Learned Optimism

The clincher, I feel, is that normal depression and unipolar depression are recognized in exactly the same way. Both involve the same four types of negative change: in thought, mood, behavior, and physical responses.

If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results.

Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again. For them, defeat is a challenge, a mere setback on the road to inevitable victory. They see defeat as temporary and specific, not pervasive.

Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.

What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.” Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.

But we found that explanatory style for bad events was highly stable across a period of more than fifty years.

The first step is just knowing your beliefs warrant dispute. The next step is putting disputation into practice.

A second way in which optimism should produce good health concerns sticking to health regimens and seeking medical advice.

But superimposed on this is our BRAC, our Basic Rest and Activity Cycle.