Part One: The Quest
Two Ways of Looking at Life
The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder. These two habits of thinking about causes have consequences. Literally hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests. When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their health is unusually good. They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.
At the core of the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon—that of helplessness. Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you.
Many things in life are beyond our control—our eye color, our race, the drought in the Midwest. But there is a vast, unclaimed territory of actions over which we can take control—or cede control to others or to fate. These actions involve the way we lead our lives, how we deal with other people, how we earn our living—all the aspects of existence in which we normally have some degree of choice. The way we think about this realm of life can actually diminish or enlarge the control we have over it. Our thoughts are not merely reactions to events; they change what ensues. For example, if we think we are helpless to make a difference in what our children become, we will be paralyzed when dealing with this facet of our lives. The very thought “Nothing I do matters” prevents us from acting. And so we cede control to our children’s peers and teachers, and to circumstance. When we overestimate our helplessness, other forces will take control and shape our children’s future.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.
What if the great majority of depressions are much simpler than the biological psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts believe? What if depression is not something you are motivated to bring upon yourself but something that just descends upon you? What if depression is not an illness but a severe low mood? What if you are not a prisoner of past conflicts in the way you react? What if depression is in fact set off by present troubles? What if you are not a prisoner of your genes or your brain chemistry, either? What if depression arises from mistaken inferences we make from the tragedies and setbacks we all experience over the course of a life? What if depression occurs merely when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks? What if we can unlearn pessimism and acquire the skills of looking at setbacks optimistically?
What if the traditional view of the components of success is wrong? What if there is a third factor—optimism or pessimism—that matters as much as talent or desire? What if you can have all the talent and desire necessary—yet, if you are a pessimist, still fail? What if optimists do better at school, at work, and on the playing field? What if optimism is a learned skill, one that can be permanently acquired? What if we can instill this skill in our children?
Explaining Misfortune
How do you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.” Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and, besides, there’s much more in life.” Your habitual way of explaining bad events, your explanatory style, is more than just the words you mouth when you fail. It is a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
Permanence. People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary. If you think about bad things in always’s and never’s and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in sometimes’s and lately’s, if you use qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style.
Pervasiveness: Specific vs. Universal. Permanence is about time. Pervasiveness is about space. Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.
Hope. Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style: pervasiveness and permanence. 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.
Personalization: Internal vs. External. When bad things happen, we can blame ourselves (internalize) or we can blame other people or circumstances (externalize). People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who blame themselves do. Low self-esteem usually comes from an internal style for bad events. Personalization is also the easiest dimension to overrate. It controls only how you feel about yourself, but pervasiveness and permanence—the more important dimensions—control what you do: how long you are helpless and across how many situations.
Ultimate Pessimism
When in a pessimistic, melancholy state, we are going through a mild version of a major mental disorder: depression. Depression is pessimism writ large, and to understand pessimism, a subtle phenomenon, it helps to look at the expanded, exaggerated form.
Depression comes in three kinds. The first is called normal depression, and it is the type each of us knows well. It springs from the pain and loss that are inevitable parts of being members of a sapient species, creatures who think about the future. We don’t get the jobs we want. Our stocks go down. We get rejected by people we love; our spouses die. We give bad lectures and write bad books. We age. When such losses occur, what happens next is regular and predictable: We feel sad and helpless. We become passive and lethargic. We absolutely believe that our prospects are bleak and that we lack the talent to make them brighter. We don’t do our work well, and we may be absent from it frequently. The zest goes out of activities we used to enjoy, and we lose our interest in food, company, sex. We can’t sleep. But after a while, by one of nature’s benevolent mysteries, we start to get better. Normal depression is extremely common—it’s the common cold of mental illness. I have repeatedly found that at any moment approximately 25 percent of us are going through an episode of normal depression, at least in mild form.
The two other kinds of depression are called depressive disorders: unipolar and bipolar depression. These provide everyday work for clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. What determines the difference between them is whether or not mania is involved. Mania is a psychological condition with a set of symptoms that look like the opposite of depression: unwarranted euphoria, grandiosity, frenetic talk and action, and inflated self-esteem. Bipolar depression always involves manic episodes; it is also called manic-depression (with mania as one pole and depression as the other). Unipolar depressives never have manic episodes. Another difference between the two is that bipolar depression is much more heritable.
Unlike normal and unipolar depression, manic-depression is an illness, appropriately viewed as a disorder of the body and treated medically.
The question arises whether unipolar depression, also a certified disorder, and normal depression are related. I believe they are the same thing, differing only in the number of symptoms and their severity. One person may be diagnosed as having unipolar depression and be labeled a patient, while another, held to be suffering from acute symptoms of normal depression, may not be considered a patient. The distinction between these two is shallow. It may be a distinction in how readily two people will seek therapy, or in whether their insurance policies cover unipolar depression, or in how comfortably they can bear the stigma of being labeled a patient. My view radically differs from the prevailing medical opinion, which holds that unipolar depression is an illness and normal depression just a passing demoralization of no clinical interest. This view is the dominant one in spite of a complete absence of evidence that unipolar depression is anything more than just severe normal depression.
A pessimistic explanatory style is at the core of depressed thinking. A negative concept of the future, the self, and the world stems from seeing the causes of bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal, and seeing the causes of good events in the opposite way.
How You Think, How You Feel
Our reasoning was straightforward. Depression results from lifelong habits of conscious thought. If we change these habits of thought, we will cure depression. Let’s make a direct assault on conscious thought, we said, using everything we know to change the way our patients think about bad events. Out of this came the new approach, which Beck called cognitive therapy. It tries to change the way the depressed patient thinks about failure, defeat, loss, and helplessness. The National Institute of Mental Health has spent millions of dollars testing whether the therapy works on depression. It does.
How you think about your problems, including depression itself, will either relieve depression or aggravate it. A failure or a defeat can teach you that you are now helpless, but learned helplessness will produce only momentary symptoms of depression—unless you have a pessimistic explanatory style. If you do, then failure and defeat can throw you into a full-blown depression. On the other hand, if your explanatory style is optimistic, your depression will be halted.
We all become momentarily helpless when we fail. The psychological wind is knocked out of us. We feel sad, the future looks dismal, and putting out any effort seems overwhelmingly difficult. Some people recover almost at once; all the symptoms of learned helplessness dissipate within hours. Others stay helpless for weeks or, if the failure is important enough, for months or longer. This is the critical difference between brief demoralization and an episode of depression.
The difference between people whose learned helplessness disappears swiftly and people who suffer their symptoms for two weeks or more is usually simple: Members of the latter group have a pessimistic explanatory style, and a pessimistic explanatory style changes learned helplessness from brief and local to long-lasting and general. Learned helplessness becomes full-blown depression when the person who fails is a pessimist. In optimists, a failure produces only brief demoralization. The key to this process is hope or hopelessness.
Put all this together and you can see there is one particularly self-defeating way to think: making personal, permanent, and pervasive explanations for bad events. People who have this most pessimistic of all styles are likely, once they fail, to have the symptoms of learned helplessness for a long time and across many endeavors, and to lose self-esteem. Such protracted learned helplessness amounts to depression. This is the central prediction from my theory: People who have a pessimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will probably become depressed, whereas people who have an optimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will tend to resist depression.
Cognitive therapy uses five tactics.
First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst. Automatic thoughts are very quick phrases or sentences, so well practiced as to be almost unnoticed and unchallenged. For example, a mother of three children sometimes screams at them as she sends them off to school. She feels very depressed as a consequence. In cognitive therapy she learns to recognize that right after these screaming incidents she always says to herself, “I’m a terrible mother—even worse than my own mother.” She learns to become aware of these automatic thoughts, and learns that they are her explanations, and that those explanations are permanent, pervasive, and personal.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence. The mother is helped to remember and acknowledge that when the kids come home from school, she plays football with them, tutors them in geometry, and talks to them sympathetically about their problems. She focuses on this evidence and sees that it contradicts her automatic thought that she is a bad mother.
Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts. The mother might learn to say something like: “I’m fine with the kids in the P.M. and terrible in the A.M. Maybe I’m not a morning person.” That’s a much less permanent and pervasive explanation for screaming at the kids in the morning. As for the chain of negative explanations that goes, “I’m a terrible mother, I’m not fit to have kids, therefore I don’t deserve to live,” she learns to interrupt it by inserting the contrary, new explanation.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts. The mother learns that thinking these negative things now is not inevitable. Rumination, particularly when one is under pressure to perform well, makes the situation even worse. Often it is better to put off thinking, in order to do your best. You can learn to control not only what you think but when you think it.
Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do: “I can’t live without love.” “Unless everything I do is perfect, I’m a failure.” “Unless everybody likes me, I’m a failure.” “There is a perfect right solution for every problem. I must find it.” Premises like these set you up for depression. If you choose to live by them—as so many of us do—your life will be filled with black days and blue weeks. But just as a person can change his explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, he can also choose a new set of more human premises to live by: “Love is precious but rare.” “Success is doing my best.” “For every person who likes you, one person doesn’t like you.” “Life consists of putting my fingers in the biggest leaks in the dam.”
On a mechanical level, cognitive therapy works because it changes explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, and the change is permanent. It gives you a set of cognitive skills for talking to yourself when you fail. You can use these skills to stop depression from taking hold when failure strikes. At a philosophical level, cognitive therapy works because it takes advantage of newly legitimized powers of the self. In an era when we believe the self can change itself, we are willing to try to change habits of thought which used to seem as inevitable as sunrise. Cognitive therapy works in our era because it gives the self a set of techniques for changing itself. The self chooses to do this work out of self-interest, to make itself feel better.
Part Two: The Realms of Life
Success at Work
The explanatory-style theory of success says that in order to choose people for success in a challenging job, you need to select for three characteristics:
aptitude
motivation
optimism
All three determine success.
But what, then, is the role of pessimism? Perhaps it corrects for something we do only poorly when we are optimistic and not depressed—namely, appreciating reality accurately. It’s a disturbing idea, that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it was my job to help depressed patients both to feel happier and to see the world more clearly. I was supposed to be the agent of happiness and of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think his world is better than it actually is. There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.
Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically. This means that, on average, optimistic people will distort reality and pessimists, as Ambrose Bierce defined them, will “see the world aright.” The pessimist seems to be at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indifferent universe. It is important to remember, however, that this relationship is statistical, and that pessimists do not have a lock on reality. Some realists, the minority, are optimists, and some distorters, also the minority, are pessimists.
The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their capacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.
Sometimes and in some niches in modern life, this deep-seated pessimism works. Think about a successful large business. It has a diverse set of personalities serving different roles. First, there are the optimists. The researchers and developers, the planners, the marketers—all these need to be visionaries. They have to dream things that don’t yet exist, to explore boundaries beyond the company’s present reach. If they don’t, the competition will. But imagine a company that consisted only of optimists, all of them fixed upon the exciting possibilities ahead. It would be a disaster. The company also needs its pessimists, the people who have an accurate knowledge of present realities. They must make sure grim reality continually intrudes upon the optimists. The treasurer, the CPAs, the financial vice-president, the business administrators, the safety engineers—all these need an accurate sense of how much the company can afford, and of danger. Their role is to caution, their banner is the yellow flag. One should hasten to say that these people may not be the full-blown, high-octane pessimists whose explanatory style continually undermines their achievement and health. Some among them may be depressives, but others, perhaps even the majority, may for all their somber caution at their desks otherwise be cheery and sanguine. Some are merely prudent and measured people, who have nurtured their pessimistic side in the service of their careers.
Perhaps a successful life, like a successful company, needs both optimism and at least occasional pessimism, and for the same reason a corporation does. Perhaps a successful life also needs a CEO who has flexible optimism at his command.
Like the successful company, we each have in us an executive who balances the counsels of daring against the counsels of doom. When optimism prompts us to chance it and pessimism bids us to cower, a part of us heeds both. This executive is sapience. It is this entity to whom is addressed the most basic point of this book: By understanding the single virtue of pessimism along with its pervasive, crippling consequences, we can learn to resist pessimism’s constant callings, as deep-seated in brain or in habit as they may be. We can learn to choose optimism for the most part, but also to heed pessimism when it is warranted.
Children and Parents: The Origins of Optimism
Explanatory style develops in childhood. The optimism or pessimism developed then is fundamental. New setbacks and victories are filtered through it, and it becomes an entrenched habit of thinking.
Children’s antennae are constantly tuned to the way their parents, particularly their mothers, talk about causes of emotionally loaded events. It is no accident that “Why?” is one of the first and most repeated questions that young children ask. Getting explanations for the world around them, particularly the social world, is the prime intellectual task of growing up. Once the parents get impatient and stop answering the never-ending why questions, children get their answers in other ways. Mostly they listen closely when you spontaneously explain why things happen—which you do, on average, about once a minute during speech. Your children hang on every word of the explanations you give, particularly when something goes wrong. Not only do they listen for the particulars of what you say, but they listen keenly to its formal properties: whether the cause you cite is permanent or temporary, specific or pervasive, your fault or someone else’s. The way your mother talked about the world to you when you were a child had a marked influence on your explanatory style.
We have evidence for three kinds of influences on your child’s explanatory style. First, the form of the everyday causal analyses he hears from you—especially if you are his mother: If yours are optimistic, his will be too. Second, the form of the criticisms he hears when he fails: If they are permanent and pervasive, his view of himself will turn toward pessimism. Third, the reality of his early losses and traumas: If they remit, he will develop the theory that bad events can be changed and conquered. But if they are, in fact, permanent and pervasive, the seeds of hopelessness have been deeply planted.
School
For almost a hundred years aptitude and talent have been the code words for academic success. These idols occupy the place of honor on the altars of all admissions and personnel officials. In America you can’t even get placed on the track unless your IQ or your SAT score or your MCAT score is high enough, and the situation is even worse in Europe. I think “talent” is vastly overrated. Not only is talent imperfectly measured, not only is it an imperfect predictor of success, but also the traditional wisdom is wrong. It leaves out a factor that can compensate for low scores or greatly diminish the accomplishments of highly talented people: explanatory style. Which comes first—optimism or achievement in the classroom? Common sense tells us that people become optimistic as a consequence of being talented or because they do well. But the design of our classroom studies clearly establishes that the causal arrow also points in the opposite direction. In our studies, we hold talent—SAT scores, IQ, life-insurance qualification test scores—constant to begin with and then look at what happens to the optimists and pessimists among the highly talented. Over and above their talent-test scores, we repeatedly find that pessimists drop below their “potential” and optimists exceed it. I have come to think that the notion of potential, without the notion of optimism, has very little meaning.
Sports
What does my view of optimism say about the playing field? Quite simply, there are three basic predictions for sports. First, everything else being equal, the individual with the more optimistic explanatory style will go on to win. He will win because he will try harder, particularly after defeat or under stiff challenge. Second, the same thing should hold for teams. If a team can be characterized by its level of optimism, the more optimistic team should win—if talent is equal—and this phenomenon should be most apparent under pressure. Third, and most exciting, when athletes’ explanatory style is changed from pessimistic to optimistic, they should win more, particularly under pressure.
Health
Almost all modern scientists and physicians are materialists. They resist to the death the notion that thought and emotion can affect the body. For them that is spiritualism. All claims that emotional and cognitive states influence illness run afoul of materialism.
Across a lifetime, an optimistic person will have fewer episodes of learned helplessness than a pessimistic person will. The less learned helplessness experienced, the better shape the immune system should be in. So the first way in which optimism might affect your health across your lifetime is by preventing helplessness and thereby keeping immune defenses feistier. A second way in which optimism should produce good health concerns sticking to health regimens and seeking medical advice. Consider a pessimistic person who believes that sickness is permanent, pervasive, and personal. “Nothing I do matters,” he believes, “so why do anything?” Such a person is less likely to give up smoking, get flu shots, diet, exercise, go to the doctor when ill, or even follow medical advice.
Another way in which optimism should matter for health concerns the sheer number of bad life events encountered. It has been shown statistically that the more bad events a person encounters in any given time period, the more illness he will have. People who in the same six months move, get fired, and get divorced are at greater risk for infectious illness—and even for heart attacks and cancer—than are people who lead uneventful lives. This is why when major change occurs in your life, it is important to have physical checkups more frequently than usual. Even if you are feeling fine, it is particularly important to watch your health carefully when you change jobs, leave a relationship, or retire, or when someone you love dies. Who, would you guess, encounters more bad events in life? Pessimists do. Because they are more passive, they are less likely to take steps to avoid bad events and less likely to do anything to stop them once they start. Putting two and two together, if pessimists have more bad events and if more bad events lead to more illness, pessimists should have more illness.
The final reason that optimists should have better health concerns social support. The capacity to sustain deep friendships and love seems to be important for physical health.
Materialists view the immune system as isolated from the psychology of the person in whom it resides. They believe that psychological variables like optimism and hope are as vaporous as spirit, so they are doubting Thomases about claims that optimism, depression, and bereavement all affect the immune system. They forget that the immune system is connected to the brain, and that states of mind, such as hope, have corresponding brain states that reflect the psychology of the person. These brain states then affect the rest of the body. So there is no mystery and no spiritualism involved in the process by which emotion and thought can affect illness.
Part Three: Changing From Pessimism to Optimism
The Optimistic Life
In what situations should you deploy the explanatory style–changing skills these chapters provide? First, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish.
If you are in an achievement situation (getting a promotion, selling a product, writing a difficult report, winning a game), use optimism.
If you are concerned about how you will feel (fighting off depression, keeping up your morale), use optimism.
If the situation is apt to be protracted and your physical health is an issue, use optimism.
If you want to lead, if you want to inspire others, if you want people to vote for you, use optimism.
On the other hand, there are times not to use these techniques.
If your goal is to plan for a risky and uncertain future, do not use optimism.
If your goal is to counsel others whose future is dim, do not use optimism initially.
If you want to appear sympathetic to the troubles of others, do not begin with optimism, although using it later, once confidence and empathy are established, may help.
The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy.
It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into beliefs. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop and focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have consequences. The beliefs are the direct causes of what we feel and what we do next. They can spell the difference between dejection and giving up, on the one hand, and well-being and constructive action on the other.
To find out how these ABCs operate in daily existence, keep an ABC diary for the next day or two, just long enough for you to record five ABCs from your own life. To do this, tune in on the perpetual dialogue that takes place in your mind and that you are usually unaware of. It’s a matter of picking up the connection between a certain adversity—even a very minor one—and a consequent feeling. So, for example, you are talking to a friend on the phone. She seems very eager to get off the phone (a distressing minor adversity for you), and you then find yourself sad (the consequent feeling). This little episode will become an ABC entry for you. There are three parts to your record. The first section, “Adversity,” can be almost anything—a leaky faucet, a frown from a friend, a baby that won’t stop crying, a large bill, inattentiveness from your spouse. Be objective about the situation. Record your description of what happened, not your evaluation of it. So if you had an argument with your spouse, you might write down that she was unhappy with something you said or did. Record that. But do not record “She was unfair” under “Adversity.” That’s an inference, and you may want to record that in the second section: “Belief.” Your beliefs are how you interpret the adversity. Be sure to separate thoughts from feelings. (Feelings will go under “Consequences.”) “I just blew my diet” and “I feel incompetent” are beliefs. Their accuracy can be evaluated. “I feel sad,” however, expresses a feeling. It doesn’t make sense to check the accuracy of “I feel sad”; if you feel sad, you are sad. “Consequences.” In this section, record your feelings and what you did. Did you feel sad, anxious, joyful, guilty, or whatever? Often you will feel more than one thing. Write down as many feelings and actions as you were aware of. What did you then do? “I had no energy,” “I made a plan to get her to apologize,” “I went back to bed” are all consequent actions.
When you have recorded your five ABC episodes, read them over carefully. Look for the link between your belief and the consequences. What you will see is that pessimistic explanations set off passivity and dejection, whereas optimistic explanations energize. The next step follows immediately: If you change the habitual beliefs that follow adversity for you, your reaction to adversity will change in lockstep. There are highly reliable ways to change.
There are two general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.
Distraction
Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating. If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results. To keep your thoughts from returning to a negative belief after interruption (by snapping a rubber band or whatever), now direct your attention elsewhere. Actors do this when they must suddenly switch from one emotion to another. Try this: Pick up a small object and study it intently for a few seconds. Handle it, put it in your mouth and taste it, smell it, tap it to see how it sounds. You’ll find that concentrating on the object this way will have strengthened your shift in attention.
Finally, you can undercut ruminations by taking advantage of their very nature. Their nature is to circle around in your mind, so that you will not forget them, so that you will act on them. When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, “Stop. I’ll think this over later … at [such and such a time].” Also, write the troublesome thoughts down the moment they occur. The combination of jotting them down—which acts to ventilate them and dispose of them—and setting a later time to think about them works well; it takes advantage of the reason ruminations exist—to remind you of themselves—and so undercuts them. If you write them down and set a time to think about them, they no longer have any purpose, and purposelessness lessens their strength.
Disputation
Ducking our disturbing beliefs can be good first aid, but a deeper, more lasting remedy is to dispute them: Give them an argument. Go on the attack. By effectively disputing the beliefs that follow adversity, you can change your customary reaction from dejection and giving up to activity and good cheer.
What we say to ourselves when we face a setback can be just as baseless as the ravings of a jealous rival. Our reflexive explanations are usually distortions. They are mere bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past—by childhood conflicts, by strict parents, by an overly critical Little League coach, by a big sister’s jealousy. But because they seem to issue from ourselves, we treat them as gospel. They are merely beliefs, however. And just believing something doesn’t make it so. Just because a person fears that he is unemployable, unlovable, or inadequate doesn’t mean it’s true. It is essential to stand back and suspend belief for a moment, to distance yourself from our pessimistic explanations at least long enough to verify their accuracy. Checking out the accuracy of our reflexive beliefs is what disputation is all about. The first step is just knowing your beliefs warrant dispute. The next step is putting disputation into practice.
There are four important ways to make your disputations convincing.
Evidence?
Alternatives?
Implications?
Usefulness?
Evidence. The most convincing way of disputing a negative belief is to show that it is factually incorrect. Much of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions. You adopt the role of a detective and ask, “What is the evidence for this belief?” Learned optimism works not through an unjustifiable positivity about the world but through the power of “non-negative” thinking.
Alternatives. Almost nothing that happens to you has just one cause; most events have many causes. There are multiple causes, so why latch onto the most insidious one? Ask yourself, “Is there any less destructive way to look at this?”
Implications. The way things go in this world, the facts won’t always be on your side. The negative belief you hold about yourself may be correct. In this situation, the technique to use is decatastrophizing. Even if my belief is correct, you say to yourself, what are its implications? How likely, you should ask yourself, are those awful implications?
Usefulness. Sometimes the consequences of holding a belief matter more than the truth of the belief. Is the belief destructive? Some people get very upset when the world shows itself not to be fair. We can sympathize with that sentiment, but the belief that the world should be fair may cause more grief than it’s worth. What good will it do me to dwell on that? At times it is very useful, instead, to get on with your day, without taking the time to examine the accuracy of your beliefs and then disputing them. Whenever you simply have to perform now, you will find distraction the tool of choice. At this moment the question to ask yourself is not “Is the belief true?” but “Is it functional for me to think it right now?” If the answer is no, use the distraction techniques. (Stop! Assign a later worry time. Make a written note of the thought.) Another tactic is to detail all the ways you can change the situation in the future. Even if the belief is true now, is the situation changeable? How can you go about changing it?
Now I want you to practice the ABCDE model. You already know what ABC stands for. D is for disputation; E is for energization. During the next five adverse events you face, listen closely for your beliefs, observe the consequences, and dispute your beliefs vigorously. Then observe the energization that occurs as you succeed in dealing with the negative beliefs, and record all of this.
Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.
Flexible Optimism
The self has a history. In one form or another, it has been around for a long time, its properties varying with the time and with the culture. From the Middle Ages until the late Renaissance the self was minimal; in a painting by Giotto, everyone but Jesus looks like everyone else. Toward the end of the Renaissance the self expanded, and in Rembrandts and El Grecos the bystanders no longer all look like members of a chorus. The expansion of the self has continued into our times. Our wealth and our technology have culminated in a self that chooses, that feels pleasure and pain, that dictates action, that optimizes or satisfices, and that even has rarefied attributes—like esteem and efficacy and confidence and control. I call this new self, with its absorbing concern for its gratifications and losses, the maximal self to distinguish it from what it has replaced, the minimal, or Yankee, self, the self our grandparents had. The Yankee self, like the medieval self, did little more than just behave; it was certainly less preoccupied with how it felt. It was less concerned with feelings and more concerned with duty. For better or for worse, we are now a culture of maximal selves. We freely choose among an abundance of customized goods and services and reach beyond them to grasp more exquisite freedoms. Along with the freedoms the expanded self brings some dangers. Chief among them is massive depression. I believe that our epidemic of depression is a creature of the maximal self. If it had happened in isolation, exalting the self might have had a positive effect, leading to more fully lived lives. But it was not to work out that way. The waxing of the self in our time coincided with a diminished sense of community and loss of higher purpose. These together proved rich soil for depression to grow in.
So put together the lack of belief that your relationship to God matters, the breakdown of your belief in the benevolent power of your country, and the breakdown of the family. Where can one now turn for identity, for purpose, and for hope? When we need spiritual furniture, we look around and see that all the comfortable leather sofas and stuffed chairs have been removed and all that’s left to sit on is a small, frail folding chair: the self. And the maximal self, stripped of the buffering of any commitment to what is larger in life, is a setup for depression. Either growing individualism alone or a declining commons alone would increase vulnerability to depression. That the two have coincided in America’s recent history is, in my analysis, why we now have an epidemic of depression. The mechanism through which it works is learned helplessness.
So that is my diagnosis: The epidemic of depression stems from the much-noted rise in individualism and the decline in the commitment to the common good. This means there are two ways out: First, changing the balance of individualism and the commons; second, exploiting the strengths of the maximal self.
If an individualism without commitment to the commons produces depression and meaninglessness on a massive scale, then something has to give. What? One possibility is that exaggerated individualism will fade away, that the maximal self will change back into the Yankee self. Another, frightening possibility is that, in order to shed depression and attain meaning, we will rashly surrender the newly won freedoms that individualism brings, giving up personal control and concern for the individual. The twentieth century is riddled with disastrous examples of societies that have done just this to cure their ills. The current yearning for fundamentalist religion throughout the world appears to be such a response. There are two other possibilities, both more hopeful. Both exploit the strengths of the maximal self. The first changes the balance between the self and the commons by choosing to expand its commitment to the commons. The second uses learned optimism.
How can we break the strong habits of selfishness in ourselves and our children? Exercise—not physical but moral—may be the antidepressant tactic we need. Consider adopting one of the following for yourself:
Put aside 5 percent of last year’s taxable income to give away, not to charities, which do the work for you; you must give the money away yourself, personally. Among potential recipients in the charitable field you are interested in, you must advertise that you are giving away $3,000 (or whatever) and for what general purposes. You must interview prospective grantees and decide among requests. You give out the money and follow its use to a successful conclusion.
Give up some activity which you do regularly for your own pleasure—eating out once a week, watching a rented movie on Tuesday night, hunting on fall weekends, playing video games when you come home from work, shopping for new shoes. Spend this time (the equivalent of an evening a week) in an activity devoted to the well-being of others or of the community at large: helping in a soup kitchen or a school-board campaign, visiting AIDS patients, cleaning the public park, fund-raising for your alma mater. Use the money you saved by canceling the pleasurable activity to further that cause.
When asked by a homeless person for money, talk to him. Judge as well as you can if he will use the money for nondestructive purposes. If you think he will, give it to him (give no less than five dollars). Frequent areas where you will find beggars, talking to the homeless and giving money to the ones in true need. Spend three hours per week doing this.
When you read of particularly heroic or despicable acts, write letters: fan letters to people who could use your praise and mend-your-ways letters to people and organizations you detest. Follow up with letters to politicians and others who can act directly. Spend three hours per week at this. Do it slowly. Compose the letters every bit as carefully as you would a crucial report for your company.
It is not necessary to undertake this in a selfless spirit. It is perfectly all right for you to do this because it is good for you, regardless of its effect on the common good. If you engage in activity in service of the commons long enough, it will gain meaning for you. You may find that you get depressed less easily, that you get sick less often, and that you feel better acting for the common good than indulging in solitary pleasures. Most important, an emptiness inside you, the meaninglessness that rampant individualism nurtures, will begin to fill.
The second way of exploiting the strengths of the maximal self has been the topic of this book. We have seen throughout how depression follows from a pessimistic way of thinking about failure and loss. Learning how to think more optimistically when we fail gives us a permanent skill for warding off depression. It also can help us achieve more and have better health.