Did you know that stress and cynicism can hurt your mental and physical health, your friendships and relationships, and your life, career, and even financial success in more than 30 different ways?

And yet both are largely just negative thinking patterns. Failures to challenge our negative view of what’s around us and what we think might harm or threaten us.

And by simply changing our way of thinking, how we process these negative thoughts, we can almost completely eliminate the harm done by both.

And cynicism is an almost perfect example of how the way we think has a profoundly negative effect on our mental and emotional health, our physical health, and even our financial and career success.

In short, cynical people get less out of life. And a shorter life at that.

Studies since the 1990s, some of them very large, have shown that people who are consistently cynical tend to come out worse in almost everything.

• On the mental and emotional side, they have higher rates of depression, and lower rates of self-confidence, self-esteem, creativity, enthusiasm, motivation, and trust.
• They have poorer relationships and they also experience higher levels of stress, which releases its own cascade of other mental, emotional, physical, and financial damages.
• On the physical side, cynical people have higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and dementia – some studies have found that cynical people are three times more likely to suffer with dementia.
• On the financial and career side, studies have also shown that cynical people make less money over their lifetime.
• They enjoy fewer promotion opportunities, see less career advancement, and have lower job satisfaction.
• They tend to be poor decision makers, poor team players, don’t engage and network as well they need, and tend to pass on valuable opportunities for cooperation and advancement.

Cynics are often just disappointed idealists with unreasonable expectations and standards. And yet another example of why although you are not what you think, you are how you think.

And one of the worst things about cynicism is how it feeds itself. When cynical people don’t do well in life, because of their views of others, they then blame others for their predicament, convince themselves they were right to be cynical, and retreat back into that mindset.

And if that’s you and it’s shortening your life, and your joy of and in life, then fix your thinking. While you still can.

And then there’s stress. And it can be a killer. Not only can it kill brain cells, but it’s also connected to the top six causes of death in America. And it’s also believed to be capable of triggering mental illnesses like depression.

It can lower your immune system, hurt your heart, slow down your thinking, impact your focus and your memory, and generally make life a misery.

And yet most stress comes from a failure to manage stressors. Stressors are the things, the thoughts, ideas, and worries that only become stress if we allow them to.

A perfect and perfectly simple example of how if we train ourselves to regulate our thoughts, manage how we think about our thoughts, those thoughts will never have the opportunity to become negative feelings and end up being things like stress and cynicism.

How easy it could be to think your way into a healthier and happier life.