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.