Learning Optimism: A Surprising Way to Overcome Pessimism

Although optimism and pessimism would seem to have a very basic role in determining lifespan, medical researchers have only very recently begun to look at personality traits as predictors of health and disease. In 2012, researchers at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia published their findings of a study of personality and mortality in 3,572 twins over the age of 50.

They found that, when other factors are taken into consideration:

• Optimists tend to live longer than pessimists, but
• Psychoticism, which may express itself as magical thinking, was associated with shorter lifespans.

The study also found a trend for introverts to live longer than extroverts, although the relationship was not statistically significant.

Optimism More Important than Good Genes

The Australian study found that having "good genes" actually plays a very small role in determining how long someone will live.

Attitude is far more important to determining how long and how well someone will live, at least in a relatively prosperous and socially conscious society such as Australia, and optimists live longer than people whose attitudes are primarily pessimistic.

Optimism Is Mainly in the Brain

Whether a person is an optimist or a pessimist, however, isn't just about attitude. It's largely about brain chemistry.

A brain chemical called dopamine prevents the brain from recording the feeling aspects of negative experiences. We can reason what is beneficial and detrimental in our lives, but we don't "feel" the effects of negative experiences as strongly when our brains produce more dopamine.

Dopamine is often described as the brain's reward chemical. It serves as a neurotransmitter, a chemical that helps electrical signals "jump" the gap between neurons in the brain. Whether there is more or less dopamine in a junction helps to determine the strength of a signal in the brain. The pattern of more dopamine on one location and less dopamine in another routes signals to their destinations. When dopamine is deficient, signals don't get sent to the parts of the brain that register pleasure. A lack of dopamine results in "depression," but dopamine also affects our thinking processes, not just our feelings.

Since an optimistic attitude involves failing to remember emotional pain, optimism is inherently unrealistic. That's not a bad thing, however, as long as optimism is not replaced by psychoticism, which erases factual memories and good judgment.

How To Train An Optimistic Brain

Training yourself to be an optimist, therefore, has less to do with thinking positively than with not thinking negatively. It has less to do with thinking than with feeling, and less to do with how we feel right now than with how we remember feelings associated with prior bad experiences.

It's possible to go through complicated behavior-based routines to train the brain for optimism. In the late 1980's, an American psychologist named Martin Seligman coined the term "learned optimism" and enunciated three principles of an optimistic lifestyle.

• Personalization. Optimists tend to take credit for desirable outcomes and to blame bad outcomes on others. Pessimists tend to give credit for desirable outcomes to others and to blame bad outcomes on themselves.
• Pervasiveness. Optimists tend to believe that failures in their lives are compartmentalized, not reflective of their lives as a whole. Pessimists tend to conflate failure in one area of their lives to negative expectations for other aspects of their lives.
• Permanence. Optimists tend to look at negative events as temporary, but to expect good things from life in general. Pessmists tend to believe positive events are the result of luck, and the trend of their lives is to have problems.

Seligman's theory became very popular in military commands for teaching leadership of soldiers, who are basically ordered to be optimistic by their commanding officers. If the method is not used carefully, it can result in a mild degree of learned psychoticism, or debilitating, learned magical thinking.

But it's not necessary to change your psychology to become an optimist. It's only necessary to support the brain's production of dopamine.

There are lots of destructive ways to increase dopamine production, of course. Fast food is laden with chemicals that stimulate the production of dopamine. Just as you can drown your sorrows in drink, you can erase the imprinting of negative experiences with a Big Mac and fries. You can also enhance dopamine by gambling, skydiving, seeking out new sexual partners, and taking illicit drugs. 

All kinds of enjoyable experiences--especially when you haven't "earned" them--help train your brain to remember the facts about the negative experiences of your life, without projecting the feelings you felt about the negative experiences in your life onto your future.