:
That’s it for this week, thanks as always for reading!
Until next time, folks.
J.J. Pryor
Remember to like, share, or comment if you want to help me reach more people. I get overly excited every single time that happens. Cheers!
(Header image credit: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)