Optimism

According to a recently reported study, optimists are more likely to live longer than those with a more pessimistic outlook. Up to 15% of longer life and a better chance of making it to 85 and beyond.

While there are likely many other factors at play here; income level, access to good health care and general living habits all have a bearing on longevity, there does seem to be a positive life impact when we tend towards optimism and away from pessimism.

A certain amount of our optimism is genetic, but there is plenty of scope to develop our optimism and change an habitual pessimistic outlook.

At its core, optimism is about accepting that we encounter problems, challenges and set-backs while maintaining a positive attitude to the future and thinking that things will likely work out ok.

The key to finding our optimism is examining how we explain life events to ourselves. The story we tell ourselves influences how we process the good and bad in life, our attitude to the future and how we’ll go on to deal with those future events.

There are three strands to how we tell our story and in each strand we can find the difference between the optimist and the pessimist within ourselves.

Is it Permanent? It will never change.

• That process will never work

• That person is a total ****

Is it Pervasive? It affects everything I do.

• All meetings are a waste of time

• Everyone is so unfair

Is it Personal? It’s my fault.

• If I had/hadn’t done that, it might have been ok

• They don’t like me

• This always happens to me

Looking at these explanatory styles, it’s clear how we easily we can tell ourselves a nightmare story about lots of routine events in our lives.

The day to day challenges in work, interpersonal issues, conflicting interests, competing priorities and agendas all lend themselves to negative story telling about how hopeless things/people are and how things/people will never change. That narrative causes us to think negatively about events, people and ourselves. It also saps our energy and sense of control over events.

How to change the story?

The key is to see that an optimistic attitude is rooted in the story we tell ourselves about events. How we interpret events is up to us. We have choices about how we think about and respond to events.

Instead of permanence - try to see the event as temporary, specific or short term.

Instead of pervasiveness - try to see the event as insulated, separate, isolated or unrelated to other areas of your life.

Instead of personalising - try to see the external factors in what happened, the full context, what you were able to control and what was beyond your control.

Final Thoughts

The research shows that people with optimistic thinking patterns tend to see negative events as temporary glitches, learning opportunities and useful experience to better meet future challenges.

And that suggests another useful question to ask ourselves when we’re in the middle of negative story telling about an event or situation: if I project myself forward a week, would this situation look the same in hindsight?