Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.

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.

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.

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

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.

“Science is rooted in … common sense thought. That is the datum from which it starts, and to which it must recur.… You may polish up common sense, you may contradict it in detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it.”

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

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.

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

The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence. The second step is to see how the ABCs operate every day in your own life.

By effectively disputing the beliefs that follow adversity, you can change your customary reaction from dejection and giving up to activity and good cheer.

THE MOST CONVINCING way of disputing a negative belief is to show that it is factually incorrect. Much of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions. You adopt the role of a detective and ask, “What is the evidence for this belief?”

Learned optimism works not through an unjustifiable positivity about the world but through the power of “non-negative” thinking.

The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life.

So optimism’s benefits are not unbounded. Pessimism has a role to play, both in society at large and in our own lives; we must have the courage to endure pessimism when its perspective is valuable. What we want is not blind optimism but flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open. We must be able to use pessimism’s keen sense of reality when we need it, but without having to dwell in its dark shadows.