On the role of optimism and gratitude

In My Humble Opinion
1

I read a lot of self-help books. Lately it’s been minimalism, slow living and productivity YouTube. One thing that comes up over and over again is the idea that optimism and gratitude will change your life.

I’m something of an optimism skeptic. I loathe the tone of self-help books that essentially proclaim all you have to do to achieve your dreams is believe that you can achieve them. I’ve also read a lot of books about toxic positivity (Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, for example) especially in the face of dire and difficult situations. A sudden death, a difficult or terminal illness, losing a job or a home, etc. This is when individuals, and society, can be really shitty in pushing people going through tremendous hardship to get over it, consider how much worse it could be, move on, look on the bright side, etc. And I am firmly against that.

But I think there could be a role for optimism and gratitude on a voluntary basis. Like it’s a choice you have to make for yourself. I don’t know if I would consider holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl an optimist, exactly, but he certainly found some silver linings - a life of meaning and a whole therapeutic philosophy - in the most dire of circumstances. There is evidence indicating that daily gratitude practice can help alleviate depression, and books like Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism appears to provide solid evidence that people can be trained to see their circumstances in ways that will make them happier. (I am aware positive psychology and Seligman in particular are somewhat controversial figures, but I think there are some useful things to be gleaned from the field.) Specifically, the hallmarks of an unhappy thinker involve the three Ps - the problem is viewed as pervasive, i.e. encompassing all of life rather than one area of it, the problem is viewed as permanent, and the problem is viewed as personal - the unhappy person’s sole responsibility. So the way to become more happy is to… flip that script. “This only affects this specific area of my life, this is temporary, and it’s not my fault anyhow.”

I know a lot of people would find it difficult to make that mental shift. I guess what I’m curious about is how you think of optimism and gratitude, whether you think they play a significant role in the ability to be resilient in the face of hardship, and whether you think a pessimist can learn to be an optimist. Do these ideas help you or just make you feel worse about your circumstances? Does it depend? Is there anything we can do to help others who are stuck in a pit of overwhelm and negative thinking without seeming like we are discounting their hardship?

For my personal experience, I was once a deeply cynical person, but things have changed for me. A lot of it came from therapy, I think, but I tend to view problems as more solvable and temporary than I did in the past. I don’t dwell on negatives as much. I did start a daily gratitude practice (though weirdly, most of what shows up on my list is gratitude for good feelings, or things like “I’m grateful I cleaned the kitchen this morning” so I’m not sure if that’s how it’s meant to be done.) This kind of, “Yeah, it sucks, but I’ll get through it” mentality is new for me. I don’t know if I would call it optimism but it certainly feels better than whatever I was doing before.

What do you think?

2

This is a very interesting subject. I have tried twice now to make a meaningful response but I don’t seem to be able to get my thoughts in order. I hope I will be able to come back later with something cogent. I will just say that I think the path you are on is a good and productive one, it seems to describe my own reactions to the world fairly well, and it has worked for me.

p.s. this seems more like IMHO material to me. Just a thought.

3

I have learned that if I crabby I will feel keep feeling crabby all day because I am a bitch. If I take a minute to think about why I feel crabby, I will be less crabby because usually I am crabby over something stupid and minor. That usually lets me laugh at myself because laughter always helps.

That is when I remind myself that I have a front loading washing machine*. That is all it takes to remind myself that I have it pretty good and I feel better about everything.

*things have changed a lot in 30 years but it still works for me. Being able to have such a thing means that I have a home and power and water and soap and enough clothes to stack up into a full load. Having a front loader means I have enough money to buy a more expensive washing machine instead of using the beat up washer at Mom’s house.

Which also brings up a whole bunch of other things I am thankful for.

So, while I’m not really thankful that I accomplished the laundry task, I sure am thankful that I didn’t have to wash my panties in the sink or use a wringer washer like Mom.

I guess that is my long-winded way of saying that if you can find something good about what is happening in the moment, it helps you be happier which makes optimism easier.

Plus, if you can just learn to mindlessly smile at everyone, that really confuses them which will make you smile for reals. I think there are endorphins or other feel good brain things that happen as well but not a scientist or anything.

4

I think a lot of the self-help genre suffers from post hoc bias, selection effects, and oversimplification (essentially, confusing for cause-and-effect what is more of a mutual relationship that depends on a great number of additional factors). Consider that one way to make a change in your life and then feel better is simple luck: could’ve been you’d have felt better anyway, but now, you’re attributing that to the change you made. Happy people, plausibly, aren’t any different from rich or successful people: the vast majority will overestimate the effect their own actions have on their wealth. Most rags-to-riches stories where somebody overcomes hardships thanks to hard work and dedication really aren’t, and even among the highly talented, success will depend on luck to a greater degree than we typically believe. (Here’s a Veritasium-video crunching some numbers on this.) So a lot of self-help success, in that regard, may just similarly be due to luck—hedonic luck, one might say.

That’s not to say it’s all for nothing. There are lots of pretty basic things one can do to improve one’s well-being, just as there are lots of basic things one can do to improve one’s finances. But I think many of the ‘success-stories’ the self-help literature, just as much as the get-rich-quick literature, asks us to emulate and look towards as examples are really bad ones, because they’re the outliers selected after the fact, without any regard to the legions who did the same things and just failed, because why tell a story about them. Furthermore, the real causes of improvements in well-being, in these scenarios, we should expect to be badly identified—we’re apt to project simplified rationalizations upon matters that are really complex interactions, thinking either that the river digs its own bed, or that the bed tells the river were to go, when in reality, it’s a complex interaction between the two.

I find that to be a somewhat liberating view: when I now engage in some self-help project, and fail to replicate the successes impressed on me, then I can just think to myself, well, maybe those people just got (hedonically) lucky, and I didn’t, as much. I suppose this falls under the ‘personal’ aspect: not adding my failure to become the perfect, happy new me to the burden of things weighing me down.

5

I agree it’s interesting and not easily addressed. Very different kinds of questions are being asked.

They work for me. Some people seem to thrive on negativity and resentment, which IMO might actually work in the short term, but for just a few and only as a way to mask their insecurity before others and/or provide themselves with distraction from fear.

They help me to keep things in perspective. By their nature, optimism and gratitude have more to do with abstract thinking and long-term perspective, and pessimism and resentment have more to do with immediacy and irreflectiveness. I prefer the former, but there’s also a lot to be said for (1) indignation as a means of overcoming adversity and (2) consideration of the worst-case scenario as the first step toward lots of goals. Not entirely off topic, I’m reminded of a friend who was really good at pushing back at others without losing his cool. I asked how he did it and his response was something like, “I won’t tolerate others making me angry.”

Most people can, IMO, but some won’t want to. Anger has always been the cornerstone of my immediate family. From the slow burn of smoldering resentment to the flashfire of a screaming tantrum, we’re all really good at getting pissed off and staying that way. I find it tiring and counterproductive. Optimism is much more interesting and has more unpredictable results. In relation to this, it’s taken me far too long to learn that a sour stomach will put me in a horrible mood. Even before the onset of an actual stomach ache or excess acid or whatever, if something’s not right down there, it’s going to come out up here.

One of the OP’s more difficult questions. Too many factors in play for a concise response: the nature, degree and duration of the trouble, the personality of the troubled, etc. If you want to be polite, don’t get in their way. Let them stew and vent if you want to put up with it and, if you want to be a friend, when the time is right, make them laugh. At a later stage, try to make them see it’s not in anyone’s interest, pointing out in so many words that everyone needs to wallow in self-pity from time to time, but it leaves a stink and everyone needs to pull out of the nosedive eventually: shower, brush your teeth and put on some decent clothes (metaphorically and in real life). Failing that, give ‘em the Godfather treatment:

Okay, that’s just a joke. But seriously, Robert Duvall’s reaction there is priceless.

Whoa… Seriously cool. Is that yours or from someone else?

6

I am almost terminally depressed. I’m going through hard times emotionally and financially, my relationship with my wife is fucked, my relationship with my kids is skewed.

But I still have optimism.

Like a beaten dog who will sidle up to its abuser, wagging his tail under his bum, is that not optimism?

I think it is intrinsic to any mammal, and maybe other species (I am not a psychologist) to think that something better may come.

Otherwise, why do we have the survival instict? I suppose “not being dead” is something of an answer to that, but I am pretty sure “things may improve” is also a legitimate answer.

7

I have a very strong lifelong pattern of seeing the dark side of everything. I have believed it to be a noble sacrificial calling. Not so sure about that any more, but I still feel someone has to be a witness to the shadow side, in this era, this culture, and my particular family of origin, all of which are adamantly opposed to taking even a tiny peek at self-examination or accepting responsibility for harm.

In the past few years, I’ve been surprised by a sea change in my attitude. My expectations of myself and desire for improvement in my circumstances, which have caused me a great deal of pain over my life, have mostly ebbed away, and I find myself content and grateful for the first time, on a daily basis. It’s true some of this is due to “luck” in that I moved from a place I hated (California) to a place I really love (rural New England). But that doesn’t account for it all, nor does simply aging – though both play a part.

Optimism is very different than gratitude. Optimism is a persistent belief that the universe is a benevolent place where good things are waiting around the corner for you. I once read a study which appeared to show that while optimists were clearly happier people, pessimists were far more often right in what they predicted. So I chose being right over being happy. Or you could say, I’d rather be bitter than stupid.

I cannot become congenitally optimistic without a personality transplant, but there is no question that I have become grateful for all kinds of things – sunrise, snow, grass, friends, my husband and children, my horses … intensely, consciously grateful.

I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’m grateful for my new gratitude.

8

Gratitude is an important mindset (tool) that helps me lock myself into a pattern of positive behavior. It is simply really really easy to get trapped into a cycle of replaying negative experiences or negative thoughts that will ruin your day every day. It’s a little bit like getting to the gym (or home bodyweight training – just as good) on a regular basis. I go to the local animistic shrine and thank the spirits for specific things in my life that make my life exceptional. Be specific, list them out. For me it clears out the musty fog of gloom.

I don’t know much about optimism, but maybe I’ll get there if it’s important.

9

I didn’t consciously steal it from anywhere, but I’d have thought it to be pretty much a commonplace…

10

This is the first thing that came to my mind. I see a social justice side to it. It’s awfully tempting to think things are going so well for us because, gee, we’re great. I even suspect that some of the attitude pushing can be a borderline conscious effort to keep some peoples oppressed.

I’m sure there is a great deal! I don’t think that, in effect, telling them to be happier is helpful. If we pay attention, listen, and care about their hardship, we are being helpful.

One thing I do (though I should do it more and better) is co-facilitate a peer to peer group of those who have lost somebody they love to suicide. As hardships go, for example, having lost your own child to suicide a few days or weeks ago is a pretty hard one. People are often so devastated all they can manage is great racking sobs. They need to be heard and cared about. They bear a hardship that very many of the people they know will run away from because it’s too horrible to embrace. They need to do a great deal of talking and sharing to work through the feeling that the death was their fault, and the insatiable longing to understand. Discounting all this is the worst thing we can do for them. They’re struggling with something far beyond having a chipper attitude.

I actually prefer to connect with people on the things they care most deeply about. It’s just what feels alive to me. When I say, “How are you?” I actually like to hear the real answer.

11

I think there are different kinds of optimism, or different things people can mean by the word.

One distinction is between present-based optimism and future-based optimism.

Present-based optimism is about looking at your present circumstances and focusing on the positive: what’s good instead of what’s bad, what you have instead of what you lack. (Seeing the proverbial glass as half-full instead of half-empty.) And this could be divided into “optimists” who don’t really notice what’s wrong or lacking vs. those who are fully aware of what’s wrong or lacking but who focus on what’s right or what they have. And part of “focus on” is “be thankful for,” hence the connection with gratitude.

Future-based optimism is about what you expect to happen in the future, which is what your definition seems to be about. And here also we can distinguish between different kinds of optimists, like between the person who thinks “good things are coming no matter what I/we do” and the person who thinks “I/we have the ability to make good things happen.”

12

That is a really great point, and it’s not lost on me that a huge proportion of people into things like self-improvement and minimalism are comfortably middle class or wealthier, and countless self-help gurus in particular define success as business success and material wealth. In other words, these are problems of privilege. In Bright-Sided Ehrenreich goes into the rise of the self-help movement in the 1990s as a corporate response to massive layoffs of their employees. These people freshly fired were herded into massive auditoriums and told, in essence, that their success or failure is their own fault, and they needed to be optimistic about what’s in the future. That arguably spawned a generation of people determined to fix whatever’s “wrong” with them rather than directing their anger at an unjust system.

Another pet peeve of mine is the “happiness is a choice” nonsense. I’ve lived with, at times, severe depression for most of my life and I find that attitude really tone deaf.

Yet at the same time I would describe my happiness as something I do. But I wasn’t able to figure out what to do until I received treatment for my ADHD which went undiagnosed for years. So I really attribute the start of my brighter outlook to a stimulant medication that enabled me to start doing things that would make me happier. Hardly a paeon to the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. I also recognize that a great deal of the things I do to maintain my own happiness are facilitated by a flexible schedule, a cushy job and a partner willing to do his share of the child care, which not everyone has.

Thanks everyone for the great responses. It’s a lot to chew on.

13

Yeah, for most people, “happiness” or lack thereof is a fairly fixed personality trait which like most others, can only be budged slightly.

14

As I understand it, the idea is that we all have a happiness “set point”; and even if something good (like winning the lottery) or bad (like being in an accident) happens to us to increase or decrease our happiness, we don’t stay at that new level, but rather revert back to our happiness set point.

However, that’s about the effect of external circumstances that happen to us. There’s some indication that we may be able to change our happiness set point by changing our attitude or mindset or approach to life. (“There is an ongoing debate among researchers over how much your happiness set point is able to change over the course of your life.”)

Here are a couple of the articles I found about happiness set point:

15

I think optimism can be practiced, like a skill. I regularly set myself arbitrary ‘challenges’ where I must overcome some (usually quite trivial) problem by means of ingenuity and tenacity. Giving up and not bothering would be easier, especially as the challenge is arbitrary and chosen, but persistence; facing even a small, artificial problem, and saying ‘OK, but what can I do?’, and practicing this as a mental habit, turns out to help when the problem is one I didn’t choose or set for myself. I find that established habitual mental response is a better lead-in to solving the real world problem than just facing it unprepared.

Of course not all real world problems are the same size and not all problems have easily navigable solutions, and my day to day existence is quite a privileged one compared to the lives of some others, so I wouldn’t dream of glibly declaring that positivity and optimism will always win the day, however, not even trying is a guaranteed recipe for failure in those cases where there is a way through - and I’ve found that I don’t need to win every single battle in life, I only need to win enough of them to prevail; therefore I try to cultivate a mindset where my default response is an optimistic one.

16

That’s great. One technique I’ve started using when facing a challenge is framing it in the third person. (I got this from the book Chatter by Ethan Kross, an evidence-based book about how we talk to ourselves and how that impacts our resilience.) This is a stupid example but my kitchen drawer broke and we didn’t really know how to fix it, so it sat on our table for months. After a series of failed attempts, I sat down to really get it done. It was very difficult and labor intensive (I feel the need to explain this so I don’t sound like an idiot… I had to drill in screws in the far back of a deep bottom cabinet and my short arms and the permanent shelving back there were a huge impediment to proper drill placement.) I was almost in tears at one point, and I said to myself, “She just wants to fix the fucking drawer!” Just that little bit of getting outside myself and seeing that objectively that person just needed to keep trying gave me the boost I needed to get it done. It also gave me a little self-compassion. It’s helpful to think about how you would think about your own life circumstances if they were happening to someone else.

I agree, which is why I tend to stick to more research based books. Not that the research is perfect, but it seems a better guide than just some random guy’s story about how he changed his life. Obviously different things will work for different people, but I try to find the things most likely to work and go from there. Or sometimes I just read a book because I like the author’s idea and think it might work for me. A lot of these authors overstate their case. Gratitude may not be the end-all be-all but maybe it can be a piece of the puzzle.

The question about how to talk to other people I guess came from some minor frustration with a friend of mine who always has a complaint about some thing or other. I’ve also had some friends who were just impenetrable fortresses of negative thinking and I get it because I’ve been there, I’ve been depressed enough in the past to require emergency intervention and hospitalization. But I have worked tirelessly to improve my circumstances for as long as I can remember, and gotten slowly better, year by year, because I made it a priority. I wish there was some magic way I could say to my friend, “You’re right, depression and anxiety suck, but you can’t use it as an excuse to give up on your life or it will never, ever get better.” Because that’s the truth as I see it.

But part of it too, which I need to learn, is to stop trying to fix people and just let go of responsibility for their happiness. The big one I had to do this for is my mother, with whom I’ve severed all contact, but I’m now seeing how the desire to solve everyone’s problems impacts my other relationships.

17

In June 1995 I was in an automobile accident and had a traumatic brain injury. When I was released from the hospital I couldn’t do much on my own and I was surrounded by constant reminders of all of the things that I could not do. My situation looked hopeless. As I recovered, I began an inventory of all of the things that I could do by myself again. For instance, in time I was able to dress my self, make my own sandwich, walk across the yard without a walker, later walk a mile. Being grateful for being able to do small things for myself once again and making a list of them made me appreciate my accomplishments and gave me what I needed to do more things. I have accomplished more post-TBI than I ever believed I would be able to do pre-TBI. My story “Quality Control and Brain Damage” was published in the March 2007 of Quality Progress. Here is a link to a copy: Quality Control and Brain Damage

18

That may be a bigger portion than you think. I suspect that there are a whole lot of people who are miserable because they’re living in the wrong place, and don’t realize it. We’re in a society that takes it for granted that people shouldn’t be place-attached, and that decent quality housing in location x is equivalent to the same quality housing in location y. And for some people that’s true. But for a lot of people it isn’t.

19

Thank you so much for sharing this! And for telling your compelling story.

20

Hell, I read a study that just living near a busy street makes you more likely to be depressed.

I do think my state is a good fit for me because I love the natural beauty and changing seasons, but I often long for the more rural areas where I grew up. Not the culture so much as the quiet.