The situation: Jane and Anthony have different ways of seeing the world. Jane is pessimistic (the glass is half empty), while Anthony is optimistic (the glass is half full). These perspectives influence how they experience similar situations.
Scene 1: Loss of employment. Jane is devastated, convincing herself that she is finished, that she will never be able to take a break, that it is useless for her to try to succeed, and that she will never be successful at anything.
Anthony, however, has a healthier self-talk. You tell yourself that you may not have been good at that particular job, that your skills and the needs of your company didn’t match, and being fired was just a temporary setback to your career.
Scene 2: New jobs. When offered a new job, the pessimist Jane thinks she was able to find a new job just because her industry is now really desperate for people and she must have lowered her standards to hire her.
Anthony, however, feels that he got the new job because his talent was finally recognized and now he will be appreciated for what he can do.
As these examples illustrate, optimists tend to interpret their problems as transitory, controllable, and situation-specific. Recent research by Dr. Martin Seligman confirms this.
When good things happen, optimists believe that the causes are permanent, as a result of traits and abilities. Optimists also believe that good events will improve everything they do.
Naysayers, on the other hand, believe that their problems will last forever, undermine everything they do, and are basically out of their control. When good things happen to pessimists, they see them as temporary and caused by specific factors that will eventually change and lead to negative outcomes.
Optimism creates better resistance to depression when bad events occur, better job performance, and better physical health.
In fact, a long-term study at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, found that optimists lived 19% longer than pessimists.
Optimism is also a powerful antidote to anger. Many of the participants in our anger management classes report that their anger lessens as they learn to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts.
Here’s some good news for negative thinkers: You can learn to replace pessimism with optimism.
The starting point is to access your vulnerability to pessimistic thinking by taking the self-assessment test that you can find in http://www.authentichappiness.org
Your answers will be compared to those of thousands of people in various categories, down to your zip code.
If you scored lower than you would like, you may become more optimistic. As Dr. Seligman writes in Authentic Happiness, his latest book: “The trait of optimism is changeable and can be learned.”
Now there is a well-documented method for generating optimism. It is based first on acknowledging and then contesting pessimistic thoughts.
People often do not pay attention to their thoughts and therefore do not recognize how destructive they can be in generating negative emotions. The key is to acknowledge your pessimistic thoughts and then treat them as if they were spoken by someone else: an outside person, a rival, whose mission in life is to make you miserable!
You can basically become an optimist if you learn to disagree with yourself, challenging your pessimistic thought patterns and replacing them with more positive patterns.
Note: This view of optimistic thinking is not the process of ‘positive thinking’ in the sense of repeating silly statements that you don’t really believe.
Rather, it is the process of correcting distorted or faulty thought patterns that creates health, career, and relationship problems for you.
By learning to think about things differently (but with the same realism), you can transform yourself from pessimistic to optimistic, and in the process, tame the anger bee.