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Welcome to Day 7 of the Spring Cleaning for Your Soul challenge. Today we’ll focus on spring cleaning our attitude.

Your attitude goes a long way for shaping what happens over the course of your day. If you approach life from a pessimistic viewpoint, you’re sure to attract more of what you’re putting out there.

Since spring is such a lovely time of year, with much beauty to tantalize the senses, why not spend some time freshening up your attitude?

Indeed, a poor attitude can feel like wearing a heavy wool coat when it’s hot out. The feeling weighs on you and can seem suffocating. You want to shed that heaviness, but you don’t know how.

But an optimistic outlook can turn your whole day around!

Did you know that negative thoughts spiral into an obsessive-compulsive mindset? When we assume that the worst can happen, we put our mind into stress and panic mode. This get our nervous system revved up and ready – fight or flight.

Fight or flight gets our bodies producing stress hormones – adrenalin and cortisol. Our breathing gets quicker and our pulse races. Now we’re thinking with our lower mind – in pure, primal survival mode – instead of using the intelligence of our higher, reasoning mind to solve problems and carry on to higher pursuits.

The opposite is true about a positive attitude! When we look on the bright side, our brain secretes feel-good chemicals. These chemicals bathe and nourish our nervous system. We’re calm, and our bodies are primed to focus on life-giving functions – digestion, rest, reproduction. Our minds relax and we’re able to utilize our cognition to the fullest – so we can make smarter choices, reason things out as we problem solve, live more mindfully, and enjoy life to the fullest.

Journal Exercise: Spring Clean Your Attitude.

How’s your attitude these days? The warm sunshine and beauty of nature in bloom at this time of year is sure to give you a lift. Why not match the jubilance of spring by elevating your thoughts? Shed that negative attitude like an old winter coat.

For today’s journal exercise, we’ll perform an attitude check, and then check all negativity at the door. Instead of gloom, doom and nay saying, don your prettiest outlook and get ready to see how positivity attracts more positivity.

Grab your pen and notebook or journal. Sit in a quiet spot and reflect on any challenges that cropped up today.

Think about the first thing that went wrong, or turned into an issue that needed your attention.

What was your reaction after getting the news or realizing that you’d have to be dealing with this problem?

What did you think or say about it? Was it negative or positive? Did you grumble? If so, how long did your kvetching last and did you say negative things to the people around you or the people you had to interact with?

Write down some thoughts on how your negative attitude can create a chain which then spreads more negativity like a contagion to others with whom you come into contact.

What can you do or say next time to maintain a positive outlook? How will this make you feel? How will others be likely to respond?

Set Your Intention:

Now that you know how a poor attitude is likely to impact people and situations in your life, you can set an intention to reduce the amount of negativity that you project onto others.

Set an intention for how you will do this. Some ideas:

• Keep a daily gratitude journal.
• Permit yourself two small, quiet complaints per day. Then use the rest of the time that you would have spent in a negative mindset, to problem-solve and move forward to happy thoughts.
• Smile more. Put your happiest face forward, the see how it comes back to you in spades.

Loving Life — The Reboot!

Dominique