how to be an optimist

in an increasingly dark and scary world.

Our community is all about being unbearably optimistic about the future, but to be fully candid with you, some days writing a solutions-based newsletter has proven to be more difficult than I anticipated.

This past week, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos are children, unleashing a wave of panic to an already untenable situation for women in the South, seeing the bright side felt like a logistic impossibility.

As I reached for my emotional support donuts, I came across something far more nourishing, a book called Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being by Sue Varma. As the medical director for the 9/11 mental heath program at New York University, she directly supported civilian and first-responder survivors in the aftermath of the tragic terrorist attack. She has unmatched experience helping humans through dark moments, which makes her the perfect person to tackle this complex topic. I gleaned so many insights from reading her book (in almost one sitting!) that I had to devote time to sharing them with you.

Being a glass half full person isn’t as hard as you think it is, I promise!

The first step to becoming more optimistic is to recognize that optimists aren’t born, they’re created. Being positive isn’t a feeling, it’s a skill. As Varma notes, only 25% of optimistic traits are inherited, which means that the majority of what happens in our brains, is up to us. She says that optimistic people tend to have two core qualities: they focus on what they can control and they take responsibility for what they can change. I guess they call it the serenity prayer for a reason! Dwelling on things that are out of our hands doesn’t just make our heads an unpleasant place to be, it also makes us less effective at discerning what can be altered. I know that I’m at my most useless as an activist, when I’m thinking about stuff I can’t change, rather than saving my energy for what I can. And if I stay in that state for long enough, my brain becomes the perfect petri dish for learned helplessness to swallow me whole and convince me that nothing I do will make a difference in the world. So if you feel like you have a proclivity for pessimism, don’t worry! Rewiring your brain isn’t just possible, it’s probable!

The second step is realizing that optimism isn’t a feeling you achieve, it’s a mindset that you practice. As Varma notes, optimists aren’t always happy. They experience ebbs and flows in their lives just like everyone else. They don’t play the ostrich and dig their head in the sand to brush aside the negative and indulge in “toxic positivity.” Optimists don’t ignore negative emotions— they actually process them with more precision and agility. So although it might feel counterintuitive, developing strategies to be more present with your sadness or anger will actually help you move through them more quickly and return to a state of mind that makes practical optimism easier to sustain.

Thirdly, being an optimist doesn’t mean being delulu, it actually means being realistic. Most people have parts of their life that they’re excited about and others that feel less enthralling, and that’s totally normal. But being completely negative (or positive for that matter!) about everything doesn’t protect you, it’s actually makes you less resilient because it’s tainting your reality.

One of the best cures Varma suggests for this growing feeling of languishing in our culture is coming up with more opportunities for flourishing. That means finding more meaning in our lives. A good journaling prompt to explore this in your life might be to write about the three people that you admire the most (living or dead) and why. This will point you in the direction of what animates and elevates your spirit. You could also write about the three people you spend the most time with and what influence they’ve had on you. If you find that many of them haven’t brought out qualities that you aspire to, it might be time to assess whether you still want to invest in them. There’s a lot in our environment that we cannot change, but part of being a practical optimist is taking responsibility for what you can, and the people you choose to be around is a good place to start. Emotional contagion is real, and misery is contagious!

Finally, if you’re trying to become more of of a glass half full kinda person, avoiding pessimism may be even more crucial than developing optimism. Varma cites a study on breast cancer patients that showed that women with high levels of pessimism were at greater risk for depression, anxiety and had a lower health-related quality of life during their treatment. The researchers concluded that optimism didn’t always lead to better health outcomes, but that the absence of pessimism almost always did. This is good news if you’re just starting out at being an optimist, because it means that you don’t need to modfy your entire worldview before you see changes. Just by identifying and reframing negative perceptions as they come into your mind will make a significant difference and eventually alter your mindset.

How do you stay positive in the face of adversity? Let me know in the comments!

And don’t forget to check out Sue Varma’s stupendously insightful book The Practical Optimist and support your local bookstores when you buy it!

x

Liz-