Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

I am not against self-esteem, but I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low. I have scoured the self-esteem literature looking for the causality as opposed to correlation, looking for any evidence that high self-esteem among youngsters causes better grades, more popularity, less teenage pregnancy, less dependence on welfare, as the California report contends.

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.

As you read this book, you will see that there is an epidemic of depression among adults and among children in the United States today. As Chapters 6–10 document, depression is not just about mental suffering; it is also about lowered productivity and worsened physical health. If this epidemic continues, I believe that America’s place in the world will be in jeopardy. America will lose its economic place to less pessimistic nations than ours, and this pessimism will sap our will to bring about social justice in our own country.

yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skilfully curled) all worlds

Later in this book we will see that judiciously employed, mild pessimism has its uses. But twenty-five years of study has convinced me that if we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise. I am also convinced that if we are in the grip of this view, we will get depressed easily, we will accomplish less than our potential, and we will even get physically sick more often. Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.

Worst of all, the biomedical approach makes patients out of essentially normal people and makes them dependent on outside forces—pills dispensed by a benevolent physician. Antidepressant drugs are not addicting in the usual sense; the patient does not crave them when they are withdrawn. Rather, when the successfully treated patient stops taking his drugs, the depression often returns. The effectively drugged patient cannot credit himself for carving out his happiness and his ability to function with a semblance of normality; he must credit the pills.

What if depression is not something you are motivated to bring upon yourself but something that just descends upon you? What if depression is not an illness but a severe low mood? What if you are not a prisoner of past conflicts in the way you react? What if depression is in fact set off by present troubles? What if you are not a prisoner of your genes or your brain chemistry, either? What if depression arises from mistaken inferences we make from the tragedies and setbacks we all experience over the course of a life? What if depression occurs merely when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks? What if we can unlearn pessimism and acquire the skills of looking at setbacks optimistically?

What if there is a third factor—optimism or pessimism—that matters as much as talent or desire? What if you can have all the talent and desire necessary—yet, if you are a pessimist, still fail? What if optimists do better at school, at work, and on the playing field? What if optimism is a learned skill, one that can be permanently acquired? What if we can instill this skill in our children?

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. I think of your explanatory style as reflecting “the word in your heart.”

Each of us carries a word in his heart, a “no” or a “yes.”

The phrase “adding epicycles” came to be applied to scientists in any field who, having trouble defending a tottering thesis, desperately postulate unlikely subtheses in hopes of buttressing it.

This view ran against the existing belief about achievement, the classic demonstration of which was called PREE—the partial reinforcement extinction effect. PREE is an old chestnut of learning theory. If you give a rat a food pellet every time he presses a bar, this is called “continuous reinforcement”; the ratio of reward to effort is one-to-one, one pellet for one bar-press. If you then stop giving him food for pressing the bar (“extinction”), he’ll press the bar three or four times and then quit completely, because he can see he’s never getting fed anymore, since the contrast is so great. If, on the other hand, instead of one-for-one reinforcement, you give the rat “partial” reinforcement—say, an average of only one pellet for every five or ten times he presses—and then start extinction, he’ll press the bar a hundred times before he gives up.

It was the explanations people made, and not the schedule of reinforcement they’d been on, which determined their susceptibility to PREE.

Throughout my career, I’ve never had much use for the tendency among psychologists to shun criticism. It’s a longstanding tradition acquired from the field of psychiatry, with its medical authoritarianism and its reluctance to admit error. Going back at least to Freud, the world of the research psychiatrists has been dominated by a handful of despots who treat dissenters like invading barbarians usurping their domain. One critical word from a young disciple and he was banished. I’ve preferred the humanistic tradition. To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality.

I had always stressed to my students the importance of welcoming criticism. “I want to be told,” I had always said. “In this lab, the payoff is for originality, not toadyism.”

HOW DO you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.” Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and, besides, there’s much more in life.” Your habitual way of explaining bad events, your explanatory style, is more than just the words you mouth when you fail. It is a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

THERE ARE three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

PEOPLE WHO give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary.

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.

THE optimistic style of explaining good events is just the opposite of the optimistic style of explaining bad events. People who believe good events have permanent causes are more optimistic than people who believe they have temporary causes.

Optimistic people explain good events to themselves in terms of permanent causes: traits, abilities, always’s. Pessimists name transient causes: moods, effort, sometimes’s.

PERMANENCE is about time. Pervasiveness is about space.

Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.

Now for the converse. The optimistic explanatory style for good events is opposite that for bad events. The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When Nora was offered temporary work back at the company, she thought: “They finally realized they can’t get along without me.” When Kevin got the same offer he thought: “They must really be shorthanded.”

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style: pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.

People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations. No other single score is as important as your hope score.

When bad things happen, we can blame ourselves (internalize) or we can blame other people or circumstances (externalize). People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who blame themselves do. Low self-esteem usually comes from an internal style for bad events.

Of the three dimensions of explanatory style, personalization is the easiest to understand. After all, one of the first things a child learns to say is “He did it, not me!” Personalization is also the easiest dimension to overrate. It controls only how you feel about yourself, but pervasiveness and permanence—the more important dimensions—control what you do: how long you are helpless and across how many situations.

Here’s one last piece of information for you, before you get your totals: The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

There is a deeper matter to deal with here: the question of why people should own up to their failures in the first place. The answer, I believe, is that we want people to change, and we know they will not change if they do not assume responsibility. If we want people to change, internality is not as crucial as the permanence dimension is. If you believe the cause of your mess is permanent—stupidity, lack of talent, ugliness—you will not act to change it. You will not act to improve yourself. If, however, you believe the cause is temporary—a bad mood, too little effort, overweight—you can act to change it. If we want people to be responsible for what they do, then yes, we want them to have an internal style. More important, people must have a temporary style for bad events—they must believe that whatever the cause of the bad event, it can be changed.

IT MATTERS a great deal if your explanatory style is pessimistic. If you scored poorly, there are four areas where you will encounter (and probably already have encountered) trouble. First, as we will see in the next chapter, you are likely to get depressed easily. Second, you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant. Third, your physical health—and your immune function—are probably not what they should be, and this may get even worse as you get older. Finally, life is not as pleasurable as it should be. Pessimistic explanatory style is a misery.

When you’re depressed, small obstacles seem like insurmountable barriers. You believe everything you touch turns to ashes. You have an endless supply of reasons why each of your successes is really a failure.

We knew the cause of learned helplessness, and now we could see it as the cause of depression: the belief that your actions will be futile.

Ellis was as outrageous in his new field as he’d been in the old. Gaunt and angular, always in motion, he sounded like a (very effective) vacuum-cleaner salesman. With patients, he pushed and pushed until he had persuaded them to give up the irrational beliefs that sustained their depression. “What do you mean you can’t live without love?” he would cry. “Utter nonsense. Love comes rarely in life, and if you waste your life mooning over its all too ordinary absence, you are bringing on your own depression. You are living under a tyranny of should’s. Stop ‘should-ing’ on yourself!” Ellis believed that what others thought of as deep neurotic conflict was simply bad thinking—“stupid behavior on the part of nonstupid people,” he called it—and in a loud, propagandistic way (he called himself a counterpropagandist) he would demand that his patients stop thinking wrong and start thinking right. Surprisingly, most of his patients got better. Ellis successfully challenged the hallowed belief that mental illness is an enormously intricate, even mysterious phenomenon, curable only when deep unconscious conflicts are brought to light or a medical illness is rooted out. In the complexified world of psychology, this stripped-down approach came off as revolutionary.

Depressives think awful things about themselves and their future. Maybe that’s all there is to depression, Tim reasoned. Maybe what looks like a symptom of depression—negative thinking—is the disease.

Depression is nothing more than its symptoms. 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. This ends the bad news. The good news is that both pessimistic explanatory style and rumination can be changed, and changed permanently.

Thirty percent of the people who (by their own definition of failure) failed the midterm got very depressed. And 30 percent of the people who were pessimists in September did, too. But 70 percent of the people who both were pessimists in September and failed the exam got depressed. So a recipe for severe depression is preexisting pessimism encountering failure.

We found that the children who started out as pessimists were the ones most likely, over the four years, to get depressed and stay depressed.

The same pattern held in a diary study in which men and women wrote down everything they did as bad moods struck: Women thought and analyzed their mood; men distracted themselves. In a study of couples in conflict, each person dictated into a tape recorder what he or she did every time there was marital trouble. In overwhelming proportions the women focused on and expressed their emotion, and the men distracted themselves or decided not to be concerned with their mood. Finally, in a laboratory study, men and women were offered a choice of two tasks when they were sad. They could choose to list the words that best described their mood (a task focusing on the depression) or rank a list of nations in order of their wealth (a distracting task). Seventy percent of the women chose the emotion-focused task, listing the words that described their mood. With men, however, the percentages were reversed.

So analyzing and wallowing in emotion when distressed seems a likely explanation for why women are more depressed than men. This implies that men and women experience mild depression at the same rate, but in women, who dwell on the state, the mild depression escalates; men, on the other hand, dissolve the state by distracting themselves, by action or perhaps by drinking it away. We are left with two plausible views that have some support. One is that women learn more helplessness and pessimism, and the second is that women’s likelier first reaction to trouble—rumination—leads right into depression.

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. The mother learns that thinking these negative things now is not inevitable. Rumination, particularly when one is under pressure to perform well, makes the situation even worse. Often it is better to put off thinking, in order to do your best. You can learn to control not only what you think but when you think it. Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:

Leslie was persistent, a full-blown optimist who seemed to have no doubt that I would be enthralled by his words of wisdom. And in fact, as the plane neared Nevada, with the snowcapped Sierras beneath us, I found myself being drawn in. “My people,” he announced, “developed the video recorder for Ampex. That was the most creative group I ever led.” “What separates your creative groups from your turkeys?” I asked. “Each person,” he said, “every one of them, believes he can walk on water.”

‘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.

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.

As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren’t very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were.

Pessimism promotes depression. Pessimism produces inertia rather than activity in the face of setbacks. Pessimism feels bad subjectively—blue, down, worried, anxious. Pessimism is self-fulfilling. Pessimists don’t persist in the face of challenges, and therefore fail more frequently—even when success is attainable. Pessimism is associated with poor physical health (see chapter ten). Pessimists are defeated when they try for high office (see chapter eleven). Even when pessimists are right and things turn out badly, they still feel worse. Their explanatory style now converts the predicted setback into a disaster, a disaster into a catastrophe.