Optimism & other keys to good health....

Today's post: Tuesday, 4-21-2009

Prudent optimism, a strong sense of purpose, an outgoing and friendly nature including liking most people and wishing them well, and laughter all tend to create good health and resilience.

Their opposites tend to cause disease and early death too.

Perhaps even more important today with all the bad news lately is that this is true in both good times and bad times.

1. Martin Seligman, PhD in his book Learned Optimism shows that:

Optimists have faith that they can make good things happen and that many good things are permanent and always available. They can even do this beyond what looks like or really is the case.

Optimists tend to take action because they believe their efforts will work even if the odds say they won’t and when the initial tries don’t work. And even then, they tend to have faith they can find something that will work. They tend to believe that good things are permanent and to notice them when they show up. They try to make good things happen; they set goals because they expect to reach them; and they are very hard to defeat & tend to persist. In fact, initial failure often causes them to try to improve how they do things and to make a much stronger effort.

They tend to overestimate their chances of success beyond what the odds and other people’s experience show is likely. But this is less irrational than it looks because they take action to solve problems and often solve them when others cannot.

Prudent optimists do even better.

Optimists who are young and inexperienced or who forget to avoid avoidable risks get burned and can stop being optimistic or even get killed. Successful and prudent optimists tend to get extra training, skilled help, and avoid situations where failure is severely damaging or fatal.

They look for heads I win but tails I avoid losing situations. So if the downside is disastrous they look for a safer method or decline to take the risk. One such entrepreneur had a motto, “Where there is little to lose if you fail and a great deal to gain if you succeed, by all means try.” That sums it up very well.

Similarly they believe what they do is effective. But they focus more on achieving good results than taking credit for them. And when they succeed as members of a team, they always make sure to give their team members full credit first or only give their team members credit. They do give themselves credit internally; but publicly they give their team the credit. That makes them more effective because they then have more effective teams than people who don’t.

Despite the fact that they often see how others mess things up better than most people, they are more interested in making things better and taking responsibility to do so than in laying blame or punishing people for their mistakes. Their approach is let’s fix it now and set things up so it won’t happen next time.

And, for bad events, optimists instead of being irrationally confident and less seemingly realistic than most people, optimists are dramatically more sophisticated, analytical, scientific and accurate than most people. They are almost surgically realistic in fact.

They tend to see bad things as temporary and as limited in their scope. They realize that bad things have specific causes and if those causes are changed the bad effects will no longer occur.

If they fail at an attempt, they do NOT say that proves I can’t do this. They say that attempt failed, let’s find out why; and look for how the next attempt can be more successful.

So when dealing with bad events they are much saner and more realistic than most people.

And, this is particularly important when they deal with people. They tend to see people as grouchy or in a bad mood where non-optimists may see such people as mean people or having a sour disposition. The optimist knows that they may be sick or had someone else recently be mean to them or lack the training they need to deal well with the public. They know that the same people on another day or in different circumstances may actually be quite nice.

So, they tend to be hard to alienate and be able to deal with people better even when they are difficult. Since each and every part of such thinking is usually much more accurate and the good will and help of other people is so important, this means that optimists have more friends and fewer enemies. And they can meet people well and recover from it when things go badly with others. To put it mildly their accurate strategic thinking where people are concerned makes it very much more likely that they will have good social skills.

Research has found that such prudent optimists are more likely to eat right, exercise, and otherwise take action to keep their health. They succeed too. They have fewer diseases and live longer than other people.

They also tend to make more money and to recover better and faster if they lose money. They also are dramatically more resilient when things go wrong.

2. Having a strong sense of purpose has also been found to predict good health and longevity.

The simple way to think about this is that if you are doing something that is or will be very worthwhile and valuable to other people by your own best standards and values, you’ll think of yourself as worthwhile and your continued ability to make a contribution to achieving your purpose as important. So, you’ll tend to be prudent, to take care of your health, and you’ll be much harder to discourage than other people.

The Revered Robert Schuler even found a bible statement that applies to this that is extraordinarily comforting even if to people who have only a tiny belief in God. “God, who has begun a good work in you, will complete it.”

3. “An outgoing and friendly nature including liking most people and wishing them well” is a sign of optimism which we have already talked about.

But it also has an interesting track record that I read about earlier today. They studied people who lived to be 100 years old and looked for things that made them different. In both the men and women they studied, people who lived to be 100 tended to be more extraverted and friendly than those who did not.

Given that having a strong social network has also been found to help longevity, that makes sense.

4. Laughter helps. There is a quote from the bible that sums it up well.: “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”

And the laughter itself is important because it dramatically releases stress and boosts feel good hormones. It even gives you some deep breathing and physical exercise.

A recent study found that people who found videos they found funny who then watched one of them for half an hour a day got better results on many of their heart risk indicators than they would have by taking the most effective drugs or supplements. If their blood pressure was too high, it went down. Their LDL cholesterol went down; and their HDL went up.

On this point, it seems the bible statement has turned out to be quite true.