It therefore grieves me to say it, but there are many who still believe in the face of undisputed evidence, that positive thinking is nothing more than a weird pseudo religion practiced mostly by new age hippy types who like to feel good about themselves.

They will openly dismiss everything about positivity as being meaningless – at best a placebo for people lacking confidence, at worst a false message of hope for those who want to turn their lives around.

To some extent the critics of positive thinking have a point. Individuals do require a belief that it will work for them and have faith that it will deliver the things they need. They also rightly point out that positive thinking fails for most people who quickly give up on the idea.

I want to return to the reasons why positive thinking fails for some later in this article and how they can turn that failure into success, but for the moment I just want to concentrate on the overwhelming scientific evidence.

Quantum physicists have shown in repeated experiments that they can change expected results simply by using the power of thought. They have concluded that thoughts have energy and can influence outcomes.

This should be enough for most people but there is plenty more. In 2016 Kings College, London, published their investigations into positive thinking and concluded that those who visualised positive outcomes reported greater happiness, restfulness and less anxiety.

Studies by the US Army, where positive thinking is taught directly to soldiers in combat situations and the University of Kentucky which looked at 300 different studies reported similar outcomes and also showed the positive people live longer.

I could fill pages and pages with detailed findings from these different studies and experiments – too many for this particular article – and for readers who want to know more I would urge you to Google the scientific evidence behind positive thinking.

For me it is a stated fact – I have been aware of the power of positive thinking for many years but I also know that for many people it does not work for them. These are the people who buy every type of self-help book on the market and still fail to make that magic breakthrough.

I am not surprised when this happens. Many of my fellow writers seem to make the whole subject of positive thinking so complicated that it cannot possibly work. While I have no doubt about their sincerity – maybe it’s because they have to fill a whole book on the subject and believe that quantity makes up for quality that causes the problem.

A lot of these books have chapters with different positive thinking exercises, they look at mood boards, the need to make continued affirmations – so much hard work for something that should be relatively simple for every human being on the planet.

Positive thinking is really about common sense. All of us are subject to mood swings. Our day can change in an instant from dark to light depending on the situations we face hour by hour. This is really the first rule of positive thinking because only you are in charge of your moods and if difficult things happen – as they do to all of us – then you have the power to control how you react to these situations.

Being in control and deciding to stay positive means that you are better able to produce a good outcome and this is particularly useful in business or sport. More importantly if you are in the state of mind then it is a lot easier to practice positive thinking and attract the things you want.

The rest is really quite simple. Be excited that better things are on the way, but please do not bother with continued affirmations or mood boards. Firstly you will get fed up very quickly and secondly you will be telling the universe that the things that you want are lacking in your life.

This concentration on the lack is why positive thinking fails – so you keep the excitement and replace the focus with action. I would refer you to other blogs on this website that give you the detail on how to do this.

In simple terms you have created your expectations and quantum physicists tell us that your thoughts will create your outcomes. We are talking here about real science regardless of what the critics might say or think.

So what are you waiting for?