More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 30 - October 20, 2018
The good news is that both pessimistic explanatory style and rumination can be changed, and changed permanently. Cognitive therapy can create optimistic explanatory style and curtail rumination. It prevents new depressions by teaching the skills needed to bounce back from defeat.
The difference between people whose learned helplessness disappears swiftly and people who suffer their symptoms for two weeks or more is usually simple: Members of the latter group have a pessimistic explanatory style, and a pessimistic explanatory style changes learned helplessness from brief and local to long-lasting and general.
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”).
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.
Many of the patients in the drug groups relapsed, but patients who got cognitive therapy did not relapse at nearly that rate. Patients whose explanatory style became optimistic were less likely to relapse than patients whose style remained pessimistic.
Drugs relieve depression, but only temporarily; unlike cognitive therapy, drugs fail to change the underlying pessimism which is at the root of the problem.
This outcome sews up a causal role for pessimism in depression. It is surely not the only cause of depression—genes, bad events, hormones also put people at risk—but that it is one of the major causes now seems undeniable.
The expectation of helplessness may arise only rarely, or it may arise all the time. The more you are inclined to ruminate, the more it arises. The more it arises, the more depressed you will be.
Changing either rumination or pessimism helps relieve depression. Changing both helps the most.
when trouble strikes, women think and men act. When a woman gets fired from her job, she tries to figure out why; she broods, and she relives the events over and over. A man, upon getting fired, acts: He gets drunk, beats someone up, or otherwise distracts himself from thinking about it. He may even go right out and look for another job, without bothering to think through what went wrong.
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.
If we now live in an age of self-consciousness, in which we are encouraged to take our problems more earnestly and analyze them endlessly rather than act, more depression might well be the result.
Cognitive therapy uses five tactics.
First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.
Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:
Helping troubled people is a worthy goal, but somehow psychology almost never gets around to the complementary goal of making the lives of well people even better.
My subsequent research showed repeatedly that optimists do better in school, win more elections, and succeed more at work than pessimists do. They even seem to lead longer and healthier lives.
people who score pessimistically on the questionnaire give up easily and become depressed.
The people who score at the very optimistic end, I said, should be the most persistent. They’re the most immune to helplessness. They should never give up, no matter how much rejection and failure they encounter.
Traditional wisdom holds that there are two ingredients of success, and you need both to succeed. The first is ability or aptitude, and IQ tests and the SAT are supposed to measure it. The second is desire or motivation. No matter how much aptitude you have, says traditional wisdom, if you lack desire you will fail. Enough desire can make up for meager talent.
The explanatory-style theory of success says that in order to choose people for success in a challenging job, you need to select for three characteristics: aptitude motivation optimism All three determine success.
‘One thing bothers me still,’ John said. “Every business is stuck with some pessimists. Some are entrenched by seniority, others are around because they’re good at what they do. As I’ve gotten older,” he continued, “I find the pessimists weigh on me more and more. They always tell me what I can’t do. They only tell me what’s wrong. I know it’s not their intention, but they curdle action, imagination, and initiative. I believe that most of them—and certainly the company—would be better off if they were more optimistic. “So, here’s my question. Can you take a person who’s had thirty or even
...more
Pessimism may support the realism we so often need. In many arenas of life, optimism is unwarranted. At times we do fail irretrievably, and seeing those times through rose-colored glasses may console us but will not change them.
There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.
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.
But imagine a company that consisted only of optimists, all of them fixed upon the exciting possibilities ahead. It would be a disaster.
The company also needs its pessimists, the people who have an accurate knowledge of present realities. They must make sure grim reality continually intrudes upon the optimists. The treasurer, the CPAs, the financial vice-president, the business administrators, the safety engineers—all these need an accurate sense of how much the company can afford, and of danger. Their role is to caution, their banner is the yellow flag.
So the successful corporation has its optimists, dreamers, salesmen, and creators. But the corporation is a form of modern life that also needs its pessimists, the realists whose job is to counsel caution.
Depression has a rhythm through the day and, at least among some women, through the month. Typically we are more depressed when we wake up, and as the day goes on we become more optimistic. But superimposed on this is our BRAC, our Basic Rest and Activity Cycle. As noted previously, it hits its lows at roughly four in the afternoon and again at four in the morning. Its highs occur in late morning and early evening, although the exact timing varies from person to person.
Children’s antennae are constantly tuned to the way their parents, particularly their mothers, talk about causes of emotionally loaded events.
It is no accident that “Why?” is one of the first and most repeated questions that young children ask. Getting explanations for the world around them, particularly the social world, is the prime intellectual task of growing up.
We were surprised to find that neither the children’s style nor the mother’s style bore any resemblance to the father’s style. This tells us that young children listen to what their primary caretaker (usually their mother) says about causes, and they tend to make this style their own.
He had isolated three protective factors. If any single one of the three was present, depression would not occur, even in the face of severe loss and privation. The first protective factor was an intimate relationship with a spouse or a lover. Such women could fight depression off well. The second was a job outside the home. The third was not having three or more children under the age of fourteen at home to take care of.
Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again. For them, defeat is a challenge, a mere setback on the road to inevitable victory. They see defeat as temporary and specific, not pervasive.
Pessimists wallow in defeat, which they see as permanent and pervasive. They become depressed and stay helpless for very long periods. A setback is a defeat. And a defeat in one battle is the loss of the war. They don’t begin to try again for weeks or months, and if they try, the slightest new setback throws them back into a helpless state.
It used to be said that it is better for the children to have their unhappy parents divorce than to live with two parents who hate each other. But our findings show a bleak picture for these children: prolonged, unrelieved depression; a much higher rate of disruptive events; and, very strangely, much more apparently unrelated misfortune. It would be irresponsible for me not to advise you to take these dismaying data seriously if you are thinking about divorcing.
It seems to be a plain fact—at least statistically—that either separation or fighting in response to an unhappy marriage is likely to harm your children in lasting ways. If it turns out that parents’ unhappiness rather than overt fighting is the culprit, I would suggest marital counseling aimed at coming to terms with the shortcomings of the marriage.
Children who watch films of adults fighting are much less disturbed when the fight ends with a clear resolution. This suggests that when you fight, you should go out of your way to resolve the quarrel, unambiguously and in front of your child.
Being angry and fighting are not a human right. Consider swallowing anger, sacrificing pride, putting up with less than you deserve from your spouse. Step back before provoking your spouse and before answering a provocation. Fighting is a human choice, and it is your child’s well-being, more than yours, that may be at stake.
I think “talent” is vastly overrated. Not only is talent imperfectly measured, not only is it an imperfect predictor of success, but also the traditional wisdom is wrong. It leaves out a factor that can compensate for low scores or greatly diminish the accomplishments of highly talented people: explanatory style.
I have come to think that the notion of potential, without the notion of optimism, has very little meaning.
the individual with the more optimistic explanatory style will go on to win. He will win because he will try harder, particularly after defeat or under stiff challenge.
Such stories are told the world over, frequently enough to inspire the belief that hope is by itself life-sustaining and hopelessness life-destroying.
Almost all modern scientists and physicians are materialists. They resist to the death the notion that thought and emotion can affect the body. For them that is spiritualism. All claims that emotional and cognitive states influence illness run afoul of materialism.
The brain and the immune system are connected not through nerves but through hormones, the chemical messengers that drift through the blood and can transmit emotional state from one part of the body to another.
I suspect, I said, that when human cultures don’t respond to loss and helplessness with depression, it’s because the punishment of endless poverty, of thousands of years of having two out of three children die young, has beaten the natural response of depression out of the culture.
LIFE INFLICTS the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
