Vital, Optimistic, Prudent, & Proactive....

Today's Post: Thursday, 7-14-2011

(Posted on Monday, 7-18-2011 due to computer being down Thursday afternoon and Friday.)

These are the characteristics of people who tend to stay healthy, recover better when they do get sick or injured, and live long lives.

1. Vital people tend to enjoy their lives. They are curious, interested, enjoy many kinds of things, and notice when things go well. So they want to keep living and be healthy enough to enjoy it. At their best, they are interesting and enjoyable to be around.

2. Optimistic people find purposes and goals to pursue. They look for ways succeeding is possible. They try the most promising things they can already do. They keep trying new things when they aren’t quite there yet. They work to expand successes. They look for better ways to do things. They make an extra effort when it’s important to do so. They are quite adaptable to changing methods; but they are unusually persistent and determined in working to achieve their goals. They are both pragmatic and hopeful.

They are very logical, careful, and scientific when things go wrong. They look for specific causes and think in terms of this time in this specific circumstance and remember the assets they can use. They assume bad things can be temporary or overcome when that’s possible to do so. They look for ways to improve the situation or limit their losses. And they look for ways to recover. They tend to be resilient and recover from things that others don’t.

3. Prudent and reliable people tend to be risk averse and careful when they can. They work to do the things necessary to stay safe and limit their risk. They make a special effort to do the things they have committed to do or are expected to do. They often have a plan B if risk is involved. They wear their seat belts. They get vaccinated when it looks safe. They tend to avoid tobacco smoke.

(A recent study found that people who were both purposeful and prudent tended to live longer and have better lives. Did this mean they were less vital and did fewer interesting things than people who weren’t? It certainly didn’t in the group of people they studied!)

4. Proactive people tend to be optimistic and vice versa. They take action. They try things. They ask questions. They do research. They tend to try to change or improve things that go wrong or cause problems. They sometimes complain but usually ask for a better result instead of just complaining. And they also save that for things that are important and leave the things alone that are less important or can’t be fixed anyway.

We recently posted on the positive effects of exercise for your mental health.

People with these characteristics tend to exercise. Then the mental effects of the exercise reinforce and strengthen these characteristics.

These are the people we do our posts for. And in our posts, we try to provide tools and information to live this way to help make these characteristics stronger and more effective in our readers.