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For the “Pleasant Life,” you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion. For the “Engaged Life,” you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure. For the “Meaningful Life,” you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.
unwarranted self-esteem causes violence.
Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue.
When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, t...
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the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly th...
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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, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. 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
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They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.
Tests reveal traces of pessimism in the speech of people who would never think of themselves as pessimists; they also show that these traces are sensed by others, who react negatively to the speakers.
Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists,
Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you.
The very thought “Nothing I do matters” prevents us from acting.
if we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise.
Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.
people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters.
a pessimistic habit of thinking. If she had said to herself, “I was robbed. The jealous bastard set me up,” she would have risen to her own defense and told her story.
One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.
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.
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.
asked for his solution to the problem he had posed, about who is vulnerable to helplessness and who is not. I learned that for Teasdale the solution came down to this: how people explain to themselves the bad things that happen to them.
therapy for helplessness and depression should be based on changing people’s explanations.
people’s explanatory style could cause helplessness and depression.
two dimensions of explanation—permanence and personalization—we introduced another—pervasiveness—to make three.
HOW DO you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.”
Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and, besides, there’s much more in life.”
THERE ARE three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
If you think about bad things in always’s and never’s and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in sometimes’s and lately’s, if you use qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style. Now turn back to your test.
Pessimists name transient causes: moods, effort, sometimes’s.
People who believe good events have permanent causes try even harder after they succeed. People who see temporary reasons for good events may give up even when they succeed, believing success was a fluke.
Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels.
People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area.
People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march...
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Do you catastrophize?
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope:
People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations.
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
Certain psychological doctrines have damaged our society by helping to erode personal responsibility: Evil is mislabeled insanity; bad manners are shucked off as neurosis;
If you scored poorly, there are four areas where you will encounter (and probably already have encountered) trouble. First, as we will see in the next chapter, you are likely to get depressed easily. Second, you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant. Third, your physical health—and your immune function—are probably not what they should be, and this may get even worse as you get older. Finally, life is not as pleasurable as it should be. Pessimistic explanatory style is a misery.
Your immune system may not work as well as it should; you will probably suffer more infectious diseases and recuperate more slowly.
When you’re depressed, small obstacles seem like insurmountable barriers. You believe everything you touch turns to ashes.
endless supply of reasons why each of your successes is really a failure.
A pessimistic explanatory style is at the core of depressed thinking.
A negative concept of the future, the self, and the world stems from seeing the causes of bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal, and seeing the causes of good events in the opposite way.
The third symptom of depression concerns behavior. The depressive shows three behavioral symptoms: passivity, indecisiveness,
Depressed people cannot decide among alternatives.
learned helplessness was a laboratory model of the real-world phenomenon called depression,
learned helplessness. It was caused by experience in which subjects learned that nothing they did mattered and that their responses didn’t work to bring them what they wanted.
learned helplessness seemed to be at the core of defeat and failure.
learned helplessness produced in the laboratory seemed almost identical to depression.
Depression could be caused by defeat, failure, and loss and the consequent belief that any actions taken will be futile.
Depressives think awful things about themselves and their future.
