Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

Learned helplessness at every turn. If women tend to have a more pessimistic explanatory style than men do, any given helplessness experience will tend to produce more depression in a woman than in a man.

And indeed there are data showing that any given stressful factor causes more depression in women than in men.

One hole is that no one has ever proven that women are more pessimistic than men. Indeed the only relevant study of randomly

Among third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders, boys are more pessimistic than girls and more depressed. When parents divorce, the boys get more depressed than the girls do. (All this may change at puberty, and indeed it does seem the two-to-one depression ratio begins in the teenage years. Something may happen at puberty that flips young women into depression and young men out of it. More of this later, when we talk about parenting and about school in chapters seven and eight.) Another

problem is that no one has ever shown that women see their lives as more unco...

depression is a disorder of thinking, pessimism and rumination stoke it. The tendency to analyze feeds right into it; the tendency to act breaks it up. In

Women try to figure out where the depression came from. Men go out to play basketball, or leave for the office to work to distract themselves. Men

The woman, ruminating away about the source of the depression, will only get more depressed, whereas the

responding by taking action, may cut depression off. The rumination theory just might be able to explain

the depression epidemic in general as well as the lopsided sex ratio. If we now live in an age of self-consciousness, in which we are encouraged to take our problems more earnestly and analyze them endlessly rather than act, more depression might well be t...

In overwhelming proportions the women focused on and expressed their emotion, and the men distracted themselves or decided not to be concerned with their mood. Finally,

We are left with two plausible views that have some support. One is that women learn more helplessness and pessimism, and the second is that women’s likelier first reaction to trouble—rumination—leads right into depression.

This new ideology, which stressed one’s environment, was the backbone of the behaviorism that dominated American (and Russian) psychology from 1920 to 1965, from Lenin to LBJ.

Behaviorism’s successor, cognitive psychology, retained the optimistic belief in change and wed it to an expanded view of the self, developing the thesis that the self could improve itself.

A society that exalts the self to the extent ours does produces

an entity that is not a chimera. The self-improving self actually improves itself. You can indeed lose weight, lower your cholesterol level, be physically stronger and more attractive, less compulsively time-urgent and reflexively hostile, less pessimistic.

Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis both argued that what we consciously think is what mainly determines how we feel.

Cognitive therapy uses five tactics. 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

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:

Traditional wisdom holds that there are two ingredients of success, and you need both to succeed. The first is ability or aptitude, and IQ tests and the SAT are supposed to measure it. The second is desire or motivation. No matter how much aptitude you have, says traditional wisdom, if you lack desire you will fail. Enough desire can make up for meager talent. I believe the traditional wisdom is incomplete.

A composer can have all the talent of a Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He

Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanator...

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 mo...

There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.

The people in both groups were asked to judge, as accurately as they could, how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate, both when they had control and when they didn’t. The nondepressed people shocked us. They were accurate when they had control, but when helpless they were undeterred: they still judged that they had a great deal of control.

These have been the consistent findings over the last decade. Depressed people—most of whom turn out to be pessimists—accurately judge how much control they have. Nondepressed people—optimists, for the most part—believe they have much more control over things than they actually do, particularly when they are helpless and have no control at all. Another kind of evidence for the

As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren’t very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were. Still another variety of evidence concerns

evidence seems to be that depressives are accurate: they tell you, for example, that they got twenty-one right and nineteen wrong. It is the nondepressed people who distort the past: They may tell you they got twelve wrong and twenty-eight right. A final category of evidence

Judging by the explanations of nondepressed people, failure is indeed an orphan, as the saying goes, and success has a thousand fathers. Depressives, however, own up to both failure and success.

This pattern has consistently emerged in all of our studies of explanatory style: lopsidedness among nondepressives and ev...

Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately.

It is important to remember, however, that this relationship is statistical, and that pessimists do not have a lock on reality. Some realists, the minority, are optimists, and some distorters, also the minority, are pessimists.

The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their capacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.

The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other. As we rise and fall daily with the circadian cycle, that tension permits us both to venture and to retrench—without danger, for as we move toward an extreme, the tension pulls us back. In a sense it is this perpetual fluctuation that permits human beings to accomplish so much.

up. Once the parents get impatient and stop answering the never-ending why questions, children get their answers in other ways. Mostly they listen closely when you spontaneously explain why things happen—which you do, on average, about once a minute during speech. Your children hang on every word of the explanations you give, particularly when something goes wrong. Not only do they listen for the particulars of what you say, but they listen keenly to its formal properties: whether the cause you cite is permanent or temporary, specific or pervasive, your fault or someone else’s.

If your child scored 10 or more and is doing badly in school, depression may be causing the poor school work and not vice versa. We have found that among children in the fourth grade, the higher the depression rating the worse the child does at solving anagrams and on IQ-test items, and the worse his grades. This is true even of children who are very talented and very intelligent.

Recognizing when this vicious circle has begun in your own child and learning how to break it up is one of the crucial things parents must learn to do. You will see how in chapter thirteen.

Here are some events to watch out for. When these occur, your child can use a lot of your time and all the help and support you can muster. It’a also a good time to put the exercises you will learn about in chapter thirteen into practice.

You and your spouse are fighting.

You and your spouse divorce or separate—along with parents’ fights, this is the number-one problem.

First—and most important—the children of divorce do badly, by and large.

Tested twice a year, these children are much more depressed than the children from intact families. We had hoped the difference would diminish over time, but it doesn’t. Three years later, the children of divorce are still much more depressed than the other children.

Our finding applies to all symptoms of depression: The children of divorce are sadder and they act out more in the classroom; they have less ...

complaints; and they w...

Divorce does not doom a child to years of depression; it only makes depression much more likely. Second, many more bad life events continue to happen

to children of divorce. This continued disruption could be what keeps depression so high among those children. These

Children of divorce also experience more ongoing events that themselves might have caused the divorce: • Their parents argue more. • Their fathers go on more business trips. • A parent loses a job.