Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

”Permanence.” Pessimists describe setbacks in permanent words like “never” or “always,” whereas optimists use temporary words like “sometimes” and “lately.” Conversely, pessimists describe good events as temporary or credit others, whereas optimists see the good as permanent.

”Pervasiveness.” Pessimist see setbacks as universal to their entire lives, whereas optimists see a setback as specific to one event.

”Rumination.” Ruminators mull over bad events and repeatedly tell themselves how bad things are.

1) Recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the time you feel worst. Automatic thoughts are quick internal phrases so well practiced as to be almost unnoticed and unchallenged.

2) Dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.

3) Make different explanations, called “reattributions,” and use them to dispute automatic thoughts.

4) Distract yourself from depressing thoughts. (Stop ruminating.)

5) Recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing your life.

--“Unless everything I do is perfect, I’m a failure.”

--"Unless everybody likes me, I’m a failure.”

--"There is a perfect solution for every problem, I must find it.”

I read this book after seeing that Steve Kendall, one of my Goodreads friends, had rated it highly. I am glad that I did.

The basic premise is that most cases of depression in people are a formed of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the reaction to unpleasant events by giving up attempts to change one’s circumstances. Learned helplessness can be studied in other mammals besides humans. Most depression in Seligman’s view is not a function of some biochemical imbalance (though it can

I read this book after seeing that Steve Kendall, one of my Goodreads friends, had rated it highly. I am glad that I did.

The basic premise is that most cases of depression in people are a formed of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the reaction to unpleasant events by giving up attempts to change one’s circumstances. Learned helplessness can be studied in other mammals besides humans. Most depression in Seligman’s view is not a function of some biochemical imbalance (though it can be treated with drugs) or a consequence of some childhood event that can be uncovered only through years of therapy.

One aspect that will disturb some readers is that Dr. Seligman’s initial research as a graduate student on learned helplessness involved giving dogs electric shocks. This research was the reason for some of the negative reviews on amazon.com. My impression is shocks were painful (they had to be to achieve the intended purpose) but not permanently debilitating. The dogs that developed learned helplessness (which meant they just sat there and took the shocks, rather than trying to evade them) due to the experimental treatment they were given were later put in a different experimental treatment in which overcame the learned helplessness they had developed. Seligman appears to have stopped the animal experiments as soon as the questions he wanted answered were answered. Readers who believe that is wrong under any circumstances to expose animals to pain will take no consolation whatsoever from the above considerations.

Learned helplessness is not merely a product of circumstances, but depends upon how you explain events to yourself. Not just humans, but other mammals including dogs do seem in some sense to interpret events; this was one point of Seligman’s experiments. This emphasis on the interpretation of events was one of the signs of the movement away from behaviorism in American academic psychology. Behaviorism held that human behavior was a function of the rewards and punishments the individual had received, with rewarded behaviors likely to be repeated.

Explanatory style has three
important dimensions: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. Permanence is the degree to which you think an outcome can be overcome, pervasiveness is the degree to which you believe an event in life domain affects other aspects of your life, and personalization has to do with to what degree you think outcomes are due to your actions. The trick in being optimistic is to realize that setbacks are probably not permanent, a setback in one area of your life doesn’t mean you will fail in other areas, and that failures are not necessarily your fault. Conversely, pleasant events are to be interpreted as a result of your own wonderfulness, are likely to recur, and will positively affect other areas of your life. Pessimists tend to view bad outcomes as their fault, believe that a failure in one area reflects a systematic failure in all areas of life, and that the negative outcomes are irreversible. Pessimists are more likely to become depressed.

If you don’t have an explanatory style that suggests you can achieve a goal, you won’t try. It follows that optimism is an important factor in good life outcomes, alongside ability and a desire to achieve. Seligman ran with this idea. He developed a test to assess how optimistic people were. He and his colleagues developed a way to score the statements of people they could not test to see how optimistic they were. He got a large life insurance company to use the test to see if more optimistic salespeople sold more life insurance policies, an endeavor I certainly agree requires optimism. They did. More optimistic sports teams win more games, and more optimistic political candidates win more elections.

The bits I suspect most readers are looking for, the “self-help” part, arrives near the end, in chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen of a fifteen chapter book. Chapter twelve is for individuals, chapter thirteen is devoted to how you can help your children if they seem depressed (and what signs indicate you need to get them professional help right away), and chapter fourteen is about dealing with setbacks at work. From his earlier chapters, I think what he is recommending is a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, albeit self-applied. The keywords here are adversity, belief, consequences, disputation and distraction. Adversity can be just about any unpleasant event, including minor ones. Disputation is rebutting the automatic negative thoughts that depressed people often have. Belief is how you interpret adversity – it is a thought that can be evaluated, not an emotion. Incidentally, beliefs can relate to how you interpret other people’s actions or words, not just your own. Consequences are how you respond to your belief, both in terms of emotions and actions. It is the preferred technique for becoming more optimistic and thus less depressed over the long term. Distraction is also a useful way of dealing with negative thoughts, especially ones you are brooding on. Distractions can be useful subdivided into techniques that interrupt the thought and those that divert your attention elsewhere. Combing these techniques can result in a helpful synergistic effect. Writing down negative thoughts is also a good way to stop brooding over adversities. There appeared to be some overlap in technique with a book I had read earlier, Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff.

One tricky problem for Seligman is that though optimistic people have better life outcomes, psychological experiments do suggest that pessimists do perceive the world more accurately (a victory for my team!). Thus it is not always wise to look at the world optimistically, but how does one decide which circumstances should not be viewed with an optimistic bias? Seligman’s suggestion is that under circumstances where large downside risks exist, then you should avoid putting an optimistic interpretation on the possible outcomes.

Towards the end of the book, after the “self-help” chapters, Seligman speculates on why the incidence of depression has greatly increased in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. He hypothesizes that the notion of an autonomous self striving for personal fulfillment has become more dominant in our culture and that collective institutions or belief systems (religion) have withered. I’m not sure I agree that collective institutions have withered, if anything I’d say in some ways they are more pervasive, but perhaps collective (i. e. “organized”) religion has declined.

I have some criticisms of the book. My main criticism is that Seligman does not give examples of where he succeeded on a large scale in teaching people to be more optimistic, though he talks about and the “self-help” chapters clearly endeavor to do just that. I wish he hadn’t told one depressed female patient she was pretty, that seems like thin ice for a male doctor to get onto. He also sometimes seems puzzled by his own results – for example a study of people incarcerated in Pennsylvania found that though no one going into prison in his study was depressed, everyone in his sample were depressed by the time they were let out (and those with the most pessimistic explanatory style when they went in were the most depressed). I don’t know why he thinks this is surprising: prisons restrict the prisoners’ ability to influence their circumstances, which is an obvious receipt for learned helplessness. I could wish for examples or case studies from non-western countries. Finally, although the book has copyrighted in 1990, 1998, and 2006, the text and references do not appear to have updated since it was first written. By now, references to East Germany, though germane for the author's purposes, feel dated.

I found the author’s advice useful.