Thoughts - Tune Them To Triumph

#AtoZChallenge

Positive thoughts may not cure cancer, but it will definitely help you triumph over it. 

We are regular people who admire superheroes. How we wish to have some superpower! What we forget is that we all have our superpowers, only we don’t know about it. One such superpower we humans possess is of our thought. Every progress, invention, achievement or development we know today, was once perceived just as a thought. Don’t you think that is a superpower?

We constantly think but never pay much attention to the flow of our thoughts. Our thoughts create a mindset which has a power to either create success or failure, happiness or distress, opportunities or misfortunes and in some extreme cases, life and death as well. If you add the spice of negative imagination to the negative mindset, it becomes a deadly combination with power of destruction.

Many studies conducted over decades have proven that our thoughts are powerful enough to affect our reality. Now there is also a field of scientific study, called psychoneuroimmunology which focuses on the effect that mental and emotional activity have on the physical well-being of the patient.

Most of our thoughts are randomly triggered by trivial things happening immediately around us, which do not stay with us for long. They are like our co-passengers during travel. Some of them are more constant, like our colleagues/relatives. Then we have those thoughts that are constantly with us, which is like our immediate family. We know any negative/positive co-passenger, colleague, relative or a loved one can have a great impact on us, so is the impact of those thought processes on us. Finally, there comes the thoughts which are strong enough to define us. These are our predominant innate thoughts which we repeat often and we may strongly believe them. They have the power to influence our behavior, attitude, actions and can shape our reality. It is the thoughts that affect us the most that we should try to tune to positivity.

Israel conducted a study, titled Modulation of anti-tumour immunity by the brain’s reward system. It was published in the science journal Nature. It claims that there is a deep connection between the patient’s mental state and cancer survival. Some other studies claim that negative thoughts promote growth of cancerous tumours. There is enough evidence to show the effect of thoughts on events.

Since thoughts are abstract, we can never be sure of the tests, studies or researches, yet we ourselves have experienced the power of thoughts in our lives. It is not only when we fight adversities, but even when going about the simple tasks of writing an exam, making friends, building relationships, attending a job interview, and many others mundane tasks, we see the influence of our thoughts on the outcome.

As for me, I had a tough time convincing my family about my choices of total radical mastectomy and chemotherapy. My parents were already reeling under the grief of seeing my sister in the last stages of cancer. I had to talk to them very often and convince them that I was going to be alright, and that I had made the right choice. This tuned my thoughts into strongly believing what I was telling them and my thoughts got permanently tuned to triumphing over cancer with my treatment. I think believing my own lie ( I call it so because back then I did know for sure that I was going to survive) and transforming my thoughts to positive outcomes in effort to convince my family, has played a big role in my survival of 25 years.

This forward message which I have no verification about, makes a lot of sense about how thoughts affects our reality -

A man finds himself locked in a walk in freezer. He is convinced he will die and begins writing letters. His letters end with a final passage where he is saying he can not write anymore because his fingers are beginning to freeze. When they find him dead, not only do they find the letters but they discover that the freezer’s temperature never dropped below 50 degrees because it was not plugged in. Thus, the man pretty much psyched himself to freeze to death.

We often say lightly without meaning it, “I am worried to death about ______”. That expression may carry more truth in it than we actually realize. If I have to die of cancer, I would like to die of the illness itself, rather than worrying about cancer.

There will always be events and circumstances in our life that we cannot control, what we can control is our thoughts, which will help us indirectly to control our lives. Let us take up the challenge today to tune our thoughts to triumph over any adversities we are facing. Good Luck!