The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not
being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry――The world bestseller ”Learned
Optimism” is the forerunner of “Positive Psychology” which is attracting the most
attention now. Could you transform yourself into an optimist to attain happiness?
――.more to come both in English and in Japanese.
The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five
years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events
will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault.
The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about
misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback,
that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their
fault; Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are
unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try
These two habits of thinking about causes have consequences. Literally hundreds of
studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often.
These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at
work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the prediction of aptitude tests.
When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their
health is unusually good. They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual
physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.
A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have found,
however, that pessimism is escapable. Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and
not through mindless devices like whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes (“Every
day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”), but by learning a new set of cognitive
skills. Far from being the creations of boosters or of the popular media, these skills were
discovered in the laboratories and clinics of leading psychologists and psychiatrists and
then rigorously validated.
This book will help you discover your own pessimistic tendencies, if you have them, or
those of people you care for. It will also introduce you to the techniques that have helped
thousands of people undo lifelong habits of pessimism and its extension, depression. It
will give you the choice of looking at your setbacks in a new light.