Optimism is Good. It is also a Choice.
If sources outside of yourself are able to change your mood, those sources are controlling you. That makes sense, right? However, it may not be the outside sources that are controlling you. It could be your perception of those outside sources that are the issue.
Well, until you can repeatedly avoid focusing on the negative side of situations, you are leaving your mood, health, and performance up to chance. When you are thinking optimistically, you are happier, healthier, and at your most charming. The optimistic mind is you at your best. A great way to always be at your best is to assume the positive as often as possible.
Every second of every day, you get to make a choice. You have the choice of seeing, interpreting, and judging whatever is happening at that second as either positive or negative, good or bad. Seeing situations as positive most of the time (almost all of the time) has more to do with you than it does with the circumstance.
If you really think about it, it’s rare that you know all of the facts about a situation. If someone in a rush bumps into you on the sidewalk, you never know if that person was being rude or rushing to find a loved one in the emergency room. In that situation, you would make an assumption about their motives but, since you can never know the whole truth, most of the time, that decision is arbitrary or a replay of your habitual opinions and fears.
There is scientific evidence on the benefits of optimism, including this Harvard study that shows a link between optimism and a longer lifespan. A positive outlook affects your mood. Perceiving a situation as successful certainly makes one feel better. If you’re feeling good, there’s a good chance your behavior is pleasant, relaxed, and friendly. This would make the world around you more pleasant, relaxed, and friendly back to you. You would get more help from people. Being pleasant, relaxed, and friendly is the opposite of being stressed. Lower stress levels are healthier for the body, according to another Harvard study.
We know that it’s better to perceive a situation as positive and we have no concrete reason to perceive a situation as negative. So, how can we choose the positive side of the coin?
A big part of being more optimistic is making a decision to be more optimistic.
You’ve been making assumptions your whole life without all of the information. Whether you choose to interpret an experience as positive or negative depends on multiple factors, just a few of which could be your past experiences, your life-long disposition or your reaction to this article. Most of the time, we react to what we encounter naturally. We don’t think about thinking. We react how we always react to that stimulus. We rarely make a decision to think a certain way. The bottom line is that we truly don’t know if we can be more optimistic until we’ve tried. Have you ever tried for any extended period of time?
Here’s a way to do it. Every time, or the next time, you dread something, fear something, are angered by something, or negatively judge something - stop and ask yourself if your opinion is based on known fact or assumption. Are you 100% sure that you should dread or dislike that thing?
Are you sure dinner with your in-laws will be intolerable? It could be lovely. You have no idea what it will actually be like. The food could be delicious. The people who are usually difficult could be charming that night. There could be a box of pastries. Your dread is based on nothing more than a blind assumption and the fact that your assumption is negative might be a result of habit, not facts.
How much relief would it give you if you went into that dinner believing that the food will be good, the difficult people won’t be so difficult, you’ll be home in time to catch the game and there might be something sweet at the end, maybe even pastries? Regardless of your in-law’s irritating track record, you have no idea how anyone will act in the future.
The negative expectation and the positive expectation have one thing in common, neither can be known until they happen. They’re both made up. Why do we torment ourselves with made-up assumptions about unknowable matters, especially if negative beliefs are unhealthy?
There are infinite scenarios and details about any topic but all of those scenarios can be categorized as positive or negative. In a conversation about optimism and pessimism, there are two options. It’s a 5/50 chance. In any moment, you can choose one or the other. My point is that you can decide to be positive about a situation even before you encounter the situation. If your outlook is based on an arbitrary decision, let’s decide to choose the optimistic choice, every time.
Some of you might be thinking that being consistently optimistic is naive. You might think that you need to look for the negative side of situations in order to protect yourself. My response to that opinion is that being optimistic does not mean jumping in blindly. You can be optimistic and careful at the same time. Choosing the positive side doesn’t mean that you are not taking in all of the information. If a vicious dog is chasing you, by all means, run. Being optimistic simply means that, when you do run from the dog, you expect to make it over the fence in time.
We can just as easily choose to see the positive side every time. If you think that it would be impossible for you to take my advice, I remind you that you have no way to know what you would be to do in the future until you try. I also ask you to go back up to the top and read this piece again. If you’ve decided to choose to see the positive side with hope, then you know what I mean.
Burak Uzun is an award-winning writer and instructor. He has received thousands of hours of training and hands-on experience in guiding individuals with social and emotional challenges. He also co-wrote a feature film called Team Marco, which was featured in over fifty film festivals around the globe and was distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films.
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