Over the last few years, I've noticed a personal decline in my positivity. And while the positivity slowly but surely funneled out of my life, heaps of sarcasm and negativity settled down into my mannerisms. Before, when something bad would happen, I would do my absolute best to try to find the positives in the situation - maybe I didn't do so well on an exam, but I can always use that subpar grade to gauge strengths and weaknesses. Nowadays, that same thing would happen and I would - without hesitation - fire off some sarcastic retort; nothing screams "forward progress" like Snapchatting your friends "Watch me fail this physics exam by 1 point," and then learning about the self-fulfilling prophetic nature of said Snapchat.

It's not hard to put the blame for the rise of negativity on the current state of global affairs, but it's certainly lazy. On any given day, you're almost guaranteed to find some ludicrous, asinine headline in the prime slot of news. Maybe another celebrity died; maybe the current president-elect added yet another bullet point to his running list of mishaps. Regardless, negativity seems to rule the world, so nobody should be surprised that it's started to rule the world like it has.

The first step to overcoming any problem is recognizing the problem. As such, I've been trying to do my best with recognizing when I'm being negative, in addition to how I'm being negative. Did I maybe make a quip that I could've kept to myself? That's something I can learn from - next time, instead of making that sort of comment, maybe try just taking a deep breath and assessing the situation before saying the first thing that comes to mind. Not everything that is thought has to be said, and I feel like as soon as I can learn to apply that philosophy, the better.

The second step for this improvement is to motivate those around you to follow along. Certainly, with this struggle to overcome negativity and reclaim positivity, there's a wide array of people to try and bring along for the ride - after all, the change to negativity seems to have impacted most people. Negativity grows when negativity is around; in other words, the more that negativity is defeated, the more negativity that becomes defeated. Nobody ever said that becoming more and more positive would be easy, but bringing back the power of positivity needs to be a group effort if we all want to benefit.