“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.” – Proverbs 17:22 NLT
Everywhere you look – from newspaper headlines, to TV alerts, to those too-long White House briefings, to people wearing masks in public places, there is hardly any news that isn’t negative. Stories of people not getting the coronavirus, much less stories about people who have recovered from it, are usually buried, if covered at all. This negative attitude produces its own kind of infection.
In a 2016 article for Forbes magazine, neuropsychologist Dr. Fabian van den Berg warned that constant negativity causes stress. He wrote of the relation between stress and bad health: “If you constantly experience negative emotions you will be subjected to stress and more sensitive to stressful situations. Being positive is the best defense against stress .” Stress, he added, can harm our immune systems.
The article seems to suggest that having a positive attitude, along with (as the experts now tell us) washing hands, practicing social distancing, staying home as much as possible and wearing face coverings, can have immunological benefits.
The United States has typically been a nation of optimists. Think of the song lyric, “Nothing is impossible I have found, for when my chin is on the ground, I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.”