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October 27 - December 27, 2020
The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault.
The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.
The way we think, especially about health, changes our health. Optimists catch fewer infectious diseases than pessimists do. Optimists have better health habits than pessimists do. Our immune system may work better when we are optimistic. Evidence suggests that optimists live longer than pessimists.
What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.” Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen.
Your habitual way of explaining bad events, your explanatory style, is more than just the words you mouth when you fail. It is a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
about the way you explain events to your self...
Optimistic people explain good events to themselves in terms of permanent causes: traits, abilities, always’s. Pessimists name transient causes: moods, effort, sometimes’s.
Permanent explanations for bad events produce long-lasting helplessness and temporary explanations produce resilience.
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.
wow
If your pessimism score is in the average range, it will not be a problem in ordinary times. But in crisis, in the hard times life deals us all, you will likely pay an unnecessary price. When these events strike, you may find yourself getting more depressed than you should.
Depression is nothing more than its symptoms. It is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry. Emotion comes directly from what we think: Think “I am in danger” and you feel anxiety. Think “I am being trespassed against” and you feel anger. Think “Loss” and you feel sadness.
Depression results from lifelong habits of conscious thought. If we change these habits of thought, we will cure depression.
Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression.
First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts. The mother learns that thinking these negative things now is not inevitable. Rumination, particularly when one is under pressure to perform well, makes the situation even worse. Often it is better to put off thinking, in order to do your best. You can learn to control not only what you think but when you think it.
Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:
The difference between Sophie and someone who takes antidepressant drugs is that she learned a set of skills to use whenever she is faced with failure or defeat—skills she always carries with her. Her victory over depression is hers alone, not something she must credit to doctors and the latest medication.
On a mechanical level, cognitive therapy works because it changes explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, and the change is permanent. It gives you a set of cognitive skills for talking to yourself when you fail. You can use these skills to stop depression from taking hold when failure strikes.
At a philosophical level, cognitive therapy works because it takes advantage of newly legitimized powers of the self. In an era when we believe the self can change itself, we are willing to try to change habits of thought which used to seem as inevitable as sunrise. Cognitive therapy works in our era because it gives the self a set of techniques for changing itself. The self chooses to do this work out of self-interest, to make itself feel better.
Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.
The explanatory-style theory of success says that in order to choose people for success in a challenging job, you need to select for three characteristics: aptitude motivation optimism All three determine success.
choose people with these drivers...
By the time she turned in her landmark doctoral dissertation, she had helped prove that the mind can indeed control illness. And even the medical world was beginning to believe it.
In four ways, the theory of learned helplessness strongly suggests that optimism should benefit health.
She experienced what is statistically a regular cost of loneliness: higher risk for disease, particularly the recrudescence of those diseases which never completely go away.
Who survived the longest? Those who felt great joy in living and those with optimistic explanatory style.
They forget that the immune system is connected to the brain, and that states of mind, such as hope, have corresponding brain states that reflect the psychology of the person.
This might mean that pessimistic people generally have poorer immune activity.
Learned optimism works not through an unjustifiable positivity about the world but through the power of “non-negative” thinking.
With these understandings reached, you’ll find that you don’t, in fact, take the criticisms personally when your friend makes them, and that the exercise can actually strengthen the bond of sympathy between you and your friend.
As we noted, some studies indicate children actually learn much of their pessimism from their mothers. They also learn pessimism from the criticisms adults make of them. But if children can learn it, they can unlearn it, and they do this exactly the same way adults do: by developing more sanguine ways of explaining life’s setbacks to themselves.
Truest
You should have found that when you began to dispute your negative beliefs, the consequences changed from dejection and lethargy to invigoration and feeling better.
This is the beginning. The next part is up to you. Now, each time you face adversity listen carefully to your explanations of it. When they are pessimistic, actively dispute them. Use evidence, alternatives, implications, and usefulness as guideposts when you dispute yourself. Use distraction if necessary. Let this become the new habit to supplant the automatic pessimistic explanations you used to make all the time.
Optimism is just a useful adjunct to wisdom. By itself it cannot provide meaning. Optimism is a tool to help the individual achieve the goals he has set for himself. It is in the choice of the goals themselves that meaning—or emptiness—resides. When learned optimism is coupled with a renewed commitment to the commons, our epidemic of depression and meaninglessness may end.
The optimist is also set free by the knowledge of what optimism does and how it works. He too can invoke his values and his judgment and say to himself that the present moment does not call for his very effective habits of disputing dire thoughts. This moment is a time for heeding their call. Now he can choose whether to use his disputing tactics, since he knows their benefits and their cost.
The benefits of this kind of optimism are, I believe, without limit.
