Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

one is mild symptoms of depression, and the other is their parents’ fighting a lot. Each of these factors predicts depression in young children.

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

we overestimate our helplessness,

pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters. One way they do this is by converting their own innocence into guilt.

What if depression arises from mistaken inferences we make from the tragedies and setbacks we all experience over the course of a life?

Pumping-up seminars work for a few days or weeks, then more pumping up is needed.

We have found over the years that positive statements you make to yourself have little if any effect. What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.” 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.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen. It is the great modulator of learned helplessness. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness, whereas a pessimistic explanatory style spreads helplessness. Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats.

Each of us carries a word in his heart, a “no” or a “yes.” You probably don’t know intuitively which word lives there, but you can learn, with a fair degree of accuracy, which it is.

came to see that their own actions worked. Once they did, the cure was one hundred percent reliable and permanent.

Learning beforehand that responding matters actually prevents learned helplessness. We even found that dogs taught this mastery as puppies were immunized to learned helplessness all their lives. The implications of that, for human beings, were thrilling.

the solution came down to this: how people explain to themselves the bad things that happen to them.

was the explanations people made, and not the schedule of reinforcement they’d been on, which

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they’re wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along

First, we were interested in habits of explanation, not just the single explanation a person makes for a single failure.

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.

People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

Is it right that I should blame others for my failures? Most assuredly we want people to own up to the messes they make, to be responsible for their actions.

depressed people often take much more responsibility for bad events than is warranted.

If you use a different explanatory style, you’ll be better equipped to cope with troubled times and keep them from propelling you toward depression.

You should find yourself reacting to the normal setbacks of life much more positively and bouncing back from life’s large defeats much more briskly than you did before. You should achieve more on the job, in school, and on the playing field. And in the long run, even your body should serve you better.

believe that our prospects are bleak and that we lack the talent to make them brighter.

It is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry. Emotion comes directly from what we think: Think “I am in danger” and you feel anxiety. Think “I am being trespassed against” and you feel anger. Think “Loss” and you feel sadness.

Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression.

Pessimistic explanatory style, you will recall, consists of certain kinds of explanations for bad events: personal (“It’s my fault”), permanent (“It’s always going to be like this”), and pervasive (“It’s going to undermine every aspect of my life”). If you explain a failure permanently and pervasively, you project your present failure into the future and into all new situations.

Put all this together and you can see there is one particularly self-defeating way to think: making personal, permanent, and pervasive explanations for bad events.

So a recipe for severe depression is preexisting pessimism encountering failure.

When bad events occurred, as they did almost daily, Tanya no longer saw them as unchangeable, pervasive, and her fault. She now began to take action to change things.

the active ingredient in cognitive therapy was a change in explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic. The

The results showed that the key to permanent relief of depression was a change in explanatory style.

IF YOU WALK around disposed to believe of any problem that “it’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I try,” you are set up for depression. But just because you may be disposed to think this way doesn’t necessarily mean you frequently utter such thoughts to yourself. Some people do, some don’t. People who mull over bad events are called ruminators.

an unbroken string of sour musings with no action statements at all. It

If depression is a disorder of thinking, pessimism and rumination stoke it. The tendency to analyze feeds right into it; the tendency to act breaks it up.

women’s likelier first reaction to trouble—rumination—leads right into depression.

The self-improving self actually improves itself.

The belief in self-improvement is a prophecy just as self-fulfilling as the old belief that character could not be changed. People who believe they don’t have to be sedentary or hostile will try to take the steps that get them jogging or make them think twice when trespassed against; people who don’t believe change is possible will indeed remain incapable of change. A culture believing in self-improvement will support health clubs, Alcoholics Anonymous, and psychotherapy. A culture believing that bad action stems from bad character and is permanent won’t even try.

Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts. The mother might learn to say something like: “I’m fine with the kids in the P.M. and terrible in the A.M. Maybe I’m not a morning person.”

yourself, you believe them. This is because you think the source, yourself, is more credible. It isn’t. Often we distort reality more than drunks do.”

“Can you predict who’ll never give up and who won’t become depressed no matter what you do to them?”

There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.

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.

25. You play a game and you win. A. Sometimes I try as hard as I can at games. 0 B. Sometimes I try as hard as I can. 1 26. You get a bad grade in school. PsB A. I am stupid. 1 B.

Common sense tells us that success makes people optimistic. But in this book we have seen repeatedly that the arrow goes in the opposite direction as well. Optimistic people become successes.

The optimistic individual perseveres. In the face of routine setbacks, and even of major failures, he persists. When he comes to the wall at work, he keeps going, particularly at the crucial juncture when his competition is also hitting the wall and starting to wilt.

DISPUTING YOUR OWN negative thoughts is a life skill that any child can learn. Like any acquired skill, it will seem a little awkward when first employed.

The earlier in life this skill is learned the more grief will be avoided.

When the skills of optimism are learned early, they become fundamental. Like habits of cleanliness and kindness, they are so rewarding in themselves that practice is automatic rather than a burden. But

If he does acquire them, he may become all but immune from the protracted feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that otherwise could afflict him.

LEARNED OPTIMISM gets people over the wall—and not just as individuals. The explanatory style of a whole team, as we saw in chapter nine, can produce victory or defeat.

Much of the skill of dealing with setbacks, of getting over the wall, consists of learning how to dispute your own first thoughts in reaction to a setback.