Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

CHILDREN’S ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE QUESTIONNAIRE (CASQ)

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.

We hypothesized that there are two major risk factors for depression and poor achievement among children: • Pessimistic explanatory style. Children who see bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal will over time get depressed and do badly in school. • Bad life events. Children who suffer the most bad events—parents separating, family deaths, family job loss—will do worst.

Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep. Is the American public as “uncivilized” as the news producers think? Are we incapable of understanding statistical arguments or do we only understand anecdotes? You only have to spend an afternoon in any baseball park in America to know how badly the general public’s capacity to appreciate and enjoy statistics has been underestimated by our tastemakers. Every child over six in the park knows what a .300 hitter is and knows Tony Gwynn is more likely to get a hit than Juan Samuel is.

Within a month, 50 percent of the rats not shocked had died, and the other 50 percent of the no-shock rats had rejected the tumor; this was the normal ratio. As for the rats that mastered shock by pressing a bar to turn it off, 70 percent rejected the tumor. But only 27 percent of the helpless rats, the rats that had experienced uncontrollable shock, rejected the tumor. Madelon Visintainer thus became the first person to demonstrate that a psychological state—learned helplessness—could cause cancer.

A third way in which optimism should matter for health concerns the sheer number of bad life events encountered. It has been shown statistically that the more bad events a person encounters in any given time period, the more illness he will have. People who in the same six months move, get fired, and get divorced are at greater risk for infectious illness—and even for heart attacks and cancer—than are people who lead uneventful lives. This is why when major change occurs in your life, it is important to have physical checkups more frequently than usual. Even if you are feeling fine, it is particularly important to watch your health carefully when you change jobs, leave a relationship, or retire, or when someone you love dies.

Other studies looked at breast cancer. In a pioneering British study, sixty-nine women with breast cancer were followed for five years. Women who did not suffer a recurrence tended to be those who responded to cancer with a “fighting spirit,” whereas those who died or who suffered a recurrence tended to respond to their initial diagnosis with helplessness and stoic acceptance.

I do not believe that when a patient has such a lethal load of cancer as to be deemed “terminal,” psychological processes can do much good. At the margin, however, when tumor load is small, when illness is beginning to progress, optimism might spell the difference between life and death.

What we saw was that health at age sixty was strongly related to optimism at age twenty-five. The pessimistic men had started to come down with the diseases of middle age earlier and more severely than the optimistic men, and the differences in health by age forty-five were already large. Before age forty-five optimism has no effect on health. Until that age the men remained in the same state of health as at age twenty-five. But at age forty-five the male body starts its decline. How fast and how severely it does so is well predicted by pessimism twenty-five years earlier.

The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy. The pilot in the cockpit deciding whether to de-ice the plane one more time, the partygoer deciding whether to drive home after drinking, the frustrated spouse deciding whether to start an affair that, should it come to light, would break up the marriage should not use optimism.

On the other hand, if the cost of failure is low, use optimism. The sales agent deciding whether to make one more call loses only his time if he fails. The shy person deciding whether to attempt to open a conversation risks only rejection. The teenager contemplating learning a new sport risks only frustration. The disgruntled executive, passed over for promotion, risks only some refusals if he quietly puts out feelers for a new position. All should use optimism.

The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence.

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.

You probably find that you have almost no capacity to refrain from thinking about the pie. But you do have the capacity to redeploy your attention. Think about the pie again. Got it. Mouth-watering? Now stand up and slam the palm of your hand against the wall and shout “STOP!” The image of the pie disappeared, didn’t it? This is one of several simple but highly effective thought-stopping techniques used by people who are trying to interrupt habitual thought patterns. Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating. If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results. To keep your thoughts from returning to a negative belief after interruption (by snapping a rubber band or whatever), now direct your attention elsewhere.

Finally, you can undercut ruminations by taking advantage of their very nature. Their nature is to circle around in your mind, so that you will not forget them, so that you will act on them. When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, “Stop. I’ll think this over later … at [such and such a time].”