Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

• The children of divorce see a sibling hospitalized three and a half times more often than children of intact families do.

The child’s own chance of being hospitalized is three and a half times greater. • The chance that a friend of the child will die is twice as great. • The chance that a grandparent will die is also twice as great. Some of these events may be causes or consequences of divorce.

This all adds up to a very nasty picture for the children of divorce.

It used to be said that it is better for the children to have their unhappy parents divorce than to live with two parents who hate each other. But our findings show a bleak picture for these children: prolonged, unrelieved depression; a much higher rate of disruptive events; and, very strangely, much more apparently unrelated misfortune. It would be irresponsible for me not to advise you to take these dismaying data seriously if you are thinking about divorcing.

But the problem may not be the divorce itself. The root of the problem may be...

We have for three years also followed seventy-five children from the Princeton Longitudinal Study whose parents have not divorced, but who say that their parents fight a lot. The children of fighting families look just as bad as the children of divorce: They are highly depressed, remain depressed long after the parents are said to stop fighting, and s...

There are two possible ways fighting between parents might hurt children so lastingly. The first is th...

unhappy with each other fight and then separate. The fighting and separation directly disturb the child, causing long-term depression. The second possibility is more like traditional wisdom: Parents who fight and separate are very unhappy with each other. The fighting and separation themselves have little direct effect on the child, but the child is aware of his parents’ great unhappiness and that so disturbs the child as...

It seems to be a plain fact—at least statistically—that either separation or fighting in response to an unhappy marriage is likely to harm your children in lasting ways. If it turns out that parents’ unhappiness rather than overt fighting is the culprit, I would suggest marital counseling aimed at coming to terms with the shortcomings of the marriage.

But if the act of fighting and the choice to separate turn out to be responsible for children’s depression, very different advice follows if your children’s interest—not your own life satisfaction—is primary for you. Are you willing to forgo separation? An even harder challenge: Are you willing to choose to refrain from fighting?

The only piece of solid research I know about on how to fight concerns resolution. Children who watch films of adults fighting are much less disturbed when the fight ends with a clear resolution. This suggests that when you fight, you should go out of your way to resolve the quarrel, unambiguously and in front of your child. I believe it is important, beyond this, to be aware at the moment

you choose to fight that your fighting may harm your children.

On the other hand, letting anger out often causes delicately poised relationships to topple. Anger escalates and, unresolved, begins to take on a life of its own. The couple winds up living in a balance of recriminations.

But these consequences of not fighting affect you and your spouse. As far as your children are concerned, there is very little to be said in favor of parents’ fighting. Therefore,

I choose to go against the prevailing ethic and recommend that, if it is your children you care most about, you step back and think twice or three times before you fight. Being angry and fighting are not a human right. Consider swallowing anger, sacrificing pride, putting up with less than you deserve from your spouse. Step back before ...

it is your child’s well-being, more than yours, that...

Our research shows the following chain of even...

Parental fighting or separation leads to a marked increase in the child’s depression. The depression itself then causes school problems to increase and explan...

School problems combine with this newly minted pessimism to maintain depression, and a vicious circle has begun. Depression now becomes a...

An escalation of parental fighting, or the decision to separate, marks exactly the point at which your child needs extra help to prevent depression and the shift to pessimism, and to ward off school problems. This is exactly when he will need special help from his teachers and from you. Go out of your way to be very close to your ch...

This is also the time to consider professional help. Therapy for you and your spouse may teach you to fight less and more productively. Therapy for your child at this stage of your marriage ...

At every point in our study, the boys are more depressed than the girls.

Among the boys in the third and fourth grades, a whopping 35 percent are found to be severely depressed at least once in the third and fourth grades.

Boys are more pessimistic and more depressed than girls,

and boys are more fragile in their response to bad events, including divorce.

Something must happen at or shortly after puberty that causes a flip-flop —and hits girls very hard indeed. We

If depression and grieving temporarily lower immune activity, then pessimism, a more chronic state, should lower immune activity in the longer run. Pessimistic individuals, as we saw in chapter five, get depressed more easily and more often. This might mean that pessimistic people generally have poorer immune activity.

As we expected, the optimists had better immune activity than the pessimists. In addition, we found that neither their health nor their depression level at the time of the interview predicted immune response. Pessimism itself seemed to lower immune activity, unmediated by health or depression.

In what situations should you deploy the explanatory style–changing skills these chapters provide? First, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. • If you are in an achievement situation (getting a promotion, selling a product, writing a difficult report, winning a game), use optimism. • If you are concerned about how you will feel (fighting off depression, keeping up your morale), use optimism. • If the situation is apt to be protracted and your physical health is an issue, use optimism. • If you want to lead, if you want to inspire others, if you want people to vote for you,

use optimism. On the other hand, there are times not to use these techniques. • If your goal is to plan for a risky and uncertain future, do not use optimism. • If your goal is to counsel others whose future is dim, do not use optimism initially. • If you want to appear sympathetic to the troubles of others, do not begin with optimism, although using it later, once confidence and empathy are established, may help.

The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is i...

On the other hand, if the cost of failure is low, use optimism. The sales agent deciding whether to make one more call loses only his time if he fails. The shy person deciding whether to attempt to open a conversation risks only rejection. The teenager contemplating learning a new sport risks only frustration. The disgruntled executive, passed over for promotion, risks only some refusals if he quietly puts out feelers for a new position. All should use optimism. This chapter teaches you the basic principles

adversity, belief, and consequence.

THERE ARE TWO general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.

Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating. If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results.

When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, “Stop. I’ll think this over later … at [such and such a time].”

Also, write the troublesome thoughts down the moment they occur. The combination of jotting them down—which acts to ventilate them and dispose of them—and setting a later time to think about them works well; it takes advantage of the reason ruminations exist—to remind you of themselves—and so undercuts them. If you write them down and set a time to think about them, they no longer have any purpose, and purposelessness lessens their strength.

They are merely beliefs, however. And just believing something doesn’t make it so.

It is essential to stand back and suspend belief for a moment, to distance yourself from our pessimistic explanations at least long enough to verify their accuracy.

There are four important ways to make your disputations convincing. • Evidence? • Alternatives? • Implications? • Usefulness?

Most people catastrophize: From all the potential causes, they select the one with the direst implications. One of your most effective techniques in disputation will be to search for evidence pointing to the distortions in your catastrophic explanations. Most of the time you will have reality on your side. Learned optimism works

To dispute your own beliefs, scan for all possible contributing causes. Focus on the changeable (not enough time spent studying), the specific (this particular exam was uncharacteristically hard) and the nonpersonal (the professor graded unfairly) causes.

BUT THE WAY things go in this world, the facts won’t always be on your side. The negative belief you hold about yourself may be correct. In this situation, the technique to use is decatastrophizing.

SOMETIMES the consequences of holding a belief matter more than the truth of the belief. Is the belief destructive? Katie’s belief in her gluttony, even if true, is destructive. It is a recipe for letting go of her diet completely.

Whenever you simply have to perform now, you will find distraction the tool of choice. At this

moment the question to ask yourself is not “Is the belief true?” but “Is it functional for me to think it right now?” If the answer is no, use the distraction techniques. (Stop! Assign a later worry

time. Make a written note of t...

Another tactic is to detail all the ways you can change the situation in the future. Even if the belief is true now, is the situation change...

Explain to your friend that in this situation it is all right to criticize you: You won’t take it personally because this is an exercise to strengthen the way you dispute such criticisms when you make them to yourself. Help your friend choose the right kinds of criticisms by going over your ABC record with him, pointing out the negative beliefs that afflict you repeatedly. 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.

Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for