C’mon Get Happy

Think it’s not so easy? THAT MAY BE YOUR PROBLEM. But the new gurus of positive psychology says even you can break free of the PESSIMISM HABIT.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FRIEND ELIZABETH. A FEW YEARS AGO ONE OF HER SISTERS DIED FROM A BRAIN TUMOR. THIS YEAR, SHE DIVORCED HER HUSBAND AND LEFT HER JOB. WITH SUCH A STRING OF MISFORTUNES, YOU MIGHT EXPECT THAT SHE'D BE BUMMED OUT OR, WORSE, PASSIVE AND RESIGNED TO THE VICIS-SITUDES OF FATE. Not my Elizabeth. "When bad things happen," she says, "they strike me as this huge aberration—like, 'What? How could that be?' And at the same time, I get this huge charge out of thinking about how I'm going to work things out."
    Now let me tell you about me. I come from a long line of people who hardly ever believe that things will work out. We see the hole instead of the bagel; our universal answer to the cosmic questions is eloquent in its simplicity: NO. In my family, we think of life as a slow march toward oblivion interspersed with occasional, and wholly unpre-dictable, moments of happiness. If you brace yourself for disaster, you'll be pleasantly surprised if disaster doesn't strike—so much better than being disappointed when good things fail to materialize. This perspective can be summed up in my father's favorite joke: How do you make God laugh? (Answer: Tell him your plans for the future.) Anyone who believes differently—in other words, an optimist—is a dim-witted, fluff-headed moron.

    Not Elizabeth, of course—she's one of the smartest people I know. But when it comes to optimism, she's off the charts. Take, for instance, the nightmare she kept having while her sister was dying. "There was a nuclear holocaust, and the bomb had gone off around the corner from my house. My dream was all about how I'd save my children. I was terrified of Armageddon, but at the same time I was very busy figuring how I'd talk my way out of it." If that's not the nightmare of an optimist, I don't know what is.
    I've been thinking about optimists a lot lately—how they are different from me, what makes them tick. There's Audrey, an 85-year-old lady at my local dog run who has lived in New York City for 50 years. Audrey chain-smokes and loves a four-martini lunch, minus the lunch; she walks haltingly with a cane, has osteoporosis and severe arthritis, and has broken her hip twice from being bowled over by overzeal-ous mutts. But she always talks about what good shape she's in, and if anyone dares to hold open the heavy dog-run gate for her, she bellows, "What's wrong, do I look old or something?"
    Or consider Tori Murden, the only woman ever to row across the Atlantic (3,333 miles in 81 days). During her first attempt, in 1998, she rowed straight into Hurricane Danielle. Her vessel cap-sized 11 times; at one point, Murden, thousands of miles from shore, grabbed her video camera and taped a good-bye to fami-ly and friends. Reluctant to risk the lives of would-be rescuers, she waited 36 hours in the screaming high seas before setting off her emergency signal beacon to summon help. Amazingly, only a few months after her rescue, she began making plans to cross again. "I think we are all capable of doing great things," says Murden, who succeeded on her second try. "If I'm an optimist, I'm the sort who believes in the forces of hard work and meticu-lous preparation. The harder you work, the luckier you are."
    I don't want to cross the ocean in a rowboat. I'd settle for com-paratively mundane changes in my outlook not automatically as-suming, for example, that a toothache is the first symptom of a jaw tumor; that if I travel abroad for more than a week, someone in my family will die (hey, it happened once, it could happen again); that if my work life is going well, my personal life must be a mess and my husband is thinking of asking for a divorce.
    But is it really possible for someone raised in the Temple of Doom (as I sometimes think of my childhood home) to see the bright side of any situation? How do you learn to think like an optimist without turning into a ninny?
    If anyone knows the answers, it should be Martin 1 Seligman, a professor of psychology at the Universi-ty of Pennsylvania and author of two classic books on positive thinking, Learned Optimism and The Opti-mistic Child. Seligman isn't just one of the world's foremost researchers on the subject; he's the father of the bur-geoning "positive psychology" movement, seen by some as the most important new mental-wellness trend in our lifetime. Thanks largely to this movement, the study of optimism has sud-denly become hotter than George Clooney in a wet suit.
    Positive psychology is based on the decidedly un-Freudian notion that human behavior can best be understood by focusing on our strengths as well as our weaknesses "healthy" emotions like love, interest, hope, and joy, as well as what's destructive/ codependent/addicted/wrong about ourselves. Why the pro-found shift in historically glum Shrink Land? Simple: The old paradigm isn't working. Americans are living in the greatest peri-od of personal and economic freedom in history, Seligman noted in a 1998 speech. "But almost all of our mental-health statistics are going south." Or north: In the past 30 years, the number of divorced people has quadrupled; diagnoses of depression are through the ozone layer.
    Why do so many personally empowered, technologically con-nected people feel so powerless and alone? How can psychologists give them the tools to strengthen their relationships and take control of their lives? The first question is daunting, but the second has a relatively easy answer, Seligman has said: Simply unlock the secrets of positive thinkers like Elizabeth, Audrey, and Tori Murden, and teach them to people like me.
    I'm hoping the great man will share some of those secrets over the phone. For someone who has spent his professional life studying the benefits of a positive outlook, though, Seligman turns out to be a remitrekably grumpy guy. He refuses almost all requests for interviews, and dismisses my E-mailed questions in a couple of rather discouraging notes.
    As a pessimist, of course, I feel vindicated by his snub. But soon I realize it was probably too optimistic of me to think that finding the answers to one of life's great mysteries would be so easy. Too optimistic? Hah! No thanks to you, Professor Smiley Face, I'm thinking more positively already.
    What makes an optimist different from a pessimist? For years, the assumption was that you were born to be a Pollyanna or a Gloomy Gus. Now researchers believe that genetics may predispose you to positive or negative thinking, but it's hardly the only factor. In studies, identical twins raised apart have less than a 50 percent chance of sharing a similar degree of optimism or pes-simism. Environment clearly plays a big role. Yet scientists also agree that one's worldview isn't necessarily determined by having a preponderance of great or ghastly experiences. Plenty of people survive rotten childhoods to become hopeful, happy adults. Plen-ty of affluent, sheltered kids grow into worrisome cranks.
    To understand why someone becomes an optimist or a pes-simist, it helps to understand what distinguishes one category from the other. Say you wrap your new Honda Civic around a telephone pole. First, do you expect good things to happen after the crash an easy recuperation, a fat check from your insurer, sympathy from your coworkers? Or do you worry that your neck will hurt forever and your mechanic will try to cheat you? Second, do you believe there was a circumstantial reason for the accident the road was slick, the car felt unfamiliar, you swerved to avoid a raccoon? Or do you think you're a menace to society who should seriously consider never getting behind the wheel again?
    "Optimistic people feel that good things will last a long time and will have a beneficial effect on everything they do," Seligman said last year. "And they think that bad things are isolated: They won't last too long and won't affect other parts of life." Pes-simists, conversely, believe in the spillover effect of bad events one negative incident begets another. Your expectations for the future are important, researchers say, but so is the story you con-struct about why things happen, as this narrative reflects your expectations at an unconscious level. If you're an optimist, you believe that bad events have temporary, specific, external caus-es—a stiff steering wheel, a sudden downpour, a troublesome critter while good things are pervasive and long-lasting. If you're a pessimist, you believe just the opposite "No one else wrecked their car in the rain. What an idiot I am." You're also more like-ly to dismiss a positive event as a lucky break. Optimist: "Of course no one got hurt I'm a really good driver." Pessimist: "Someday I'm going to end up killing someone."
    Most fundamentally, this perspective reflects how much con-trol you think you have over your life anda sense of control may be the single most important trait that distinguishes the Little Engines That Could of the world from the woe-is-me Eeyore types. Positive thinkers feel powerful; negative thinkers, Seligman says, feel helpless because they have been conditioned to believe they're screwed, no matter what. This concept, known as "learned helplessness," is the sine qua non of pessimism.
    The classic studies in this area date from the mid4960s. First researchers subjected two groups of dogs to electric shock. One group was able to stop the voltage; the others could not escape no matter what they did. Next, scientists put the animals in a new environment, with a low hurdle; to get away from the jolts, they simply had to jump the barrier. The dogs trained to think they could avoid shocks had no trouble figuring this out, but most of the animals in the other group didn't even bother to try to flee. Similarly, human volunteers were confronted with an irri-tating sound they couldn't stop or a word puzzle they couldn't solve. Later, when faced with easy-to-control noises or simple anagrams, most just sat there doing nothing. Clearly they thought their actions would be futile.
    It's easy to see how this concept translates to real life. Kids with critical, blaming parents stand a good chance of turning into teenagers who think they're stupid and ugly. (In fact, research at Vanderbilt University suggests that young adolescents with a pessimistic explanatory style are more likely to have been told by their mothers that their mistakes are caused by some personal defect.) A young wife who's made to feel she's incapable of handling household finances becomes a 50-year-old divorcée who can't balance a checkbook and has no idea how to pay off her debts.
    Learned helplessness is also a major factor in and often the cause of depression and stress, many researchers believe. No surprise; both emotions are very highly correlated with pes-simism. Pessimism has something else in com-mon with these negative mood states: All take a huge toll on health. Numerous studies have shown that opti-mists are much better at coping with the anxiety and distress associated with everything from infertility treatments and menopause to heart surgery and breast cancer. What's more, sci-entists at the University of California at Los Angeles studying a group of healthy law students discovered that optimists had higher levels of disease-fighting T cells.
    Positive thinkers live longer, too. In a study published this year, Mayo Clinic researchers compared the health of 839 men and women to scores on a personality test they took three decades ago. Those who had an optimistic explanatory style in their younger years were 19 percent more likely to still be alive and kicking than their morose peers. Similarly, 3,000 heart patients at Duke University were asked to rate their health from poor to excellent. Those who said "poor" were about three times as like-ly to die within the following three and a half years as those who said "very good." Astoundingly, the researchers were comparing people who were all at approximately the same level of health. They controlled for factors such as age, smoking, activity levels, and blood pressure. Similar studies involving the elderly and HIV patients invariably show that the longest-lived people are the ones who believe they enjoy good health.
    In fact, positive emotions such as optimism may actually heal. Last year Barbara Fredrickson, an associate professor of psychol-ogy at the University of Michigan, subjected volunteers first to a frightening movie and then to a film that was either amusing, neu-tral, or depressing. The heart rates of those who finished with a sad or neutral film took longer to return to normal than the rates of those who saw a movie that made them smile. "Positive emo-tions promote wellness by regulating and actually undoing our negative emotions," Fredrickson theorizes.
    Even if they don't recover, positive thinkers facing death tend to get more out of the time they have left. "You might think that optimistic people going through traumatic events would become “Positive Psychology” is based on the notion that to really understand human nature, we need to start studying “healthy” emotions like LOVE, HOPE and joy.