The science of being positive

Answer the question “Why be an optimist?” not difficult. Perhaps the famous politician Winston Churchill did it better than others: “A pessimist sees difficulties in every opportunity, an optimist sees opportunities in every difficulty.”

Who is an optimist? It is generally accepted to consider him a person who believes that in the future he will have more good events than bad ones, and that his actions will lead to the achievement of his goals. But optimism is manifested not only in the tone of our forecasts for the future, but also in how we perceive the events of the present and the past.

Our life largely depends on how we evaluate it ourselves – whether we put a positive or negative meaning into what is happening. The ancient Greek Stoic philosophers were the first to write about this: Epictetus, for example, said that it is not our adversities that upset us, but how we treat them. Gottfried Leibniz, Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about optimism, Daniel Defoe and Leo Tolstoy explored this topic. Following the philosophers and writers, psychologists began to study optimism.

Success and helplessness

The first step was to study the psychological mechanisms of success. In the mid-1960s, the American psychologist Julian Rotter suggested that people who place the responsibility for the events of their own lives primarily on themselves tend to be more active and achieve more than those who tend to blame external circumstances for everything.

The American psychologist Bernard Weiner was interested in another aspect: why do some people, faced with failures, quickly give up, while others do not stop efforts, no matter what? He suggested that this directly depends on what they see as the reason for their successes and failures.

In the course of research, for example, it turned out that children who do well in school believe that their achievements are the result of their abilities, and random failures are associated with the fact that they did not try hard enough. Those who do not study so well, attribute their success to the ease of the task or random luck, and attribute their failures to a lack of ability.

However, the greatest contribution to the understanding of optimism was made by Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). He came to this problem through the study of depression and pessimism: his father was paralyzed, and Seligman sought to understand why a calm and balanced person can lose interest in life so quickly.

Through a series of experiments, Seligman identified and described the phenomenon of so-called learned helplessness in animals and humans.

Its essence lies in the fact that, being subjected to unpleasant influences for some time and not being able to control them, most of the subjects gradually come to the conclusion that the efforts are meaningless and give up. Even when the opportunity to avoid suffering arises, they continue to passively endure without making an attempt to do something.

These studies led Martin Seligman to reflect on whether it is possible, through conscious effort, to develop an optimistic style of thinking. The result of his research was the creation of positive psychology, which studies such concepts as “happiness”, “optimism”, “positive emotions”.

How do we explain what happened to ourselves?

Why do some people easily become helpless victims of circumstances, while others stubbornly continue to resist? This question led Martin Seligman to develop the concept of “explanatory style,” a term he proposed to refer to the way in which a person is used to explaining to himself the reasons for what is happening.

The explanatory style can be optimistic or pessimistic. In stressful situations, it depends on the style of explanation that a person is used to, whether he will surrender to the will of circumstances or continue to fight.

In a pessimistic explanatory style, negative events are described by constant and universal characteristics (“It will always be so with everything I touch”), and vice versa, positive events in a pessimistic explanatory style are considered as random, temporary and caused by external causes.

In contrast, in an optimistic explanatory style, negative events are explained as external, temporal, and specific causes (“The way things are, it will pass quickly”), and positive events are explained as permanent, universal, and caused by personal causes, such as abilities.

Whose side are the advantages?

Optimism is not just the absence of pessimism, but a qualitatively different state. An optimist does not seek to control everything around him, but at the same time he believes that he is not a puppet in the hands of fate or other people, but an active figure who can change the surrounding reality and on which a lot depends.

According to a number of studies conducted at different times by various scientists (including Martin Seligman), optimists, on average, live longer and recover better after undergoing operations, they are confident in themselves, and also suffer less from mental illness.

Optimists have higher satisfaction with family life, more friends, they are more likely to be liked by others. They are more successful in their careers and more likely to come up with creative ideas. This is quite natural: the thinking of a person who does not tend to dwell on the bad and is used to finding a way out of any situation is more flexible, free and open.

Pessimists are also successful in their activities, but other things being equal, an optimist always achieves more: for him, failure in solving one problem does not mean the inability to cope with others.

Can optimism be learned?

This or that style of explanation is formed from early childhood: watching how mother and father react to life events, we unconsciously assimilate and adopt parental behavior patterns. Feedback plays an even greater role: depending on how the mother perceives the actions of the child, whether he considers his failures a disaster, he himself will begin to evaluate what is happening in the future.

It takes time to overcome established stereotypes, and yet it is possible to “relearn”. This can be done consciously (with the help of special aids or a psychotherapist) or spontaneously: for example, a person who grew up with pessimistic parents can end up in an optimistic family after marriage, unconsciously adopt their explanatory style and, as a result, feel happier.

All the many situations in life that we face can be divided into those that we are able to control and those that are beyond our control. The most rational way to perceive them is best expressed in the famous Protestant prayer: “God, give me the strength to change what I can change, give me the courage to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”

It is this realistic, but positive and open, view of the world that can be considered the hallmark of true, enlightened optimism.