Having an optimistic attitude can lead to a more stable and less stressful emotional life with stronger coping strategies and quicker recovery from illness. Also, popular with people, optimists are better at initiating and maintaining relationships. 

The optimistic attitude that I want to encourage is not unbounded and exaggerated optimism in a Willy Wonka style, but is purely a more realistic yet self-confident and balanced, approach to life.  

We tend to think of optimism and pessimism as fixed in people, like it’s part of their personality. Whilst there may be a smidgen of something in this (because personality is the sum of our genetic temperament and life experience), the way that we perceive and think about ourselves, others, life, and the world is definitely something we can alter when we recognise our thinking biases. Once we understand that we tend to see a glass half-empty, we can have some agency in shifting that perspective to half-full…it just takes some willingness, time, and effort.

The founding father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, was himself a confessed depressive whose concept of ‘Learned Helplessness’ in the field of depression was seminal. But, wanting to translate his research into something beneficial people could apply, he turned his research on its head and decided to focus on what non-depressed, optimistic people did differently instead. He discovered (along with what the founding father of CBT, Aaron Beck, also concluded), that the answer lies in our thought patterns, calling his new concept ‘Learned Optimism’.

Seligman discovered that when life events turn sour, or we don’t succeed at something, pessimists tend to perceive the reasons why as being personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Personal: “It’s my fault, I’m worthless, unloveable, talentless”.  A self-critical inner monologue dominates.

Permanent: It will always be this way, things can’t and won’t change. “I’ll always be bad at this, that’s just me”

Pervasive: It happened here and now so it will happen there and then, failure will be in all areas of life. “I did a terrible job…I won’t ever get asked again”

Whereas an optimist will see the reasons for failure as being down to a mixture of problems and not take it personally, that every situation is different and not likely to be permanent nor pervasive. Unlike pessimists, they see bad events as having specific causes (not necessarily to do with them), and good events will enhance everything they do. Optimists understand you can be very able at one thing and less able at another, and that’s not problematic.

The negative perceptions of a pessimist are manifested into thoughts, which they tend to believe as true, fixed, and factual. Yet, thoughts are only thoughts and in truth are just opinions created and tainted by our internal belief systems. Self-critical thoughts in particular really suppress optimism. For example, there may be a whole internal monologue around “I don’t deserve good things” which would be particularly damaging and undermining.

How we think and feel, and what we do accordingly, dominates the field of mental health research and the resulting therapies used by professionals. We don’t all need therapists, but perhaps a little guidance and understanding of how important awareness of our thinking styles is to our health, would be most welcome at school and at work and ongoing throughout life.

4 important messages about how to learn optimism are

Negative and distorted thinking leads to unpleasant feelings and gets in the way of achieving goals or living your best life.

Take note if you are over-personalising blame, thinking in all or nothing pervasive terms, and think things can’t change for the better. 

Altering thoughts to being more realistic and open, fosters more pleasant and motivating emotions that encourage goal-seeking and achievement and results in a pleasant impact on life.

This process is possible and achievable with some self-help guidance, knowledge and/or the help of a coach or a therapist.

Finally

Our daily thoughts are more habitual than we realise; they are set patterns of neuronal firing in our brain. Just like playing tennis fires a particular neuronal network of activity, thinking pessimistically also fires its own neuronal pattern of activity. So when we work on changing thoughts/outlook/mindset, it is just like learning a new practical skill (say badminton instead of tennis), and will take repeated practice to re-wire a new and different neuronal pattern….but it will pay off eventually, you just have be ready and willing. 

For more on learning optimism take a look here.