Thursday, December 8, 2011

Final Post

Throughout this course, we have learned about many aspects of motivation and most importantly, how they are all related. It is difficult to understand one idea about motivation without exploring the others. We talked about he biological, psychological and environmental influences as well as the history of each. When we learned about things such as addictions, homeostasis, arousal, stress, and many other topics, it was interesting to explore how they were all related and effected one's motivation and actions. The best part about this class is how everything we talked about is relevant to us and can be related to our personal lives. Every class was more than just a textbook based lesson because it was related to real life experiences and important insight that personally effected each one of us.

"For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three -- the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings."
--Peter McWilliams

Similar to many other students in the class, I was very interested in learning about addiction. Some people have an addictive personality while others seem to be able to use substances or have behaviors that do not develop into addictions. Addiction is typically related to drug or substance abuse but that is not always the case. This semester we also learned about pessimism and optimism. The quote above correlates both pessimism and addiction and I thought it was very interesting.

Pessimism affects ones psychological mind, physical body, and personal emotions. This was also mentioned in Richard Wiseman's article, "The Luck Factor." Pessimism can have a lot to do with how a person handles a situation and how they let it effect all three part of their life- their mind, body, and emotions. Just as with addictions with drugs, once a person is so overcome by pessimistic traits, it is difficult and nearly impossible to beat them. Not saying it is impossible, however, because even the most serious drug addicts have been treated and recovered.

The video below is the first segment of a youtube video titled, "How to Stop Being a Pessimist. I though it was very interesting and gave the viewer good advice and insight into the topic of pessimism. The tips given can be looked at as how to overcome the addictive nature of pessimism :




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