Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

Strangely one can both be happy and sad (although not in the same instant). Women, in fact, being more emotionally labile, are both happier and sadder than men. The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry. Psychology had

Until January 1996, I believed that self-esteem was merely a meter with little, if any, causal efficacy. The lead article in the Psychological Review convinced me that I was wrong, and that self-esteem is causal: Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1996)3 reviewed the literature on genocidal killers, on hit men, on gang leaders, and on violent criminals. They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that 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 than how we value how well they are doing in the world.

the dominant theories in psychology shifted focus in the late 1960s from the power of the environment to individual expectation, preference, choice, decision, control, and helplessness.

Sigmund Freud.

It is hard to believe that intelligent people could have long subscribed to such an idea, but since the end of World War I, American psychology had been ruled by the dogmas of behaviorism. The appeal of this notion, so implausible on its face, is basically ideological. Behaviorism takes an enormously optimistic view of the human organism, one that makes progress appealingly simple: All you have to do to change the person is to change the environment. People commit crimes because they are poor, and so if poverty is eliminated, crime will disappear. If you catch a thief, you can rehabilitate him by changing the contingencies in his life: Punish him for stealing and reward him for whatever constructive behavior he might display. Prejudice is caused by ignorance about the people you are prejudiced against and can be overcome by getting to know them. Stupidity is caused by deprivation of education and can be overcome by universal schooling.

Her major was philosophy, and she’d become particularly attracted to existentialism. She accepted the doctrine that life was absurd, and this too filled her with despair.

These simple results directly identified the source of 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. This experience taught them to expect that, in the future and in new situations, their actions would once again be futile.

Learned helplessness could be cured by showing the subject his own actions would now work. It could also be cured by teaching the subject to think differently about what caused him to fail. It could be prevented if, before the experience with helplessness occurred, the subject learned that his actions made a difference. The earlier in life such mastery was learned, the more effective

the immunization against helplessness.

DSM-III-R is a little like ordering dinner

To be diagnosed as suffering a “major depressive episode” you must have five of the following nine symptoms: Depressed mood Loss of interest in usual activities Loss of appetite Insomnia Psychomotor retardation (slow thought or movement) Loss of energy Feelings of worthlessness and guilt Diminished ability to think and poor concentration Suicidal thought or action

This is the central prediction from my theory: People who have a pessimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will probably become depressed, whereas people who have an optimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will tend to resist depression.

There is evidence of a genetic contribution to depression, but there is no evidence that genes contribute more to depression in women than in men. Three interesting theories

In fact, depression itself may set off rumination more in women than men. When we find ourselves depressed, what do we do? 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 are more often alcoholic than women are; perhaps the difference is great enough to enable us to say: Men drink, women get depressed. It might be that men drink to forget their troubles while women ruminate. The woman, ruminating away about the source of the depression, will only get more depressed, whereas the man, responding by taking action, may cut depression off.

Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do: “I can’t live without love.” “Unless everything I do is perfect, I’m a failure.” “Unless everybody likes me, I’m a failure.” “There is a perfect right solution for every problem. I must find it.” Premises like these set you up for depression. If you choose to live by them—as so many of us do—your life will be filled with black days and blue weeks. But just as a person can change his explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, he can also choose a new set of more human premises to live by: “Love is precious but rare.” “Success is doing my best.” “For every person who likes you, one person doesn’t like you.” “Life consists of putting my fingers in the biggest leaks in the dam.”

“Tell me exactly how optimism could help,” Creedon replied. “Let’s take cold calling, a crucial part of selling life insurance. In cold calling, you have a list of possible prospects, like the names of all the parents of new babies in a town. You start calling, from the top of the list, and you try to make a face-to-face appointment. Most people say, ‘No, I’m not interested’—or even just hang up on you.” I explained that optimistic explanatory style should affect not what the insurance agent says to prospects but what he says to himself when the prospect says no. Pessimistic salesmen, I told Creedon, will say permanent, pervasive, and personal things to themselves, like “I’m no good” or “No one wants to buy insurance from me” or “I can’t even get to first base.” This undoubtedly will produce the giving-up response and make it harder to dial the next prospect. After several such episodes, I predicted, the pessimistic agent will quit for the evening—and eventually quit altogether.

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.

SO WE HAVE evidence for three kinds of influences on your child’s explanatory style. First, the form of the everyday causal analyses he hears from you—especially if you are his mother: If yours are optimistic, his will be too. Second, the form of the criticisms he hears when he fails: If they are permanent and pervasive, his view of himself will turn toward pessimism. Third, the reality of his early losses and traumas: If they remit, he will develop the theory that bad events can be changed and conquered. But if they are, in fact, permanent and pervasive, the seeds of hopelessness have been deeply planted.

For example, if you were trying to predict the birth weight of a baby from the weights of its parents, you might look at the last thousand babies born in a certain hospital and note their weights, and then note their parents’ weights, and you might find that if you divide the mother’s weight by 21.7 and the father’s weight by 43.4 and then average those two numbers, the result would correspond to the baby’s birth weight. There would be no significance in the number 21.7 or the number 43.4; the weights wouldn’t connect to any law of nature; they’d be statistical accidents. Regression equations are what you do when you don’t know what else to do.

IT’S A matter of ABC*: When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into beliefs. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop and focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have consequences. The beliefs are the direct causes of what we feel and what we do next. They can spell the difference between dejection and giving up, on the one hand, and well-being and constructive action on the other.

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.

The epidemic of depression stems from the much-noted rise in individualism and the decline in the commitment to the common good. This means there are two ways out: First, changing the balance of individualism and the commons; second, exploiting the strengths of the maximal self.