Why optimism is powerful medicine

I’ve always thought that optimism beats the heck out of pessimism?

Why?  How much fun can it be to always expect the worst from others, and the world in general?  How can that improve your day or your life?

Now, a recent article in the journal CIRCULATION provides hard evidence that optimism and health are directly connected.

Researchers studied nearly 100,000 women over eight years, tracking how many heart attacks they suffered and how long they lived.  Their conclusion?  Optimism is good for you!  Optimists had a 16% lower risk of having a heart attack.  A 2004 study of nearly 1000 elderly Dutch people also found a connection between optimism and a lowered risk of death from heart disease.

So what is the specific mechanism behind these findings?  Scientists aren’t sure.  If we are predisposed to more positive future expectations, we are more likely to have a can-do attitude about improving our health and our lives.  We know there is a better way to live and so we find it.

Pessimists habitually view life as a bunch of setbacks, permanent, unchangable and pervasive, so they feel helpless when things go wrong.  These attitudes tend to increase stress and contribute to depression.  And depression is never helpful when we need to do some serious problem solving.

However, being optimistic does not mean taking a “don’t worry, be happy” approach.  Excessive optimism can lead to making some terrible choices.  Believing that bad things cannot happen to you can lead to poor choices like taking the risk of getting a bad infection or smoking because you don’t believe you could ever get lung cancer.  Bad things can and do happen to optimists.  They just don’t spend their entire lives expecting the worst!

There is new type of resilience training to help convert pessimists to a more positive world view.  The key to this training is learning to recognize your natural thought patterns.  By identifying your own negative patterns of thought, you can learn to then replace them with more positive alternatives.  This training usually requires work with an experienced therapist.

This is exactly the focus of my own practice.  As a life change coach, I take my clients’ negative perceptions and turn them on their head.  For example, most of us have a gigantic and irrational fear of changing our lives.  We fear that change can only lead to bad outcomes.  When, in actuality, the only way our lives can improve is to make major changes in our attitudes, our thought patterns and our lives.  I know.  I’ve changed it all in the past few years!

[Via http://agingresearch.wordpress.com]