Optimism

Ultimate optimism 

It’s easy to be optimistic about optimism these days. Research shows that optimists on average get sick less often and live longer than pessimists. The immune system seems to be stronger in optimists, and the cardiovascular system more stable. Optimists are the go-getters, achievers, and leaders who are held high in public esteem. Optimists are generally likable; they pump others up, and people enjoy their company more than that of pessimists. There is a new field, positive psychology, that stresses the value of optimism. Optimism is so hot it recently made the cover of Time.6

Optimism is on a roll—and I sometimes feel as if it is about to roll over me. Although I am personally inclined toward optimism, I tremble at the showy, smiley-faced, shotgun variety that is advocated these days by the insufferable optimism merchants. I favor a quiet, indwelling variety of optimism that I keep to myself as a calm certainty. I hesitate to name this attitude; even calling it a “cognitive style,” as the positive psychologists do, is going too far. As Stendahl said about happiness, “To describe [it] is to diminish it.”7 My approach is akin to what medieval theologians called the via negativa, the negative way, which emphasized the fullness and reality of the Divine by dwelling not on positive attributes, but on the fact that the Divine is beyond description. Attributing any quality to the Absolute was a form of anthropomorphic idolatry, dressing up the godhead in human form. Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic, was a proponent of the via negativa. He said, “Then how shall I love him?—Love him as he is: a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image; as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien from all duality. And in this one let us sink down eternally from nothingness to nothingness. So help us God. Amen.”8 In keeping with Eckhart’s view, perhaps I should call my attitude not-optimism.

For me, linking optimism and the Absolute or Divine, however named, is not hyperbole. The connection is natural: “optimism” comes from Latin words meaning highest or best, which is what we consider the Divine to be. Julian of Norwich, England’s sublime fourteenth-century mystic, understood this relationship. At a time when the Black Death was stalking Europe, she found no difficulty associating optimism and the Divine. In enchanting prose she exulted, “But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well…. He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased,’ but he said, ‘thou shalt not be overcome.’ ”9 Or as poet Maya Angelou has echoed in our day, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”10

Optimism unanchored to the Absolute is hard to sustain. If one takes the distant view of modern cosmology, the scenario is bottomlessly depressing. Our expanding universe, scientists tell us, will eventually undergo heat death and will descend into irreversible disorganization. This means that life and consciousness will perish. Against this backdrop, optimism is a worthless, pitiful band-aid. But if consciousness is linked with the Absolute, the outlook changes. The Absolute stands above all, including whatever may happen to the cosmos. Our connectedness with the Absolute implies that we share qualities with it—qualities which, much evidence suggests,11 include infinitude in space and time. If so, we are in some sense eternal and immortal: the ultimate justification for being optimistic, and a finger in the eye of doomsaying cosmologists.

Exuberance: profound optimism 

In some people optimism shades into exuberance, a sense of overflowing joy and energy. Kay Redfield Jamison, the psychiatrist who made headlines in exposing her own bipolar illness,12 has written a book, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, which includes interviews with many exuberant people.13 Everyone she interviewed described how annoying they could be to others. Highly optimistic, exuberant people are also easily annoyed by others; many of those in highly competitive environments such as universities and research institutions where objectivity is in demand said they felt very vulnerable to ridicule.

One reason exuberant people are resented by their colleagues is that they make others uncomfortable after a certain point. As Jamison says, “They like being around them, enjoy the energy and the enthusiasm, but it is kind of exhausting.” Or as the author Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) said, “A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.”14

Unrestrained exuberance can also be hazardous. Jamison again: “We all need to have … skepticism about ourselves. Exuberance can be dangerous. If you have someone who is exuberant and doing great and wonderful things, that is terrific. But if you have somebody who is leading you into war because he or she is very enthusiastic about it, or into very bad business deals… . ”15

Optimism tested, optimism twisted 

Optimism was repeatedly put to the test during the twentieth century with two worlds wars, the Holocaust, repeated genocides, and a death toll unparalleled by any era. Challenges to optimism are continuing into the twenty-first century.

On December 26, 2004, an earthquake on the sea floor off Sumatra generated a monstrous tsunami that lashed coastlines as far away as Africa, killing an estimated 250,000 individuals. Entire families and whole villages vanished. Hearts around the world ached for the victims and, in another kind of flood, millions of dollars of aid poured in from governments and individuals everywhere.

The disaster generated around-the-clock news coverage in which pundits tried to find meaning in the disaster. These programs featured agnostics, atheists, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, politicians, and clerics of various religions. The agnostics, atheists, and scientists generally saw the tsunami as an expression of the blind laws of nature—nature red in tooth and claw. To them, there was no essential meaning to the event, because the laws of nature, they believe, are coldly impersonal and inherently meaningless. In contrast, several Islamic commentators managed to find positive meaning and optimism in the event. They said that the Christians, Jews, and westerners who perished at seaside resorts were infidels and heretics who deserved their heaven-sent punishment. As Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajjid said in an interview on Saudi/UAE’s Al-Majd TV, “Haven’t they [western tourists celebrating Christmas holidays] learned the lesson from what Allah wreaked upon the coast of Asia, during the celebration of these forbidden [festivals]? At the height of immorality, Allah took vengeance on these criminals.” But what of the thousands of Muslims who died alongside the infidels? They were considered martyrs.16, 17 It was a sorry moment. Optimism, in the hands of religion, can take alarming forms.

These comments illustrate an eternal problem with optimism: What seems optimistic to one individual can be disastrous for another. Even in matters of health, things are clouded. All mothers, for example, want their newborns to be well and never to get sick. Yet the only way infants develop immune systems capable of resisting infections is through repeated exposures to swarms of microbes that stimulate mini-illnesses and the production of antibodies. If the hopes of the optimistic mom were realized, her child would wind up a “bubble baby” who must live inside a plastic shield to ward off the myriad bacteria, fungi, and viruses that are a part of daily life.

Another widespread expression of optimism is the hope or belief that we will recover from any illness that may strike us. If this universal wish were realized, no one would die, and the earth would have become disastrously overpopulated millennia ago and rendered unfit for human habitation.

The most egregious abuses of optimism, however, take place on a large scale and in full view. The entire advertising sector is driven by a strategy of faux optimism: your life will be happier, sexier, and better if you buy a particular product, whether or not you actually need it or can afford it. Similarly, the self-help industry also rests on a doctrine of cheery optimism and happy outcomes, if the strategy of the month is followed. And politics oscillates crazily between optimism and pessimism, each political party painting the other as pessimistic, retro, and out of touch, and itself as forward-looking, creative, and positive about the future.

Pessimism’s paradox 

Pessimism, if carried to the extreme, often undergoes a weird transformation and becomes funny. This is the sort of thing that occurs in gallows humor, in which “things are so bad I might as well laugh.”

Many comic geniuses understand keenly that pessimism can morph into humor, and they use this to great effect. It is no accident that some of our greatest comedians have been self-styled pessimists, such as Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Red Skelton, and Rodney Daingerfield.

Even when people try to be genuinely pessimistic, they often come off as funny and we laugh at them through their seriousness. Consider Henry Miller’s put-down of optimism and hope: “Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.”18 Or the curmudgeon who said, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a one hundred percent fatality rate.” Or Baron de Montesquieu, who said, in all seriousness, “A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.”19

If we are trapped in pessimism, perhaps we should not hold back, but plunge in and be seriously pessimistic, nothing half-way. If we did so we might wind up laughing, and liberate our self from pessimism’s grasp.

The health connection 

One of the most significant breakthroughs in twentieth-century medicine was the discovery of the importance of attitudes, emotions, and beliefs in health—what is now called mind-body medicine. Prior to mid-century, it was decidedly odd to hear clinicians speak of such things; now it is commonplace. The key premise of mind-body medicine is that our mental life is not isolated above the clavicles. Each thought and emotion is a message to the rest of the body, mediated by an intricate array of nerve signals, hormones, and various other substances.

A major development was the findings of behavioral scientists Suzanne Kobasa and Salvatore Maddi, then at the University of Chicago. In a series of landmark studies in the early 1980s, they elaborated the idea of psychological hardiness—a behavioral pattern found in stressed individuals who almost never got sick and lived long, fulfilling lives. The key, they found, was the “3 Cs”—control, commitment to work, family, and self, and a strong sense of challenge. Even during periods of intense psychological stress, individuals possessing these traits remained healthy, while those who had low hardiness scores had significantly poorer health.

Kobasa and Maddi found that the critical starting point for hardiness and effective coping is an “optimistic appraisal” of a situation. When an event is viewed with less pessimism, its psychological and physiological impact is reduced. They concluded that hardiness, effective coping, and optimism are not fixed but are flexible.

A sense of control is largely a belief one can either reject or adopt and cultivate. As Blair Justice, professor of psychology at the School of Public Health, University of Texas-Houston, says in his admirable survey of the mind-body field, Who Gets Sick: How Beliefs, Moods, and Thoughts Affect Your Health, “Cognitive control stems from the belief that we can affect the hurtful impact … of a situation by how we look at the problem. It means that by choosing to regard losses, hurts, frustrations and stressful life changes with less gloom and doom and not as the end of the world, we control their power to damage us.”20

In study after study, people who were most resistant to physical and mental illness used a style of coping in which they viewed their situation with less pessimism. This led to taking action, where possible, to change the external problem. Then the individuals usually palliated the physical and mental effects of the stress through exercise, relaxation training, or some other healthy behavior.20

“Optimistic appraisal” is simply a good attitude or upbeat approach to a given situation. Lawrence Hinkle and his colleagues at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center followed several populations over 20 years, looking for evidence that optimistic appraisal makes a difference in health.21, 22 One group was 100 Chinese immigrants who were marooned in the United States because of political unrest in their homeland. Their lives were in upheaval—uncertainty about their fate and that of their families back home, and how they would survive economically. Those who remained healthy—and many did—were distinguished by how they viewed their difficulties. They saw their past and present as difficult but also interesting, challenging, and relatively satisfying. Those who got sick more often took a different view, seeing their situation as threatening, frustrating, and demanding.23

Hinkle and his coworkers found also that there is another way to promote good health in trying circumstances that does not involve optimism. If one insulates one’s self emotionally, invests little in life, and builds walls to keep others out, the incidence of illness is also reduced.24 But there is a downside to this approach. As Justice says in an understatement, “[O]ur social health will suffer and our relations with others will have no depth.”20

Cardiologist Daniel B. Mark, of Duke University School of Medicine, followed the progress of 1,719 men and women after cardiac catheterization. After one year, twelve percent of people who were initially pessimistic about their health had died, compared to only five percent of the optimists. Dr. Nancy Frasure-Smith, of the Montreal Heart Institute, found that heart patients who scored high on pessimism were eight times more likely than optimists to die over the course of eighteen months. Dr. Geoffrey Reed, of the University of California-Los Angeles, showed that fatalism, optimism’s polar opposite, and the loss of friends predicted negative outcomes in patients with HIV disease.25

How does optimism actually foster longer and healthier lives? Seligman suggests four ways.5 First, the brain registers the experience of optimism and reaches down via humoral, chemical, and nerve pathways to affect cellular function throughout the body, including the cardiac, immune, and other systems. Second, because optimism is correlated with motivation and taking action, optimistic people are more likely to want to be healthy and to believe they can be healthy. This makes it more likely they will follow healthy regimens and appropriate medical advice. Third, optimists experience fewer noxious events in their life than pessimists, including fewer threats to their health, because their sense of control assures them they can make a difference in what happens. In contrast, pessimists often seem to roll out a red carpet for chaos, convinced that what they do doesn’t matter. Finally, optimists enjoy greater social support than pessimists, and evidence shows that even mild social interaction is a buffer against illness.5

Cardiologist Dean Ornish, who pioneered the reversal of heart disease by diet, exercise, and stress management, emphasizes the value of love in health. Love is perhaps the most profound type of social interaction. In his book Love and Survival, he suggests that our very survival depends on the healing power of love, intimacy, and relationships.26 The link to optimism is direct: love leads to optimism and empowers it. Optimists are move loveable than pessimistic curmudgeons, and the love they receive generates more optimism—and so on, in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Optimism is also essential to the actual practice of medicine—not as an optional nicety, but as a vital factor. Consider the placebo response, which is the sense of benefit a patient feels that arises solely from the knowledge that some treatment has been given. Researchers estimate that the placebo response accounts for thirty to fifty percent of the effect of many drugs, and sometimes up to one hundred percent of certain surgical procedures.27 All physicians know that the placebo response is an indispensable part of modern medicine, and that a good physician must know how to maximize it. The driving force behind the placebo response is optimism—the belief that the therapy will work. Optimism, therefore, in the guise of placebo effects, remains an essential part of the foundation of medicine, as it has been throughout history. But let’s not forget that the placebo response has a dark twin, the nocebo effect, which is a negative and sometimes fatal result based in pessimism—the belief that a therapy will not work.

Barriers to optimism 

Many people find it difficult to be optimistic about their health as they age. With the attention given these days to Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, and other degenerative ailments, they see their future as a one-way ticket to a nursing home, disability, and senility. Yet there are solid grounds for optimism. Of those 65 to 74 years of age, 89 percent report no disability. After age 85, 40 percent of individuals are fully functional.28 In recent years, the percentage of people over 65 who are disabled has dropped, and experts predict this trend will accelerate.29

A wealth of evidence suggests that the choices we make about diet, weight, exercise, and social and mental stimuli during middle age greatly affect our psychological and physical competence as we age.30 Spiritual and religious involvements are believed to add seven or more years, on average, to one’s lifespan.31 Several studies show that what one thinks about one’s health is one of the most accurate predictors of longevity ever discovered.32

Many individuals find it difficult to be optimistic about their health because they come from short-lived, unhealthy families. They feel cursed by their genes, betrayed by their DNA. But, says Justice, “[G[enes account for about 35 percent of longevity, while lifestyles, diet and other environmental factors, including support systems, are the major reasons people live longer.”20, 28

Another barrier to remaining optimistic with aging is that close friends and family members die, and we feel increasingly alone. The periodic mourning and bereavement that comes with aging are legitimate health concerns, because evidence shows that bereavement is associated with a drastic decline in immune function, which may be one reason for the increase in infections and cancer with aging.33 It is important to mourn one’s losses, and bereavement should not be short-circuited. Yet we should help bereaved individuals move through their mourning, and, to the extent possible, focus on life’s brighter facets—not just because it is humane to assist them in this way, but also because it is healthy for them as well. Why healthy? Optimism counters the negative effects of pessimism on immune function in the elderly. In men and women between ages 62 and 87, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that optimistic individuals had higher helper/suppressor T-cell ratios, meaning greater ability to resist disease.34 Other researchers found that elderly individuals who remained alive at the end of an eight-year period were those with the most optimism.35

Optimism: the dark side 

Psychologist Roy Baumeister, author of Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty,36 and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University explored what happens when individuals are too optimistic about themselves.37 They examined self-esteem in serial killers, hit men, gang leaders, violent criminals, spouse abusers, and bullies. It is commonly assumed that people drift into criminality because they think poorly of themselves, but the researchers found the opposite: these individuals have enormously high levels of self-esteem. This creates in them a sense of grandiosity, supremacy, invulnerability, and the belief that they should not be corrected. When others object to their behavior, they lash out. Thus Baumeister states, “Today, it is common to propose that low self-esteem causes violence, but the evidence shows plainly that this idea is false. This is true across a broad spectrum of violence, from playground bullying to national tyranny, from domestic abuse to genocide, from warfare to murder and rape. Perpetrators of violence are typically people who think very highly of themselves… . In the United States the push to raise everyone’s self-esteem seems ill-advised.”36

Optimism about the self, then, is no panacea and can be dangerous. Boosting self-esteem indiscriminately in some youngsters may lead to disaster. You may get an egotistical kid who grows up to abuse his wife, or at worst a schoolyard shooting spree.38

Cultivating optimism 

Optimism is not a given. It can fluxuate, like our body weight, and can be learned. In his book Learned Optimism, psychologist Seligman shows how.5

It’s a matter of ABC, Seligman explains. When we encounter adversity, we begin to think about it. Over time, these thoughts ossify into beliefs, which can become so habitual they are unconscious. Our beliefs about adverse situations have consequences, causing us to respond either optimistically or pessimistically.

Seligman teaches people to become aware of their habitual, unthinking behaviors and to substitute more adaptive, optimistic responses. Here’s a typical exercise. Allow yourself to vividly imagine an everyday adversity, “A”—someone has squeezed into the parking space you were eyeing. Then you identify the thoughts and beliefs, “B,” that you have about this situation. You then imagine the consequences, “C,” of these beliefs, such as honking your horn, shaking your fist, or yelling. Seligman adds a “D” and “E”: disputation, in which you engage in self-dialogue or analysis of the situation (I don’t own the parking spot; others are available); and energization, in which you seek an optimistic perspective (the driver of the other car was elderly; she needed the parking spot more than me; giving it up is an act of kindness; I feel better having done it). Seligman advocates keeping a journal of ABCDE exercises to help jostle the mind out of habitual, pessimistic responses. These methods have been used in children, college students, and adults. They appear capable of generating not only optimism, but positive physical changes as well. In patients with cancer, for example, sharp increases in immune function have been observed in participants in these techniques.5

Pessimists often resist methods like these because they sound gimmicky, and because they disdain efforts by optimists to convert them. Pessimists are often convinced that they “see the world aright,” as the cantankerous pessimist Ambrose Bierce put it; why should they trade in their perspective for rose-colored glasses? Perhaps the most concrete reason is that optimists, research shows, get sick less often and live longer than pessimists, and that optimists are happier.

A larger view 

Henry Dreher, the science and health writer, is a keen analyst of mind-body research. In his important book Mind-Body Unity, he offers a stinging critique of nearly all the research touting optimism.25 In his opinion, it’s not enough to demonstrate that optimism makes a difference in health; one must also ask why it does so. Almost none of the researchers in this field, Dreher says, has asked why some sick people are optimistic, while others are pessimistic. The research specifically ignores the social factors that spawn and nourish optimism or pessimism. The result of disregarding these external factors, he believes, is that optimism is converted into a purely psychological issue. As a consequence, researchers tend to “put the onus on individuals to lift themselves out of the muck of negativism by their cognitive bootstraps.” Sometimes this is successful, as in the therapies advocated by Seligman. “But,” Dreher laments, “the other part of the task, the creation of neighborhoods and workplaces that generate optimism and self-efficacy, remains nearly absent from mind-body intervention research.”25

Dreher should be listened to. He spent two years as a reading teacher in an after-school day-care program in the notorious Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. Most of his students lived in terrible, demoralized neighborhoods overrun with poverty and drugs. Dreher was often baffled by his students. “I was struck,” he relates, “by the children who came from the worst imaginable homes and neighborhoods and yet possessed a maturity and resilience that I could not explain … [T]hey had psychospiritual qualities—whether from genes, early experiences, or unknown influences—that enabled them to survive.” But not all were that durable. Dreher emerged from these experiences convinced that optimism was about more than psychology. He is convinced that unless researchers expand their vision to include social and economic factors, optimism research will be squeezed into “a one-sided preoccupation with getting people to change their inner lives as a cure for every ailment of mind and body.”25

Many lab experiments show that if animals such as rats, mice, and dogs are shocked repeatedly, they lie down in their cages and give up if they do not have a way of turning off the shocks. Many people in our society, says Dreher, such as the chronically unemployed, the disaffected, and those who are discriminated against, are like the animals in these studies, unable to turn off the “shocks.” Is it appropriate to ask these individuals to think themselves out of their plight? Thus, “[W]hile Seligman’s cognitive therapy is undoubtedly helpful for many individuals, as well as for more privileged people, more is needed…. Yes, people can improve their lot by thinking, feeling, and behaving in more adaptive ways. But if people are asked to take greater responsibility for their attitudes and health, the social engineers, the politicians, the powerbrokers, and the medical establishment must also be asked to take greater responsibility for conditions that sometimes crush even the most resilient personalities.”25

Health psychologist Blair Justice agrees: “When people grow up in poverty or are the victims of injustice, when they struggle day by day just to survive, their thoughts and beliefs cannot help but be deeply influenced by their environment. In the absence of love, support, minimum opportunity and security, faith and optimism are much harder to come by. By redressing wrongs and improving human conditions, we can give more people a decent chance to adopt less pessimistic views and contribute to their own health.”20 Psychiatrist Redford Williams and historian Virginia Williams, of Duke University Medical Center, support this view: “[T]he health of entire populations—nations and states—can suffer when societal relationships deteriorate … for example, in the widening gap between haves and have-nots.”39

The future of optimism 

Research linking health and longevity with socioeconomic status is so firmly established that in 2000 Justice predicted, “We can expect in the next decade considerable national debate on health policies that will focus more on strengthening low-income families, bringing more of a sense of community to neighborhoods and a sense of belonging to all within the United States. Also, policies are likely to be proposed that would result in reducing the wide gap between those on top and those on bottom in terms of income and education.”20

Sadly, Justice’s prophecy has not come to pass. The gap between rich and poor in the United States is widening. Concern about the social determinants of health is taking a back seat to glamorous, expensive interventions such as DNA and genome manipulation, stem cells, organ transplants, and new drugs.

A wave of cynicism toward the disadvantaged seems to be settling over our nation, which makes it difficult to engage the social determinants of health. The tendency is to blame people for being poor or disadvantaged, or to otherwise ignore, redefine, and obfuscate the problem. In one of his cartoons, Jules Feiffer satirized this situation: “I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.”40

Politicians romanticize poverty by exaggerating their humble beginnings (they never brag about their privilege and wealth). Another ploy is to invoke the idea in physics of “order out of chaos”—the pretense that chaos at the social level generates order, as it often does in purely physical systems. But as John W. Gardner observed in his book Excellence, “For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it has blighted a hundred.”41

Although individuals can learn optimism, as we’ve seen, they can also learn pessimism—as they do any time we foster social conditions that make it more difficult for people to climb out of poverty, acquire an education, and support their families. Until we take seriously the plight of the vulnerable in our nation—not just the poor but all those who find themselves the objects of every sort of prejudice and discrimination—we have no right to preach to them the virtues of optimism. Until we help change the conditions that cause pessimism, our exhortations to look on the bright side will ring hollow—for, to the seriously disadvantaged, the light we perceive at the end of the tunnel is for them an oncoming train.42

“A hungry man is not a free man,” Adlai E. Stevenson said in 1952.43 Neither is he an optimistic one. Who can be comfortable in their optimism when increasing numbers of our elderly must choose each day between medicine and food? When one in seven people around the world suffers from hunger, and forty million people starve to death each year or die from hunger-related diseases? When forty million are living with AIDS? When twelve million die each year from lack of water, and 1.1 billion have no access to clean water?44 When each day in Africa alone 3,000 children under the age of five die of malaria, and 6,000 adults of AIDS?45

We must work toward an optimism that is suitable for not only the wealthy but also for the poor, the disadvantaged, the vulnerable. Until then we can advocate optimism only with hesitation, knowing that it has an elitist connotation we desperately need to eliminate.

In the end, it will not mainly be weekend conferences, seminars, Web-based courses or books that will teach people how to be optimistic, but what we do as a nation to create the conditions in which optimism can flower.