BE AN OPTIMALIST

The Primer for Pessimists suggests to be an “optimalist” instead of optimist.

The OPTIMIST believes everything happen for the best while the OPTIMALIST makes the best of things that happen. This article still revolves around the power of positive thinking and serves as a guide especially in our current recession crisis, be it in corporate or personal levels.

The topic is an inspiration for performing and gaining companies even in tough times like ours :).

But still, one should not make the current recession as an easy excuse for things we should be doing.

Below is the complete full article.


A Primer for Pessimists

Obesity and smoking may be the most conspicuous causes of illness in this country, but physical factors don't account for everything. Your psychology--namely, your personality and outlook on life--can be just as important to your well-being as exercising and eating right. And especially these days, with the world's economy tumbling toward a depression, it's a good time to prevent yourself from slipping into one too.

An entire science has grown up around the perils of negative thinking (as well as the power of positive psychology), and the latest findings confirm that a pessimistic outlook not only kindles anxiety, which can put people at risk for chronic mental illnesses like depression, but may also cause early death and set people up for a number of physical ailments, ranging from the common cold to heart disease and immune disorders.

Optimism, meanwhile, is associated with a happier and longer life. Over the course of a recent eight-year study, University of Pittsburgh researchers found that optimistic women outlived dour ones. Which may be good news for the motivational gurus out there, but what about the rest of us who aren't always so chipper? Are we destined for sickness and failure? Or is it possible to master the principles of positivity the same way we might learn a new hobby or follow a recipe?

The answer from the experts seems to be yes. But it does take effort. Seeing the sunny side doesn't come easily.

Be an "Optimalist"

Most people would define optimism as being eternally hopeful, endlessly happy, with a glass that's perpetually half full. But that's exactly the kind of deluded cheerfulness that positive psychologists wouldn't recommend. "Healthy optimism means being in touch with reality," says Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard professor who taught the university's most popular course, Positive Psychology, from 2002 to 2008. "It certainly doesn't mean being Pollyannaish and thinking everything is great and wonderful."

Ben-Shahar, who is the author of Happier (2007) and a new book, The Pursuit of Perfect (April 2009), describes realistic optimists as "optimalists"--not those who believe everything happens for the best, but those who make the best of things that happen.

In his own life, Ben-Shahar uses three optimalist exercises, which he calls PRP. When he feels down--say, after giving a bad lecture--he grants himself permission (P) to be human. He reminds himself that not every lecture can be a Nobel winner; some will be less effective than others. Next is reconstruction (R). He parses the weak lecture, learning lessons for the future about what works and what doesn't. Finally, there's perspective (P), which involves acknowledging that in the grand scheme of life, one lecture really doesn't matter.

Studies suggest that people who are able to focus on the positive fallout from a negative event--basically, cope with failure--can protect themselves from the physical toll of stress and anxiety. In a recent study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), scientists asked a group of women to give a speech in front of a stone-faced audience of strangers. On the first day, all the participants said they felt threatened, and they showed spikes in cortisol and fear hormones. On subsequent days, however, those women who had reported rebounding from a major life crisis in the past no longer felt the same subjective threat over speaking in public--and did not show a jump in cortisol. They had learned that this negative event, too, would pass and they would survive. "It's a back door to the same positive state because people are able to tolerate and accept the negative," says Elissa Epel, one of the psychologists involved in the study.

Accept Pain and Sadness

Being optimistic doesn't mean shutting out sad or painful emotions. As a clinical psychologist, Martin Seligman, who runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says he used to feel proud whenever he helped depressed patients rid themselves of sadness, anxiety or anger. "I thought I would get a happy person," he says. "But I never did. What I got was an empty person." That's what prompted him to launch the field of positive psychology, with a groundbreaking address to the American Psychological Association in 1998. Instead of focusing only on righting wrongs and lifting misery, he argued, psychologists need to help patients foster good mental health through constructive skills, like Ben-Shahar's PRP. The idea is to teach patients to strengthen their strengths rather than simply improve their weaknesses. "It's not enough to clear away the weeds and underbrush," Seligman says. "If you want roses, you have to plant a rose."

When a loved one dies or you lose your job, for example, it's normal and healthy to mourn. You're supposed to feel sad and even depressed. But you can't cocoon yourself in sadness for too long. A study by UCSF researchers of HIV-positive men whose partners had died found that the men who allowed themselves to grieve while also seeking to accept the death were better able to bounce back from the tragedy. Men who focused only on the loss as opposed to, say, viewing the death as a relief of their partner's suffering, tended to grieve longer, presumably because they couldn't find a way out of their sadness.

Smile in Your Profile Picture

If all else fails, try "catching" happiness from your friends. We are social beings, of course, and our outlook is influenced to no small degree by that of our friends and family. Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, documented in a 2008 study just how extensive and powerful this network effect is. Compared with glum people, those who were happy were more likely to be surrounded by other happy people--even the friends of happy people's friends' friends (who might be complete strangers) tended to be happy.

Christakis and his colleague James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, are now studying happiness contagion in perhaps the largest social network of all, Facebook. They noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled. This might simply be peer pressure at work, with members feeling obliged to flash a smile to fit in with the rest of the group, but Christakis and Fowler are investigating whether there isn't a more infectious phenomenon at work.

If you still aren't convinced that your doomsaying ways can ever be changed, consider this: only about 25% of a person's optimism may be hardwired in his genes, according to some studies. That's in contrast to the 40% to 60% heritability of most other personality traits, like agreeableness and conscientiousness. Science suggests that the greater part of an optimistic outlook can be acquired with the right instruction--a theory borne out in a study of college freshmen by Seligman. Pessimistic students who took a 12-week optimism-training course devised by Seligman--which included exercises like writing a letter of gratitude then reading it aloud to someone--were less likely to visit the student health center for illnesses during the next four years than their similarly pessimistic peers who weren't tutored in positive thinking. And a larger study of more than 3,000 middle-school students who are being taught resilience techniques is under way in England. "It's the largest-scale validation that optimism can be taught," says Seligman, who developed the techniques used in the study.

The thing about being optimistic, though, is that it takes hard work--and that's a drag. It's an active process, say psychologists, through which you force yourself to see your life a certain way. Indeed, the leading optimism and happiness experts consider themselves born pessimists. But if they have learned over time and with lots of practice to become more hopeful, take heart. So can you.

By Alice Park Thursday, Mar. 26, 2009
(Wellness Section in Time Magazine)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887872-1,00.html