[chapter 3]

HOW TO BECOME AN (EVEN BETTER) OPTIMIST

Optimism can be learned. Even diehard pessimists
can become more optimistic. Our brain is
surprisingly flexible.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Now that you are aware of the happiness, health, and success that a lifestyle of optimism brings, you may wonder whether or not you are indeed an optimist.

Let’s do a little test.

Have a look at this image.

What do you see?

Do you see a horseman coming to you?

Or do you see the horseman riding away from you?

You can see the horseman going in both directions. But what you see at first glance says a lot about your attitude.

If you saw the horseman coming to you, you tend to have a more optimistic mind-set.

If you saw the horseman riding away from you, you tend to be more of a pessimist.

TEST YOUR OPTIMISM

There is a more scientific way to test your optimism and pessimism levels. Scientists have been using “The Life Orientation Test” in many of the studies about the relationship between optimism and pessimism and (mental) health. The test incorporates ten statements. You need to indicate the extent of your agreement using the following scale:

0 = strongly disagree

1 = disagree

2 = neutral

3 = agree

4 = strongly agree

Be as honest as you can throughout and try not to let your response to one statement influence your response to other statements. There are no right or wrong answers. (You can also do this test at www.jurriaankamp.com/opti-test.)

___   1. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.

___   2. It’s easy for me to relax.

___   3. If something can go wrong for me, it will.

___   4. I’m always optimistic about my future.

___   5. I enjoy my friends a lot.

___   6. It’s important for me to keep busy.

___   7. I hardly ever expect things to go my way.

___   8. I don’t get upset too easily.

___   9. I rarely count on good things happening to me.

___ 10. Overall, I expect more good things to happen to me than bad.

See page 81 for scoring.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPTIMISTS AND PESSIMISTS

The good news is that even if you turn out to be more of a pessimist than you think or hoped to be, you can learn to become more optimistic. In fact, that can be surprisingly simple.

The key difference between optimists and pessimists is how they view success and failure. Pessimists see failure as permanent, personal, and pervasive, while optimists see it as temporary, nonpersonal, and specific. Their views on success are the opposite: Optimists see success as something long term and global, something that results from commitment and hard work. Pessimists, however, are more likely to view success as something short term, temporary, and accidental.

Imagine two students who receive the same poor grade on an exam. The first student thinks, “I’m such a failure. I always do poorly in this subject. I can’t do it right.” The other student thinks, “This test was very difficult. I will do better on my next test. It was my birthday yesterday, after all.”

The two students exhibit different “explanatory styles.” The first student sees a situation that happened because of her (“I’m bad at that subject”) and that she cannot change. The second student sees the poor result as related to something outside her (the difficulty of the specific test) and feels confident that the negative event will not repeat itself. The first student is a pessimist. The second student is an optimist.

Another example: You are on a walk and you see your friend Sarah on the other side of the street. You wave, but Sarah doesn’t wave back. In fact, she turns a corner without even noticing you. If you are a pessimist, your thoughts may go back to your last conversation with Sarah; you start thinking that you may have said something wrong and that Sarah is angry with you. Soon, troubling thoughts ruin your happy walk. The negative feelings of the pessimist lead to withdrawal and inaction. You don’t bounce back from a setback. In fact you allow your negative feelings from one situation to pollute your next experience. Your life becomes miserable.

If you were an optimist, you would have had a very different response. You would have thought about all the possible causes for Sarah not seeing you. She could have forgotten to put in her contact lenses that morning; she may have been lost in thoughts of her own; or she simply may have had a bad day. As an optimist, you don’t lose the connection with Sarah even if she doesn’t wave back. You see the cause of the setback in your life as temporary, changeable, and local. You don’t feel helpless. That’s why optimists are happier and healthier people.

WE THINK OF OURSELVES AS OPTIMISTS OR PESSIMISTS

The crucial difference between optimists and pessimists lies in the things you tell yourself—your self-talk, that endless stream of unspoken thoughts that runs through your head every day. The non-waving Sarah is not present. It is you with your thoughts. And a lot of these thoughts came to you at a very early age. More often they are not even your own. We tell ourselves the wrong things because we have the voices of influential others—most often our parents—in our heads.

Take this example: As a small kid, you were playing with your younger brother and somehow play got out of hand and you hit him. Your angry mother responded, “That is mean. You are not going to have any friends at school if you behave that way.”

With such a response, she was assigning you the character flaw of being mean, as something that is part of your personality. Something permanent, pervasive, and personal. Experiences like that may turn you into a pessimist. You begin to tell yourself that you are a mean person. The problem is that once established these negative pathways prepare you to respond pessimistically to most similar situations.

But if your mother had said, “I see you are having a hard time. Come here. I think you are hungry. Let’s go a make a sandwich,” such a response would have made the bad behavior temporary and specific to the situation and not connected to your personality. It would have paved the way for you to say you were sorry to your brother. Your sense of self would have been preserved and you could have remained the optimist you always were.

DON’T SAY ANYTHING TO YOURSELF THAT YOU WOULDN’T SAY TO ANYONE ELSE

Pessimists need to learn to change their self-talk to rediscover their optimism. If you want to become more optimistic, you need to identify the areas of your life that you tend to think negatively about. Most pessimists are not pessimistic about everything. Their pessimism flourishes in certain significant areas.

When you have identified the areas that are negative for you, check yourself regularly during the day. Are you finding your thoughts mainly negative? Then you need to learn to dispute your thoughts. You need to challenge your own thinking and try to look at possible alternative outcomes. You can learn to turn negative thinking into positive thinking. Here are some examples.

Pessimists need to practice positive self-talk and follow one simple rule: Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to anyone else. It is surprising how harsh and negative we can be toward ourselves while we remain nice to the people around us.

Various studies have confirmed that explanatory styles can be changed. Martin Seligman pioneered many of those studies. Seligman started the Penn Resiliency Program at the University of Pennsylvania for first-year college students, a notoriously vulnerable group. The program consists of twelve sessions in which students are taught how to change the types of thoughts that are consistent with the pessimistic explanatory style.

The program also teaches assertiveness, creative brain-storming, decision making, relaxation, and other coping skills. More than twenty studies over the past twelve years show that the Penn Resiliency Program reduces and prevents depression, decreases feelings of hopelessness, limits or prevents anxiety, and improves health.

The conclusion is clear: Optimism can be learned. But learned optimism is more than just positive thinking. It is not just about saying positive things to yourself when you are fine and things are going well. What you think when things are not going well—when you fail or when you experience setbacks—is crucial. That’s where the power of optimism comes from. As Seligman writes in Learned Optimism: “Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals us is the central skill of optimism.”

HOW POSITIVE ACTIONS CAN MAKE YOU AN OPTIMIST

Changing your self-talk works. But trying to think positively can be challenging. More recent research shows that changing your brain from pessimist to optimist can be even easier.

Imagine a toddler who is having a tantrum about something. Suddenly you point your finger toward the sky: “Do you see that bird?” Through her tears the girl looks up and gets distracted. Her eyes begin to follow the bird. Her mouth falls open, the crying stops, and in moments the tantrum is gone. You have succeeded in tricking the girl out of it. It’s simple and very often successful.

You would think it’s not so easy to trick an adult, but it actually is. Elaine Fox, director of the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex and author of Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to Retrain your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook, has done many scientific experiments that show that positive actions rewire your brain no matter what you think while doing these actions.

Fox: “A very common thing with depression or pessimism is that people really find it difficult to motivate themselves to do anything. But invariably if they do force themselves to do something, they generally do actually quite enjoy it. If you do that on a regular basis it becomes a kind of habit. It’s about shifting the habits of the mind. It’s really important to break up the normal way of doing things.”

Doing something can be going to a movie you really wouldn’t dream of seeing—it doesn’t have to be a positive movie, just a different movie. Or you read a book or magazine that you normally wouldn’t think about reading. Go to a restaurant that you never went to before. Take dance lessons. It can also be simply taking a different route to work. Fox: “The brain is very good at settling into a very habitual way of doing things. When we get used to something new, the brain doesn’t really have to think about it anymore. It can just switch off and operate like ‘oh yeah, we’re doing this again.’ It doesn’t take much effort [to switch the brain].”

KEEP A DIARY, PLAY A GAME

Optimists tend to remember more of the nice things happening to them and they forget a lot more of the negative things. Their selective mind-set fuels their optimism. Pessimists do the complete opposite and remember all the negative things. One way to overcome the negative bias is to keep a diary for a few days and write down the things that happen to you. Simple things, like “I was frustrated because I missed the bus.” And “I ran into my friend Peter in the store.” You rate each of these incidents as either positive or negative. Then when they look back after a week or so, most people who are very pessimistic are surprised to find that they have forgotten that a lot of positive things that happen to them—more often far more than negative things. That awareness helps shifting the brain too. Research has shown that keeping such a diary helps to challenge and change the pessimistic pattern.

Scientists have developed a kind of “positive training” called “Cognitive Bias Modification” (CBM). The training consists of looking at a set of pictures of four people. One of them is smiling, the other three are looking angry. The challenge is to pick the smiling face the fastest. When you do this training a few minutes per day, research shows remarkable improvement after only hours of total practice. In one study, 72 percent of a group of people suffering from social anxiety disorder were cured after just two hours of practicing CBM. CBM can be done on an app (Anxiety Mint, Psych Me Up) or on the website http://baldwinlab.mcgill.ca/labmaterials/materials_BBC.html.

The best results with CBM are achieved when this training is combined with a mindfulness meditation for at least ten minutes per day, three days a week.

SMILE, HAVE FUN, TURN OFF THE TELEVISION, AND KEEP GOOD COMPANY

The simple act of smiling—using your “smile muscles”—can improve your mood. Having fun is also important, like listening to your favorite music or watching your favorite movie. When I have a bad day I love to watch a short YouTube video about how the Dutch soccer team beat Brazil at the 2010 World Championships. I have been doing this for a few years—granted, to the frustration of my family—not aware of the research that shows that such things really work.

It also helps to turn off the news and cancel the paper; as we have already seen, media feed pessimism. Interesting fact: When optimists and pessimists read the same newspaper, they are both drawn to the stories their minds seek. Pessimists see and remember the negative stories. Optimists tend to overlook those and their eyes go to the more positive news—which is a much harder job!

Keep good company is critical too. To move away from pessimism, it helps to surround yourself with optimists and not to join the ever-present complainers.

YOU NEED THREE FUN EXPERIENCES FOR EVERY BAD EXPERIENCE TO THRIVE

There’s a good reason why our brain tends to drift to the negative. Thousands of years ago on the African plains, where the life of our ancestors started, a little sound in the bush could be a sign of imminent death. Fear made sense. Fear protected our ancestors. That’s why our pessimism makes sense too.

However, there’s less danger in the bush in our modern lives—in fact we have never had it so good (see chapter 4). But the good news that groundbreaking research by Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has proven that we need to have three positive emotions for every negative one in order to thrive (some of the mathematical calculations used in Fredrickson’s work have been discredited in further research. However, other psychologists, like Elaine Fox, support her general thesis of the importance of the 3 to 1 ratio).

Fredrickson’s research shows that most people have about two positive experiences for every negative experience. These people do fine. However, your overall experience moves to flourishing and thriving when you are able to generate three positive experiences for every negative one.

We may pay more attention to negative events, but because we experience a greater frequency of positive events in our lives, most of us are not burdened by pessimism. But for true happiness—doing better than just fine—we need to aim higher and make sure that we have maintained the 3 to 1 ratio. As this chapter shows, that’s much easier than it may seem. Positive events include listening to a piece of your favorite music; a moment of compassion or gratitude. A sense of wonder evoked by being in nature. Optimism stands always ready around the corner.