Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

optimism has been proven especially important in jobs that have high recruitment and training costs and a high turnover rate.

Optimism is essential in careers with high turnover rates

Strong optimism is an obvious virtue for “high-defeat” and “high-stress” jobs that require initiative, persistence, and bold dreaming.

These are the fields in which optimistic explanatory style is a must: Sales Brokering

Public relations Presenting and Acting Fund-raising Creative jobs Highly competitive jobs High-burnout jobs

pessimists do well in these fields: Design and safety engineering Technical and cost estimating Contract negotiation Financial control and accounting Law (but not litigation) Business administration

Statistics Technical writing Quality control Personnel and industrial-relations management

Encountering adversity always sets off your beliefs, your explanation and interpretation of why things have gone wrong.

The first thing we do when we encounter adversity is try to explain it.

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.

When our explanations take the opposite form, we become energized.

“I’m a lousy sales agent” is personal, permanent, and pervasive—the recipe for depression.

Each time you find yourself suddenly deflated, sad, angry, anxious, or frustrated at work, write down the thought that came right before. You will find these thoughts look much like your answers to the ABC exercises.

the things we say to ourselves when trouble strikes can be just as baseless as the ravings of a drunk on the street.

disputing your pessimistic explanations

Fortunately, mastering the skill of disputing doesn’t take much training. You do this daily,

You have had a lifetime of practice disputing other people’...

But what you have missed is treating your own ...

when you began to dispute your negative beliefs, the consequences changed from dejection and lethargy to invigoration and feeling better.

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

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.

Master the important skill of decatastrophizing by examining the situation’s most realistic implications.

you should distract yourself from your negative beliefs. There are three reliable ways to accomplish that. Each is simplistic but effective: • Do something physically distracting, like snapping a rubber band on your wrist,

dashing cold water on your face while saying “Stop!” to yourself.

Schedule a specific time for thinking...

When you find yourself ruminating, you can say to yourself, “Stop! I’ll tackle that at s...

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 ...

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.

Great idea: write down ruminating thoughts

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.

Now, 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.

AS WE SAW in chapter four, depression has been on the rise since World War II.

Young people today are ten times likelier to suffer severe depression than their grandparents were,

THE SOCIETY we live in exalts the self. It takes the pleasures and pains, the successes and failures of the individual with unprecedented seriousness.

There are hundreds of kinds of aspirin and thousands of kinds of beer. To create the market for all this, advertising whipped up a great enthusiasm for personal control. The deciding, choosing, hedonistically preoccupied individual became big business.

Americans on the average now have more buying power than any other people in history.

Our job used to be counted satisfactory if it brought home the bacon. Not so today. It must also be meaningful. There must be room to move up.

Marriage also now requires more than it used to. It’s no longer just a matter of raising children. Our mate must be eternally sexy, and thin, and interesting to talk to, and good at tennis.

These inflated expectations are rooted in the expansion of choice.

The modern individual is not the peasant of yore with a fixed f...

From the Middle Ages until the late Renaissance the self was minimal;

I call this new self, with its absorbing concern for its gratifications and losses, the maximal self

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.

I believe that our epidemic of depression is a creature of the maximal self.

diminished sense of community

THE LIFE COMMITTED to nothing larger than itself is a meager life indeed.

Human beings require a context of meaning and hope.

many in my generation shifted their commitment, out of fear and out of despair, from careers in public service to careers in which we could at least make ourselves happy. This shift from the public good to private goods was reinforced by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War taught those a bit younger

decade of war eroded youth’s commitment to patriotism and America.

the lesson of Vietnam, Watergate was h...

This erosion of commitment, in turn, caused people to look inward for satisfaction, to focus upon their own lives.

social trends were nullifying God and the family, as scholars have noted.