Optimists live longer, are more self-confident, and deal with stress more effectively. Pessimists can also learn to be optimistic, and here’s some advice on how to do it.
It was in the late 1960s when American psychologist Martin Seligman started research that would soon make him famous in the scientific community. His goal was to analyze the mechanism behind learned helplessness, which is a state of passivity and resignation resulting from a belief that, no matter what actions we take, they won’t have any impact on what happens to us. In his laboratory experiments, Seligman managed to generate a sense of helplessness: first in dogs, then in mice, rats, and pigeons. It became more challenging, however, when he began to research people. As he recalled in a 2020 American NPR program dedicated to optimism, “One-third of people I could not make helpless in laboratory, so I began to wonder, what was it about some people that makes them so resilient?”
The subject of the program was not accidental. As Alix Spiegel, a science journalist who hosted it, observed, “Seligman came to research on optimism through a strange back door.” He demonstrated that people who had an optimistic approach to life proved resistant to his experiments.
High Spirits Help
Science shows that an optimistic approach has many advantages. Optimists are more confident, persistent, and enthusiastic about life (and expect more from it). They deal with failures better than pessimists and tend to blame themselves less often, identifying unfavorable circumstances as the reason. As demonstrated in a 2001 study by Margaret Marshall and Jonathon Brown from the University of Washington, students whose levels of optimism are higher tend to claim their success (“I passed
