We’ve all been exposed to enough pop psychology that we know optimism when we see it. Optimism makes us feel warm and happy inside, whereas its nemesis – pessimism – can feel a real drag.
Last week we learned that optimism and pessimism affect our emotional health — which may not be all that surprising. But what is surprising is how much they affect our physical health and even our risk of death.
This week we’ll take a closer look at exactly how optimism and pessimism differ from each other.
Explaining Stuff to Ourselves
One researcher who has contributed tremendously to our understanding of optimism is Dr. Marty Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Now in his seventies, Dr. Seligman’s career has spanned some formative decades of mental health research. He started in the field of depression – he and his colleagues were the first to characterize “learned helplessness,” the phenomenon where you and I simply give up in the face of problems over which we think we have no control.
But over the decades, Dr. Seligman’s interests began to change. He began to see that “the absence of ill-being does not equal the presence of well-being.”1
He didn’t just want to help individuals leave the shadowland of depression and anxiety; he wanted them to live in the bright light of happiness and optimism.
So in later years, he began to study these topics in earnest, eventually forming the Positive Psychology Center at UPenn. His programs on resilience and optimism have now been integrated into education programs worldwide.
According to Seligman, optimism and pessimism are polar opposites on the spectrum of explanatory style, that is, the way we explain to ourselves what happens to us life. When either good or bad things happen, our brains automatically start clicking and whirring, trying to determine how and why things went down the way they did. As it turns out, the reasons that optimists come up with are pretty much the exact opposite to those of pessimists.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about the three dimensions to explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.2
Permanence:
Permanence refers to an event’s timing, whether we feel it is short-term and changeable or long-term and permanent.
Let’s be clear. Both optimists and pessimists will feel pain after a loss or setback. What distinguishes between the two is what they do next, how they explain that pain to themselves.
- Optimists see bad events as a temporary setback that they will eventually get through.
- Pessimists see the same event as a permanent pattern that will never change.
Using terms like “always” or “never” to explain bad events is a major tip-off of pessimistic thinking. On the other hand, optimists think of bad stuff in temporary and changeable terms: “This happens sometimes and under specific circumstances.”
This thinking pattern flip-flops when something good happens:
- Optimists believe that good events have a permanent cause, whereas
- Pessimists believe the cause was temporary and changeable.
Optimists think their bad luck is fleeting and their good luck will last forever. Pessimists think just the opposite: their bad luck will last forever and their good luck is fleeting.
Those who believe they will be able to build on past success will try even harder to succeed in the future. But those who believe their success is unpredictable and short-lived may give up even when they succeed.
Pervasiveness:
While the permanence dimension is about time, pervasiveness is about space – in other words, the reach that a good or bad event has in our life.
- Optimists see bad events as specific and isolated incidents. They can compartmentalize things that are going well in life vs. things that are not going well.
- Pessimists see one bad event as a universal pattern that pervades the rest of their life.
Making sweeping, overgeneralizations is a major tip-off of pessimistic thinking: “I failed that test – I am such a failure.” On the other hand, optimists think that bad things happen in specific situations: “I failed that test, but I was not feeling well. I’ll do better next time.”
This thinking pattern flip-flops when something good happens:
- Optimists believe that good events have a universal, pervasive cause, whereas
- Pessimists believe the cause was specific.
Together, permanence and pervasiveness create the mental underpinnings for either hope or despair. Seligman put it this way:
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.”3
Personalization
Personalization is not about the timing or universality of an event – it’s about who we think caused it.
When something bad happens, we either blame ourselves (“internalization”) or we blame someone or something outside of ourselves (“externalization”). We may be correct in either case. Pessimism and optimism refer, in this case, to a general tendency in opposite directions:
- Optimists tend to externalize bad events. He or she might think, “It’s too bad I didn’t do as well as I wanted in that contest, but there were extenuating circumstances: it was a particularly difficult challenge, the judge was having a bad day,” and so on. If an optimist internalizes an event, he or she is able to critique his or her performance instead of himself or herself as a person – “I failed” rather than “I am a failure.”
- Pessimists tend to internalize bad events, believing that they are to blame for anything bad that happens. Those who consistently blame themselves for failures are at risk for low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety.
Internalizing most bad things that happen is a major tip-off of pessimistic thinking. This is also a common thinking pattern in depression – many depressed individuals take the blame for circumstances and events that were really not their fault.
One clarification should be made here between personalization and responsibility. When first learning about this thinking pattern, some may be tempted to over-compensate and think, “Oh, well then, it must be okay to blame all my problems on others.” Obviously, this would create just as many problems as taking all the blame on oneself.
I think of responsibility as a road with a ditch on both sides. On one side is the ditch of internalization – falling into this ditch slashes self-esteem and leads to depression and anxiety.
But on the other side of the road is the ditch of blame: “I’m not responsible for anything or anyone else’s problems. You do you and I’ll do me and if you don’t like it, well, that’s your problem.”
This boorish attitude is just as unrealistic as the other. In the real world, our actions do have consequences; they can and do affect other people.
So the goal is not to climb out of one ditch only to skid across the road and into the other.
The goal is simply to stay on the road.
This will prevent both excessive, unfair internalization and excessive, unfair blame.
This thinking pattern flip-flops when something good happens:
- Optimists internalize good events, whereas
- Pessimists externalize them.
I think we can all see that, while optimistic internalization can be healthier for our self-esteem than pessimistic externalization, there are dangers here as well. At the extreme high end of self-esteem lies narcissism and self-aggrandizement, which are just as unrealistic (and downright off-putting) as self-abasement. I am not encouraging one extreme over the other; rather, I think we should aim to stay in a realistic middle.
Summary of Explanatory Styles:
1Seligman, M. E. P. (2018). The Hope Circuit. New York: PublicAffairs. p.5.
2Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned Optimism. New York: Vintage Books. pp.44-50.
3Seliman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned Optimism. New York: Vintage Books. p.48.
4 Schiraldi, G. R. (2017). The Resilience Workbook. New Harbinger Publications, Inc. pp.123-126.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.
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