Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

pessimistic people generally have poorer immune activity.

we found that explanatory style for bad events was highly stable across a period of more than fifty years.

The body is at all times exposed to pathogens—agents of disease—normally held in check by the immune system. When the immune system is partly shut down by the catecholamine-endorphin link, these pathogens can go wild. Disease, sometimes life-threatening, becomes more likely.

psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how psychological events change health and the immune system.

Let’s change explanatory style, and, yes, read my lips, cure cancer.”

cognitive therapy strongly enhanced immune activity

low in rumination, optimistic in explanatory style, and replete with reference to action.

The permanent and pervasive statements that pessimists make about bad events signal hopelessness.

permanence and for pervasiveness

explanatory style and rumination.

Depression, I said, doesn’t seem to occur in non-Western cultures at anything like the epidemic rate it does in Westernized ones.

Perhaps cultures that aren’t obsessed with achievement don’t suffer the effects of helplessness and pessimism the way we do.

is there such a thing as a national explanatory style, one that predicts how a nation or a people will behave in crisis? Does one particular form of government engender more hope than another?”

East Berliners are more pessimistic and depressed than West Berliners.

She counted everything observable that the literature considers related to depression: smiles, laughs, posture, vigorous hand movements, small movements like biting one’s nails.

Sixty-nine percent of West Berliners smiled, but only 23 percent of East Berliners. Fifty percent of West Berliners sat or stood upright, but only 4 percent (!) of East Berliners. Eighty percent of West Berlin workmen had their bodies in an open posture—turned toward others—but only 7 percent (!) of the East Berliners did. West Berliners laughed two and a half

staunch churchgoers experience less depression than nonchurchgoers.

Eva presented evidence that the Jews were much less helpless in the face of oppression than the Slavs were.

She posed the question of why, when things got intolerable, the Jews got up and left and the Slavs did not. “Both groups,” Eva contended, were terribly oppressed. “The peasant Slavs lived under unrelieved, crushing poverty, poverty of a degree unknown in this country.

Eva and Gabriele showed that Russian Judaism was more optimistic than Russian Orthodoxy in its stories and prayers.

explanatory style of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria should predict how successfully these nations will exploit their newly won freedom.

learning a set of skills about how to talk to yourself when you suffer a personal defeat.

adversity, belief, and consequence. The second step is to see how the ABCs operate every day in your own life.

To do this, tune in on the perpetual dialogue that takes place in your mind and that you are usually unaware of. It’s a matter of picking up the connection between a certain adversity—even a very minor one—and a consequent feeling.

• Evidence? • Alternatives? • Implications? • Usefulness?

pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions. You adopt the role of a detective and ask, “What is the evidence for this belief?”

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 not through an unjustifiable positivity about the world but through the power of “non-negative” thinking.

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.

decatastrophizing. Even if my belief is

ABCDE model. You already know what ABC stands for. D is for disputation; E is for energization.

When our explanatory beliefs take the form of personal, permanent, and pervasive factors (“It’s my fault … it’s always going to be like this … it’s going to affect everything I do”), we give up and become paralyzed.

What you had to do was, first, to make the reason for the criticism something you could change, something unstable: “I know where I can get help at effective writing” or “I should have proofread it.” Second, you had to make your thinking less pervasive: “It was only this report that was poor.” Third, you had to shift the blame away from yourself: “My boss was in a terrible mood.” “There was too much time pressure on me.” If you can habitually make these three moves at the point of belief, adversity can become a springboard to success.

When you have recorded your five ABC episodes, look over your beliefs carefully. You will see that in your own internal dialogue, pessimistic explanations set off passivity and dejection, whereas optimistic explanations set off activity.

four tacks to take in effective disputation with yourself. Evidence? Alternatives? Implications? Usefulness?

Evidence: Shift to the role of detective and ask yourself, “What is the evidence both for and against the belief?”

Often you will find you have catastrophized, jumped to the worst possible conclusion in the absence of solid evidence—sometimes just on the thinnest hunch. Alternatives:

Is there any other way to look at the adversity?

Implications: What if your dark explanation is right? Is it the end of the world?

Just because a situation is unfavorable doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a catastrophe. Master the important skill of decatastrophizing by examining the situation’s most realistic implications.

• Do something physically distracting, like snapping a rubber band on your wrist, or dashing cold water on your face while saying “Stop!” to yourself.

might be a half hour this evening or any other time that fits into your day. When you find yourself ruminating, you can say to yourself, “Stop! I’ll tackle that at seven-thirty this evening.” The tormenting process of worrisome thoughts going round and round, coming back again and again, has a purpose: to make sure we don’t forget or neglect an issue we should deal with. But if we set aside a specific time for thinking the issue over, we undercut the very reason for brooding now, so the brooding is no longer psychologically necessary. • Write the troublesome thoughts down at the moment they occur. Now you can return to them not helplessly but deliberately, when the time is right for you. Like the second technique for distraction, this one also robs brooding of its very reason for existence.

ARMED WITH THESE four ways of disputing your pessimistic explanations—evidence? alternatives? implications? usefulness?—you now can get some practice at externalizing your disputation: bringing your thoughts out into the open where they can be dealt with.

you learned to tune into your own negative dialogue by writing down the beliefs you have when adversity strikes. You saw that when these beliefs were pessimistic, dejection and passivity usually followed. If you could change those automatic explanations of adversity, you could change the consequent feelings to invigoration and good cheer.

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.

distinguish it from what it has replaced, the minimal, or Yankee, self, the self our grandparents had. The Yankee self, like the medieval self, did little more than just behave; it was certainly less preoccupied with how it felt. It was less concerned with feelings and more concerned with duty.

THE LIFE COMMITTED to nothing larger than itself is a meager

life indeed. Human beings require a context of meaning and hope.

I call the larger setting the commons. It consists of a belief in the nation, in God, in one’s family, or in a purpose that transcends our lives.

While political events were nullifying the old idea of the nation, social trends were nullifying God and the family, as scholars have noted. Religion or the family might have replaced the nation as a source of hope and purpose, keeping us from turning inward. But, by unfortunate coincidence, the erosion of belief in the nation coincided with a breakdown of the

family and a decline of belief in God.