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| Always Look on the Bright Side
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| Hey, it works for optimists! So why not give it a try? After all, having positive thoughts about the future and working to attain your goals may make you happier, healthier and more satisfied with your life.
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Dr. Suzanne Segerstrom, an associate professor of law at the University of Kentucky in Lexington finds herself in the unique position of being “both an optimism scientist and an optimist…”
The author of Breaking Murphy’s Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life and Pessimists Can Too, Dr. Segerstrom, A Templeton Prize winner, came to the personal realization after years of research and despite her own reservations about optimism’s traditional problems of image.
Mindless good cheer, unrealistic expectations, perky adherence to the panacea of doctrinaire positive thinking—let’s call them symptoms of “cockeyed” optimism.
Dr. Segerstrom prefers a different definition. “…‘You believe that the future is something that you can control.’ I love that definition of optimism because it moves directly from positive thoughts about the future
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to their most important consequence: working to achieve that future,” she writes in Murphy’s Law.
Through her research, Dr. Segerstrom has identified a skill set possessed by optimists to derive the most from life—she says that ultimately optimism is a way of “doing” that can be translated as behavior and behavior can be changed.
More good news—it seems that an optimistic nature isn’t necessarily harnessed to genetics.
“A dispositional optimist (the kind my research characterizes) is someone who has generally positive expectations about the future. Dispositional optimists are mostly made. Most traits are about 50 per cent inherited, but optimism is only about 25 per cent inherited. The rest seems to come from experiences, particularly experiences that lead you to believe that you can achieve your goals: a history of having and getting the things you need the most. Most people fall into the ‘moderately optimistic’ range: fewer people are ‘highly optimistic’ and ‘moderately pessimistic’, and (fortunately) very few people are ‘highly pessimistic’,” explains Dr. Segerstrom.
It turns out that optimism represents a good strategy for living.
“Optimism seems to be a very good strategy if for no other reasons than the consequences: Optimists are happier, more satisfied with their lives, achieve their goals more readily, and may even be physically healthier,” says Dr. Segerstrom who describes optimism as being less about happiness and more about the conviction that the future holds more good things than bad things.
Optimists are disinclined to agonize or fantasize, preferring action and relying on persistence and motivation to attain the goals they set for themselves, essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, which serves to reinforce all those good feelings.
The high level of commitment demonstrated by many optimists also increases engagement, which appears to be a significant component of happiness—if you’re engaged in work and the world around you, it diminishes the time you spend worrying about whether you’re losing your hair or if that mole on your back is malignant.
If you doubt your capacity to change consider the example cited in Murphy’s Law of an international college student sample, which demonstrates happiness levels almost on par with those of Calcutta slum dwellers, despite the vast differences in their prosperity levels.
According to Dr. Segerstrom, people have an enormous facility for adaptation that’s independent of circumstance called the “psychological immune system,” or the “hedonic treadmill.”
The ability to adapt makes a sturdy foundation on which to erect behavioral change—the kind of practical changes that can help even the most unapologetic pessimist get to work at developing some of the strengths and traits that confer power to optimists—which doesn’t mean you need to abandon your beloved curmudgeonly attitudes and persona.
“Keep the crummy attitude if it suits your personal style—just focus on changing your behavior. You don’t have to recite mantras or even believe in the possibility of cognitive transformation for change to actually occur. Hard work, persistence, and motivation pay off just the same, no matter what you believe in your heart,” explains Dr. Segerstrom.
In fact, if you are a pessimist, rather than drive yourself crazy trying to fundamentally change your predilections, why not set a more attainable goal?
“I think that ‘a good impersonation’ is a good target,” advises Dr. Segerstrom. “It seems to be very difficult to change your temperament. However, it’s easier to change your behavior. If you consider the things that characterize optimists, particularly engagement with their goals and persistence to achieve them, adopting those behaviors is a way to try to reap the benefits of optimism without attempting a change of character or temperament.”
Up, Up and Away!
From Murphy’s Law, Dr. Segerstrom offers her own highly instructive personal checklist—they may even make an optimist out of you:
- Believed that good things were in my future.
- Worked to make that future come true.
- When encountering roadblocks, considered them carefully and worked to eliminate them.
- Got off the hedonic treadmill by always having new goals to work toward.
- Focused on goals that would build basic, social, status and existential resources.
- Prioritized goals that were important to me.
- Believed the best of others and was inspired by them.
- Spent basic resources to meet my goals, neither hoarding time and energy nor squandering them to no purpose.
- Slept and ate well to replenish energy resources.
- Stayed away from the roulette wheel.
(Copyright 2006, Breaking Murphy's Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life - and Pessimists Can Too, by Suzanne C. Segerstrom, PhD. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press.)
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