There is good evidence that building optimism will make you more resilient from depression and more productive at work. There is also mounting evidence that optimism may make you physically healthier, with some of the strongest evidence coming from well-designed studies of cardiac mortality. I believe that your learning the skill of optimism could save your life. (If I am wrong, you have very little to lose except some of your pessimism.) Here’s why I believe this:
The story begins at a poker game in Northern Iowa in the late 1980’s. Bob Colligan, a psychologist from the Mayo Clinic, sat to my right. After singing “two tenors” every time a pair of tens appeared on the table, he made an intriguing suggestion about health. I had presented a talk earlier that evening on the suggestive evidence that optimism improves health in aging men. Bob mentioned that since 1950 every patient admitted to the Mayo Clinic for any physical problem took the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory, the MMPI. This is a 500 item yes-no test (“I am a secret agent of God”). Could we somehow code each item for optimism or pessimism and form a new optimism-pessimism scale?
Chris Peterson did just that, and Bob soon began to analyze the optimism or pessimism of patients admitted to the Mayo Clinic for all causes, using Chris’s technique. To see if optimism predicted longevity, Bob selected 839 consecutive patients who referred themselves for medical care in 1950. Death from any cause was the focus of the study and two hundred of these patients had died by the year 2000. The optimists had a whopping nineteen percent increase in longevity when their expected life span was compared to that of the pessimists.
Many of these deaths were cardiac, so Greg Buchanan and I undertook a prospective study of optimism and second heart attack. In this study, unlike the Mayo Clinic study, we knew the entire range of risk factors for each patient, so we could better zero in on pessimism as the deadly culprit. One hundred and twenty-six men had their first heart attack in the early 1980s in San Francisco. At that time, they were all interviewed about their lives. Their “attributional style” — pessimism or optimism — was derived from these interviews in just the same content-analytic way that we derived the optimism or pessimism of the MMPI items. The raters of the interviews were, of course, blind, unaware of the health of the men. Over the next eight years, half of these men died, mostly of a second heart attack. What predicted who would survive and who would die? Damage to the heart at the first heart attack, Type A, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, and the entire panoply of traditional physical risk factors did not predict second heart attack. Pessimism, on the other hand, predicted second heart attack and death. Of the most pessimistic quartile, 86 percent died, whereas only 33 percent of the most optimistic quartile died (Buchanan, 1994).
Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health found similar results. In 1986, 1306 men took the MMPI, from which she derived the optimism-pessimism score. In 10 years of follow-up, 162 cases of coronary heart disease occurred: 71 cases of nonfatal myocardial infarction, 31 cases of fatal coronary heart disease, and 60 cases of angina pectoris. She adjusted for smoking, weight, blood pressure, and a variety of other traditional risk factors. Men with high levels of optimism had less than half the risk for combined fatal and nonfatal myocardial infarction and for angina pectoris. The greater their optimism, the lower the risk for cardiac incidents.
In the largest study, 999 Dutch men and women from the Arnhem Elderly Study, took a variety of psychological tests and were followed for nine years, from 1991 to 2001. 397 died, and a high level of optimism was far and away the best predictor of survival. Taking sex, age, disease, education, smoking, alcohol, prior cardiac disease, cholesterol, and weight into account, strong optimists were at one-quarter the risk for cardiac death. Again the higher the optimism, the more protection against cardiac death. This was true of both men and women.
So the effects of optimism on risk for heart attack are strong, stronger probably than most or even all of the traditional risk factors. But is optimism the cause of the lower risk for heart attack or does it merely correlate with some unknown protective factor, like serotonin level or genes, which in turn is the active ingredient, causing both the optimism and the protection from heart attack?
We do not know, and there is really only one impeccable way to find out: a random-assignment experimental study, in which some people are randomly assigned to become optimists and later heart attacks are measured. Random assignment rules out all such confounding “third variables.” There is one such study in the literature: My research group invites the most pessimistic members of Penn’s entering freshmen to be randomly assigned to a control group or to a workshop which teaches the optimism techniques you will learn over the next three months. The freshmen who learn optimism not only have less depression and anxiety over the next three years but their physical health is significantly better than the controls. While the study is not about heart attack, but about the whole mélange of undergraduate physical ills, it shows optimism to be a cause, not just a correlate of better health.
I urge you (and the people you care about) to do the exercises on happier.com diligently, and as my mother used to say “use them in good health.”
References:
Buchanan, G.M., Gardenswartz, C.A.R., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1999). Physical health following a cognitive-behavioral intervention. Prevention and Treatment, 2.
Giltay, E., Geleljnse, J., Zitman, F., Hoekstra, T., & Schouten, E.(2004). Dispositional optimism and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in a prospective cohort of elderly Dutch men and women. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61, 1126-1135.
Kubzansky, L. Sparrow, D. Vokonas, P. and Kawachi, I. (2001). Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full? A Prospective Study of Optimism and Coronary Heart Disease in the Normative Aging Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 63, 910-916
Maruta, T., Colligan, R. Malinchoc, M. & Offord, K (2000). Optimists vs. pessimists: Survival rate among medical patients over a 30-year period. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 75, 140-143.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
A happier.com user asks:
Dr. Seligman:
How do I help someone else to use their strengths?
For more information on assessing and exploring your strengths, take a strengths assessment on happier.com or use the exercise Learn to Use Your Strengths.
Thanks for your question.
Go over the VIA list of strengths with your friend and then ask how much your friend feels these things for each strength:
- A sense of ownership and authenticity (“this is the real me”).
- A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first.
- A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced.
- Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength.
- A sense of yearning to find ways to use it.
- A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“try and stop me”).
- Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength.
- The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it.
- Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it.
This is an alternative way of helping someone discover their signature strengths. If one or more applies, have your friend pounce on this strength and use it more.
-Marty
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
A happier.com user asked:
What is the best gratitude letter you have ever read?
Previously, I shared with you one of my favorite gratitude letters (a poem).
Here is another one of the nicest letters I’ve read:
Dearest Papa,
It was a hot summer morning in Malaysia. I remember being three years old and being scolded by Mama. You were the first one I ran to, and I climbed into your lap, crying because it was one of my worst three-year-old fears: being reprimanded by someone who I esteemed and loved so much. I can’t specifically identify what I loved so much about being in your arms – maybe it was your comforting words, or the way you wiped tears from my chubby cheeks, or just the way your strong arms made me feel so safe, a small ship harbored from the cold and stormy waters of the world.
Whatever it was that always made me feel better, I remembered it and cherished it, because in the years to come I would always return to those arms whenever my world turned upside-down. In elementary school, I would cry into your shoulder because the other girls were making fun of me. In middle school, I ran to you when I didn’t get elected to the student council position that I wanted. Each of those time periods brought new traumas – traumas that, to me, signified the downfall of my life. But you always reassured me that things would get better, and things always did.
But high school brought with it new experiences, fresh relationships, changing emotions. Suddenly, I stopped climbing into your lap to share with you my deepest fears. Suddenly, I wanted to be independent, to embark from your harbor and confront turbulent waters myself. Suddenly, I didn’t need you. It was too much for me to handle on my own – with a sibling who graduated for Stanford at fourteen, I felt inadequate and pressured. I felt that I had to prove myself to the world, solitarily and brilliantly. I broke down if I got grades lower than an A, and I remember Mama being so disappointed with my first SAT score. I felt incompetent.
Even though I pushed you away, you were still there, gradually and subtly. You came to my bed that one night when I was crying over disappointment at myself, and you kneeled there, a lighthouse for my wrecked ship. You let me cry and cry, and you listened. You not only offered me unconditional love, but you believed in me, and that was exactly what I needed. When I got into Stanford, and finally proved myself, your arms were the first that I threw myself into; your shoulder was the first that I cried into, but this time out of pure happiness. My victory was yours, every step of the way.
When you finally brought me to Stanford, a deep, deep sorrow eluded the sweet happiness I felt at being here. How could I be in my dream place, yet leave you behind? You held me as a crying newborn in your arms, marveling at the beautiful life we would spend together; seventeen years later, you held me as a frightened teenager, crying at the life we would now spend physically apart. In those moments before you let me go, I clung to you, a small child again – I needed your safety, your advice, your words, your confidence in me. Those arms, that harbor, would now be a continent away, and I was petrified. In your teary state, you told me that I could always come home, but I knew that I had to walk as a little girl from your arms into the new arms of college life. It would take baby steps, difficult and painful, but it needed to be done.
They say you never realize how much you love something until it’s gone, and now I know how true that is. I’ve had to learn how to cope without you, how to go through my problems and pitfalls without your arms to run into. In my most difficult times, I pick up the phone and cry to you, separated by distance but bridged by love. And I’ve realized that in my eighteen years, you have never once demanded anything in return other than my unrequited happiness. All of your time, hard work, and sacrifice became devoted to my success, and I never acknowledged that.
So now I want to say thank you for all that you have been and all that you are to me. You are a source of support, a beacon of guidance, a haven of comfort, a guardian angel, a believer, and first and foremost, you are a father. If those thank-you’s that you deserve daily are sparse or nonexistent, just know that my entire existence and effort are a reflection of your love and a quest to make you proud. I may be hundreds and thousands of miles away. I may be eighteen, no longer considered a child. I may have new friends, a new life, a new existence outside of the one we both knew. I may have matured, learned, grown, adapted to new challenges and new struggles solitarily. But ultimately, your arms are the only ones I will ever run to. I hope you will forever be there to tell me that I can always come home.
For more information on writing gratitude letters, visit the gratitude exercise (coming soon) at happier.com.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
