Optimism is one of the central traits required in building resilience, say Yale University investigators in the. A resilient person may go through difficulty and uncertainty, but he or she will doggedly bounce back. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma or tragedy. But instead of curling into a foetal ball beneath the coffee table, they resiliently pick themselves up, learn from their pratfalls and march boldly towards the next opportunity. Research among tycoons and business leaders shows that the path to success is often littered with failure: a record of sackings, bankruptcies and blistering castigation. Because (as every good sports coach knows) adversity is character-forming - so long as you practise the skills of resilience. Of course, there is no guarantee that optimism will insulate you from the crunch’s worst effects, but the best strategy is still to keep smiling and thank your lucky stars. But a 1995 nationwide survey conducted by the American magazine Adweek found that about half the population counted themselves as optimists, with women slightly more apt than men (53 per cent versus 48 per cent) to see the sunny side. “Preliminary studies on heart patients suggest that, by changing a person’s outlook, you can improve their mortality risk,” she says.įew studies have tried to ascertain the proportion of optimists in the world. Rosalind Wright, believes that attitude somehow strengthens the immune system. A Harvard Medical School study of 670 men found that the optimists have significantly better lung function. Other American research claims to have identified a physical mechanism behind this. Becca Levy found that thinking positively adds an average of seven years to your life. For example, a study of 660 volunteers by the Yale University psychologist Dr. Optimists have something else to be cheerful about - in general, they are more robust. Their attitudes and behaviour patterns, however, are different from one another.” Chad Wallens, a social forecaster at the Henley Centre who surveyed middle-class Britons’ beliefs about income, has found that “the people who feel wealthiest, and those who feel poorest, actually have almost the same amount of money at their disposal. Studies also show that belief can help with the financial pinch. The research shows that when times get tough, optimists do better than pessimists - they succeed better at work, respond better to stress, suffer fewer depressive episodes, and achieve more personal goals. In this light, optimism “is a habitual way of explaining your setbacks to yourself”, reports Martin Seligman, the psychology professor and author of Learned Optimism. In other words, if you can convince yourself that things will get better, the odds of it happening will improve - because you keep on playing the game.
Optimism is a piece of evolutionary equipment that carried us through millennia of setbacks.” Depressive people see things as they really are, but that is a disadvantage from an evolutionary point of view. As Brice Pitt, an emeritus professor of the psychiatry of old age at Imperial College, London, told me: “Optimists are unrealistic. But here we encounter the optimism paradox. How you start the year will set the template for the rest, and two scientifically backed character traits hold the key: optimism and resilience (if the prospect leaves you feeling pessimistically spineless, the good news is that you can significantly boost both of these qualities).įaced with 12 months of plummeting economics and rising human distress, staunchly maintaining a rosy view might seem deludedly Pollyannaish. You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1 - 13, which are based on Passage 212 below.
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