Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
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1 Some or a little
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and 16 to 24 in the moderately depressed range.
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Learned helplessness could be cured by showing the subject his own actions would now work. It could also be cured by teaching the subject to think differently about what caused him to fail. It could be prevented if, before the experience with helplessness occurred, the subject learned that his actions made a difference. The earlier in life such mastery was learned, the more effective the immunization against helplessness.
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When we now looked at the upsurge of depression, we could view it as an epidemic of learned helplessness. We knew the cause of learned helplessness, and now we could see it as the cause of depression: the belief that your actions will be futile. This belief was engendered by defeat and failure as well as by uncontrollable situations. Depression could be caused by defeat, failure, and loss and the consequent belief that any actions taken will be futile. I think this belief is at the heart of our national epidemic of depression. The modern self must be more susceptible to learned helplessness, ...more
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“What do you mean you can’t live without love?” he would cry. “Utter nonsense. Love comes rarely in life, and if you waste your life mooning over its all too ordinary absence, you are bringing on your own depression. You are living under a tyranny of should’s. Stop ‘should-ing’ on yourself!” Ellis believed that what others thought of as deep neurotic conflict was simply bad thinking—“stupid behavior on the part of nonstupid people,” he called it—and in a loud, propagandistic way (he called himself a counterpropagandist) he would demand that his patients
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stop thinking wrong and start thinking right. Surprisingly, most of his patients got better. Ellis
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women tend to contemplate their depression, mulling it over and over, trying to analyze it and determine its source. Psychologists call this process of obsessive analysis rumination,
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Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression.
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The difference between people whose learned helplessness disappears swiftly and people who suffer their symptoms for two weeks or more is usually simple: Members of the latter group have a pessimistic explanatory style, and a pessimistic explanatory style changes learned helplessness from brief and local to long-lasting and general.
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there is one particularly self-defeating way to think: making personal, permanent, and pervasive explanations for bad events.
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This is the central prediction from my theory: People who have a pessimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will probably become depressed, whereas people who have an optimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will tend to resist depression.
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We consistently found that when people are depressed they are also pessimistic. The finding was so consistent and was repeated so often that, according to one estimate, it would take over ten thousand negative studies to cast doubt on it.
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group of people who were not depressed and show that, after some catastrophe, the pessimistic ones became depressed more easily than the optimistic ones. The
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rate, we once again correctly predicted who became most depressed of all: those who entered as pessimists. This means pessimism is fertile soil in which depression grows, particularly when the environment is hostile. These various
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We found that the children who started out as pessimists were the ones most likely, over the four years, to get depressed and stay depressed. Those children who started out as optimists stayed nondepressed or, if they did get depressed, they recovered rapidly. When major bad events occurred, like parents separating or getting divorced, the pessimists went under most readily. We also studied young adults and found the same pattern.
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First, both treatments worked very well. Antidepressant drugs alone and cognitive therapy alone broke up depression reliably. The combination worked even better than either alone, but only slightly better. Second, the active ingredient in cognitive therapy was a change in explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic. The
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more cognitive therapy done and the more expertly it was delivered, the more thorough the change to optimism. In turn, the greater the change toward optimism, the greater the relief from depression. Drugs, on the other hand, even though they relieved the depression fairly effectively, did not make patients more optimistic.
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was reasonable to conclude that although drugs and cognitive therapy both relieve depression, they probably work in quite different ways. Drugs seem to be activators; they push the patient up and out, but they do not make the world look any brighter. Cognitive therapy changes the way...
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The results showed that the key to permanent relief of depression was a change in explanatory style.
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This means cognitive therapy specifically works by making patients more optimistic. It prevents relapse because patients acquire a skill they can use again and again without relying on drugs or doctors. Drugs relieve depression, but only temporarily; unlike cognitive therapy, drugs fail to change
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the underlying pessimism which is at the root of the problem. I concluded from these studies that among
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This outcome sews up a causal role for pessimism in depression. It is surely not the only cause of depression—genes, bad events, hormones also put people at risk—but that it is one of the major causes now seems undeniable.
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A ruminator can either be an optimist or a pessimist. Ruminators who are pessimists are in trouble. Their belief structure is pessimistic, and they repeatedly tell themselves how bad things are. Other pessimists are action-oriented and do not ruminate: They have pessimistic explanatory style, but they do not talk to themselves much at all. When they do, it is usually about what they plan to do, not about how bad things are.
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It wasn’t her pessimism alone that was fueling her depression; it was rumination too. Here’s how the pessimism-rumination chain leads to depression:
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Second, you look for the threat’s cause, and, if you are a pessimist, the cause you arrive at is permanent, pervasive, and personal. Consequently, you expect to be helpless in the future and in many situations, a conscious expectation that is the last link in the chain, the one triggering depression.
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all the time. The more you are inclined to ruminate, the more it arises. The more it arises, the more depressed you will be. Brooding, thinking about how bad things are, starts the sequence. Ruminators get this chain going all the time. Any reminder of the original threat causes them to run off the whole pessimism-rumination chain, right through to the expectation of failure and into depression.
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Changing either rumination or pessimism helps relieve depression. Changing both helps the most.
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pessimistic ruminators are most at risk for depression.
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Cognitive therapy limits rumination as we...
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optimistic explanato...
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The first concerns sex roles—that there is something about a woman’s role in our society that makes her fertile ground for depression.
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The second of the remaining theories involves learned helplessness and explanatory style. In