A beautiful article on Optimism

I found this particulary good write-up in The Economic Times of 3rd March, 2007 by Vithal C. Nadkarni on Optimism. Here I re-type the whole matter, as I could feel a strange but sure resonance with my experiences and convictions.

Teach yourself to be Optimistic

Psychologist Martin Seligman is acclaimed as a high priest of positive psychology. In his earlier avatar in the opposite camp, he probed topics such as symptoms of despair. He made his key discovery about 'learned helplessness' with the help of dogs, not their masters. Repeated exposure to inescapable shock, he found, was 'teaching' dogs that nothing they did would make an iota of difference to their miserable condition. What Seligman was proposing was heresy. He recalls meeting B F Skinner, the legendary proponent of Behaviourism, in a men's room after a lecture, only to be chastised grandly: "Animals don't think anything; they only behave!"

But seligman persisted with the conviction that his animal model could help in explaining the sense of utter helplessness that lies at the core of human depression. Seligman's landmark research also revealed that a small percentage of animals never became passive in the face of adversity. Similarly, in his later studies extended to humans, the psychologists found a corresponding minority of subjects who refused to learn to be helpless. So how does one separate the 'hard-boiled' from those who readily throw in the towel at the first hint of adversity?

The difference, Seligman reasoned, lay in the manner in which people 'explain' or rationalise good and bad events to their lives. Paradoxically, those who cheerfully bounce back from upsets, he said, might have an innately optimistic explanatory style that may even contain elements of 'self-serving' illusions; they might overestimate their abilities of talents while shrugging off responsibility for loses and failures. On the other hand, people prone to despair had a persistently negative style marked by brutal (read self deprecatory) honesty: neither inclined to grandiosity nor seeing themselves as charmed children of destiny, they were 'at the mercy of reality' Seligman argued.

So how does one turn off that cloud of darkness and despair hovering over one's head into a halo of brightness and good cheer? Try the exact opposite of learned helplessness - learned optimism, he said. Teach yourself to be optimistic with a tool that deliberately disputes catastrophic thinking. Bolstering the illusions that make life bearable, he said, was one of the roles of therapy. This was akin to what poetry does by giving us the lie we need to stay alive.