Welcome to sheep Resisted, I'm your host Sadie Sutton, a 19
year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Sheep Resisted is the teen
mental health podcast made for teenagers by a teen.
In each episode I'll bring you authentic, accessible and
relatable conversations about every aspect of mental Wellness
you can expect. Evidence based teen approved
resources, coping skills, including lots of DBT insights
and education in each piece of content you consume.
She Persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and
understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take
ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.
So let's dive in this week on She Persisted.
I think this is one of the most common misconceptions and
something that I really struggled with when it was like,
OK, just accept that you're depressed, except that you're
struggling, except the cards that you've been dealt.
And it felt like accepting was giving up.
Acceptance was like, this is how I feel and this isn't going to
change. And really it's the opposite of
that fact. If we don't accept where we're
at, what our starting point is, we cannot move forward.
We're not able to take those next steps and adjust the
situation unless we understand where our starting point is.
And so I think that's a mistake that I made in my journey.
If you could even call it a mistake or something that I, I
wish I would have known earlier on.
And I think it's, I think he trapped that a lot of people
fall into Hello, hello and welcome to she persisted.
If this is your first episode, I'm so glad you're here.
If this is your 190th episode and you've been along for the
ride the entire time, I'm so glad you're here.
I think I'm probably the only person who's listened to every
single episode, to be honest. If you are a returning listener,
we have some fun things going on in the sheep resisted world.
We're going to be starting some Monday mini episodes, so these
are going to be 5-10 minutes, the very most re releases of
past episodes that are just edited down and optimize so you
can get the most value possible in a short little period of
time. You can add these to your weekly
routine and get to experience some wisdom that was released
last year or the year before, any point in the past five
years, because there's such an incredible catalogue of content.
And I really hope you guys all get to listen to these
incredible conversation. So I'm excited for that.
If you are a new listener, I will give a little bit of
context to this episode, which is that I am a psychology
student at the University of Pennsylvania.
I just finished up my junior year yesterday, so I'm an
incoming senior, I guess you could say now.
And one of the areas of study that I've become really
interested in and really gotten the chance to dive deeper in
during the past couple of years is positive psychology.
And I've been really lucky in the fact that Penn is actually
kind of a home to positive psychology.
Doctor Seligman, the father of positive psychology, he really
created the field. He is a pen professor.
And I took his class, The Science of well-being this
semester. And there was just a really
incredible department at Penn sitting positive psychology.
And to learn from them and get to hear these insights and
findings from the horse's mouth, I guess you could say, is really
the most incredible cool thing. And I try to bring as much as
possible from the classroom and from my own lived experiences to
the podcast and make these things more accessible and share
anything that I wish I would have known earlier on.
And so today's episode is absolutely one of those things
we are talking about optimism and explanatory styles.
And the first time I came across this was as a sophomore in
college when I took Introduction to Positive Psychology.
And it's really wild because it's such a fundamental mindset
shift to have. And it has so many benefits.
And it can be an easy shift to make.
And yet the benefits are extremely profound.
I wish this was taught in elementary schools and middle
schools and even high schools. And yet it's not yet common
knowledge. And so I'm really hoping that I
can break this down in this episode, share a lot of fun
studies that have been done talking about this and give you
some tips and ways that you can implement this and your own
life. Because it's been something I've
been wanting to do a solo episode on for months at this
point. Which if you notice, we didn't
do a solo episode last month. Things were so busy with the end
of the semester. We had a lot of interviews
batched. I kept being like, OK, actually
interview this week, solo episode next week, but we're
here. I'm really excited for the sit
down and like I mentioned, you're going to have more mini
episodes. And with that, I'm definitely
going to throw in some some new minis that are just me talking
to the mic in shorter form with those little twice a week
episodes. So I'm really excited for that.
And I I need to be making tik toks like guys, every single day
I write, I want to do this, make Tik toks edit videos to share
these things with you. And it's been so busy, but that
is definitely a goal. So make sure you're following
along and actually persist a podcast.
I'm going to try and share more things like this episode in
social media form because it is so important and not enough
people know about it. So to give you some like broad
overarching context to your positive psychology is a new
field within the general arena of psychology.
And the way that it is defined is the scientific study of
ordinary human strengths and virtues.
So if we look at the field of psychology as a whole,
historically we've looked at people that are kind of below
that average point. They're struggling.
Their ability to function or show up in relationships or
maintain their mental health has been impacted.
And so a lot of resources and research and interventions have
been aimed at that population. And it's a large population.
We know that more than half of a will struggle with mental
illnesses at some point in their life, and that's believed to be
a low estimate. And the vast majority of us
spend a lot of our time not actively struggling.
And so understanding how we can thrive and flourish and succeed
in our lives and how people who are really successful and
effective and happy, how they're living their lives is another
really important part of the puzzle.
And what's really incredible and cool about this area of
psychology is that it really emphasizes and celebrates the
fact that despite all the challenges and difficulties and
obstacles that we as individuals overcome on a daily basis and
throughout our lifetimes, generally we thrive.
Generally we are doing pretty well Despite that fact and so
it's a really incredible area of study and if you are looking at
college or psychology as a field, this is a fun area to
check out and at least be aware of.
So I think the best way to start talking about optimism and
explanatory styles is to talk about emotions, because a lot of
people think of these two things as synonymous.
If you're optimistic and always seeing the good in things, you
must be feeling really happy, or conversely, you feel really
happy. So therefore you look at the
world from a more positive lens. And so it's important to kind of
really understand these two pieces of the puzzle and then
understand how they're actually correlating, how they fit
together and how we can adjust either one to in turn impact the
other. So when we talk about emotions,
we aren't just talking about feelings.
The operational definition that we we use for emotions is not
just subjective feelings, but also attention, cognition,
facial expressions, cardiovascular and hormonal
changes and more unfolding over a relatively short time span.
And this is from a 1991 study. And when we see emotions as that
larger, more comprehensive experience, we can better
understand why emotions motivate us to act in certain ways and do
certain things and are correlated with certain outcomes
in our lives. So for example, we talked about
positive emotions, which can be really correlated with optimism
and generally entire well-being and moods.
And so we see that mild positive emotions are generally
associated with improved spatial and verbal memory.
So when we have positive emotions, our memory skills are
improved. We use more flexible thinking,
we are better with problem solving, we are more rational
and utilitarian with our decision making.
We are more willing to exhibit self controlled behavior.
And we also see changes in our risk taking behavior.
So we wouldn't necessarily think like, oh, I'm feeling happy, I'm
better at problem solving, I'm more decisive, I have more
self-control, my memory is better.
But these things can be correlated.
So when we understand how these things are related, it makes
more sense why our lived experience is so different when
our mental health is struggling. As there is this really
interesting theory in positive psychology.
It's called the broaden and build theory and it talks about
what happens when we experience positive emotions and what the
outcomes in our life are. And so this was created by
Barbara Frederickson. Basically, this means that when
we experience positive emotions, we are motivated to take action
to make our lives better. And so this is again, like the
chicken or the egg situation that comes with a lot of
positive psychology. Or we can ever definitively
determine causation. We can just understand
correlation. And so in this instance, it's
the idea that OK, when we experience positive emotions, we
want to go out and get more things that make our lives
better. And then it becomes the question
of if we've accumulated all of these resources, is that in turn
improving our emotions and making us feel more positive?
And how, how does that relationship function?
And I wanted to read you one other quote that we got this
semester. We had a really fun app
interaction called Uvita that was part of our science and
well-being course. And so we got these little
notifications on our phone that taught us that would show a
little like positive psychology quotes or learnings and also
different like daily interventions and practices that
we can do, which was really incredible and cool.
So this one was specifically about the broad and build
hypothesis, but it says that when we feel good, our minds
open up to a world of new possibilities.
Think of positive emotions as keys unlocking doors to creative
thinking, new friendship, and even skills we didn't know we
had. Positive emotions help us
discover and build new skills, resources, and social
connections, fostering growth and resilience.
And so kind of establishing that foundation that positive
emotions are really important element to building our lives
worth living, right? They motivate us in different
ways. The negative emotions do, and
they're that key element to getting what we want in life.
And building off of this positive emotion idea is
positive affect. So if we think of positive
emotions as these momentary experiences, positive affect is
like our general mood on a day-to-day basis and generally
how we present and people can be really high affect or low affect
and it is in some ways correlated with the individual
emotions that we experience. And so individuals that are high
and positive affect experience frequent and intense episodes of
pleasant, pleasurable moods. Generally speaking, they are
cheerful, enthusiastic, energetic, confident and alert.
And so when people have high positive affect, they are more
likely to help other. They more frequently contact
their friends and relatives, they have a number of close
relationships, they have more satisfaction in their romantic
relationships, they have higher levels of social activity,
they're more involved in social organizations, and they also are
more likely to make new acquaintances.
So there's and that strong correlation with social ability,
but we also know that our social relationships are really strong
factor and what determines our overall well-being and our mood
as well. So it's really everything in
this is a catch 22. And if you listen to Doctor
Marissa Franco's episode, which will definitely feature in a 5
minute mini because it was so incredible.
We talked about friendship and loneliness, and she said that
loneliness can kind of be a self fulfilling prophecy because when
we're more lonely, we feel more irritable and we actually enjoy
our social interactions less. But the reason we're enjoying
those last is because we're lonely in the 1st place.
And so a lot of this is putting yourself initially through the
motions and doing what you know is good for you.
And then you experience the ROI and your mood and your emotions
and you're more motivated to do those things in the future.
And so when we have low levels of positive affect, it's
correlated with a lot of things that I'm sure most of you would
expect, which is things like mood disorders and mood
disorders are like depression and anxiety, social anxiety
disorder, social phobia, agoraphobia, which is when you
are afraid to leave your median environment or home, PTSD,
schizophrenia, eating disorders and substance disorder.
So this positive affect in general, mood and emotions are
very much correlated with our mental health from a mental
illness perspective. And what makes us even crazier,
which is why I'm like, why is this not taught in preschool and
elementary school and middle school and high school?
Like why is this not part of our health class?
Is that positive affect and health are really, really
correlated? And so there was a meta analysis
that was done and they reviewed 225 well-being papers and they
compared happier to less happy people and the people that were
quote UN quote happier. And when they look at happy
people, they're looking at their subjective well-being.
They're filling out surveys about how frequently they're
happy, how that shows up in their lives.
But those people perceive themselves as healthier, but
they were also literally healthier when looking at
objective measures. They had better coping skills,
they had more energy, they engaged in healthier behaviors,
and they engaged in enjoyable activities more.
So it's almost like a sales funnel.
It's kind of how I think of it. We have our positive emotion at
the bottom of the pyramid, and then we move into positive
affect and then we move into optimism, which we'll get into.
And these things build upon each other.
And the further you go up the pyramid, the stronger and
stronger the benefits become. Now I have another study to
share with you. This is one of my favorite
studies. I heard this and haven't
forgotten it. It's only been a year, but it
always comes to mind whenever I'm talking about psychology or
mental health. And this is the nun study.
And you'll probably also remember it because how often do
you hear about a nun study? So basically nuns do a lot of
journaling is the TLDR on this. And when Catholic nuns in their
20s were applying to join the nunnery, I think it's what it's
called, they wrote two to three page autobiographies about
themselves. And they analyzed 180
applications, again by Catholic nuns in their 20s.
And they looked for statements about the frequency of positive
emotions. They objectively analyzed and
coded, looking for the instances of those within these
autobiographies. And they found that the nuns
that expressed more positive emotions, 90% were alive at the
age of 85 and 54% were alive at age 94.
And nuns that expressed fewer positive emotions, 34 were alive
at age 85 and 11% were alive at 94.
So again, the nuns that experience more positive
emotions, 90% were alive at age 85 versus 34% of those that
didn't, And 54% were alive at age 94 compared to 11% for those
that didn't experience positive emotions.
Wild. I love this study.
It's crazy. And I'll give you some fun
anecdotes on longevity because there's so many studies on this.
But like to truly understand how powerful and impactful this is,
I feel like I just have to throw the data at you because it's
wild. But greater levels of positive
affect were associated with longevity in studies in 2008,
2011, 2005, a two year study of 65 to 99 year old Mexican
Americans found that those with greater positive affect were
half as likely to die. There's a lot of studies out
there that support this relationship, but basically the
idea is that positive affect and longevity have a strong
relationship just like positive affect and health.
And so if we unpack this briefly, this positive affect
and health correlation, we find that positive affect potentially
changes how people actually perceive their health in their
bodies. So people with high positive
affect report fewer and less severe symptoms.
And positive affect also is associated with healthier
behaviors. Not only are you impacting how
you're perceiving these things, but you're also more likely to
engage in behaviors that improve your general health.
So a bunch of research has been done that showed that was true
for better sleep habits, increased exercise, and improved
coping skills. So we're working through our
pyramid here. We have positive emotions, which
we know motivate us to act in certain ways and do certain
things, and is really related with things like social
relationships. We have positive affect, which
is our general mood, and this really impacts our health and
longevity and builds upon these momentary moods.
And then we move into optimism, which we define scientifically
as to believe that good rather than bad things will happen.
And I really like this quote that my positive psychology
professor shared with us, and she's going to come on the
podcast. I need to coordinate and
schedule that. But it's going to be phenomenal,
amazing. And you're going to love it.
But the quote is by George Bernard Snow, and it is that
both optimist and pessimist contribute to society.
The optimist immensely. Airplane and the pessimist
invents the parachute. Now we're going to get into the
science and the context and the correlations here.
So there is some nature and nurture that happens with
optimism. We know that optimism is
relatively a stable trait. So if you are optimistic early
in life, it's likely that that will continue throughout the
rest of your life. We know that it's partially
inherited, so how optimistic your parents and your family are
has an impact on how optimistic you are.
And we know that it is somewhat malleable.
So social factors definitely do impact levels of optimisms, and
studies have showed that. And so now we get into these
crazy correlations, which is that optimists compared to
pessimists compare better with their subjective well-being,
physical health, quantity and quality of relationships,
self-confidence, perseverance and challenges, coping skills,
transitions to college, work performance, and enduring
traumatic war or disaster events.
So basically everything. Optimists tend to fare better in
those experiences. And again, there are some
elements that can't be controlled for, but this is one
of those things that you can work into how you speak to
yourself, how you look at the world, how you solve challenges,
how you solve problems, and again, has an exponentially
positive impact. So how do you optimist think?
If you're a pessimist and you tend to view things more
negatively, you're like, OK, what are they saying to
themselves? How are they approaching these
things? I got you.
We're going to break it down. So the very central feature of
optimism is positive expectancy. So you expect positive things to
happen and we have to be realist.
Sometimes positive things won't always happen, but the general
trend is that you have positive expectations for outcomes and
optimism really comes into play and really has an impact.
When you are going through a challenge, this is when it's
really relevant to your well-being and your mental
health. And so we know that during
difficulties, optimists tend to use problem focus, coping,
realistic acceptance of their situation, humor, and positive
reframing. They also have greater
self-confidence and perseverance during those challenges.
So this is the biggest shift, right?
Like we talked about, hey, like we can't really necessarily
change what motions we're experiencing all the time
affect. We can try and adjust, but when
it comes down to these challenges that we're
overcoming, having that optimistic outlook and lens that
we're operating in the world through really makes a
difference. You guys know, if you've
listened to podcast before, we're really big on coping
skills. Like this is really what I hone
into and talk about a lot of the time.
And it was what was such a game changer for me.
So I have some research for you on optimist versus pessimist and
how they cope with things. Optimists tend to seek
information about problems they plan and actively cope.
They seek benefits and adversity and positively reframe stressful
situations and also use humor. So making light of things,
looking for the positive, seeing like what are the benefits in
this situation, even if it's not what I wish it was.
And again, they accept the reality of the situation.
So a lot of acceptance. There's not denial.
We're not in a state of delusion, like, oh, everything's
going to work out for things going to be positive.
It's acceptance and coming to terms with what you're
experiencing. Pessimists tend to distract
themselves from problems cognitively avoid stressors, or
overtly deny their problems. Focus on their distress and give
up trying to cope with problems. Which when I think about my
internal experience, when I was really depressed and anxious and
struggling and at a low, this is exactly what I was doing.
I was constantly distracting. I avoided stresses as much as
possible. I'm still prone to avoidance,
but we do some exposure for that.
And a lot of focus on the distress all the time, every
day, and a lot of giving up because there was no belief that
I was able to cope through these things.
And so this is what I think is cool about optimism and why I'm
sharing this episode for you. Yes, some of these things we do
inherit and some of these are stable over our lifetimes.
But when I think about how I view the world and navigated
challenges and spoke to myself when I was struggling, I really
did take a pessimistic lens. And now I definitely think I
spend more time in the optimistic side of the camp.
And I think it's had a really positive impact on my mental
health and just how I experienced the world.
And we have a quote on denial because I love these quotes.
My pressure with me. I'm like looking at my notes
from this course and so many of them are relevant that I'm
sharing. But denial or refusing to accept
the reality of the situation means trying to maintain a world
view that is no longer valid. Acceptance implies restructuring
our experience to come to grips with the situation.
This means not giving up. And I think this is one of the
most common misconceptions and something that I really
struggled with when it was like, OK, just accept that you're
depressed, except that you're struggling, except the cards
that you've been dealt. And it felt like accepting was
giving up acceptance was like, this is how I feel and this
isn't going to change. And really it's the opposite of
that fact. If we don't accept where we're
at, what our starting point is, we cannot move forward.
We're not able to take those next steps and adjust the
situation unless we understand where our starting point is.
And so I think that's a mistake that I made in my journey.
If you could even call it a mistake or something that I, I
wish I would have known earlier on.
And I think it's, I think he trapped that a lot of people
fall into, which again is being in denial because you don't, you
don't want your life to look the way it does, which means that
you're not even holding onto a valid view of the world.
Maybe you're like, this isn't as bad as it is.
It's temporary. I haven't felt this way for that
long. It could be worse.
Whatever it is that you're saying to yourself.
And when we actually do accept what our starting point is, then
we are able to actually take steps forward and move in the
direction that we want to. And then we have more optimism
and health correlations because these are truly wild.
But optimist compared to pessimist fare better when
undergoing coronary bypass surgeries and bone marrow
transplants, coping with cancer, AIDS or chronic pain, dealing
with aging and health issues later in life and caring for
others, for example, Alzheimer's or cancer patients like wild so
insane. And also when we think back to
positive affect and the behaviors that people tend to
engage in when they have more of a positive affect, it makes
sense is be these health promoting behaviors and these
more effective coping skills. So now that we kind of
understand these three pieces of the puzzle, which is positive
emotion, positive affect, and optimism, we can talk about how
do we increase those and how do we especially increase optimism
and adjust the way that we're thinking.
And so one is CBT to enhance positive thinking.
The 2nd is positive visualizations.
And the third is the best possible cells activity, which
I'm going to share with you guys, explanatory styles, which
is kind of the CBT side of things.
And then we're also going to talk about best possible cells,
just an activity you guys can do after this, which is a really
cool positive psychology intervention.
So I'm literally going to read you guys the prompt that we got
when we did this activity this semester in Doctor Seligman's
class. I really love hearing what other
people are learning about in their psychology classes and how
it varies from school to school based on who your teacher is and
the concept that you're focusing on.
And if you're like, I feel like I'm in a class, I am sorry.
But I, I hope that other people out there also enjoy this
perspective and like these very concrete activities and
assignments and all these things.
So it may be hard at any age to find what we want out of life.
That said, research shows that having a positive vision of the
future can serve as effective motivation towards what we
desire, thus perhaps making it more likely that it will
manifest. This activity asks you to
imagine your future life going as well as it possibly can.
As you imagine this best version of a specific aspect of your
future life, write in journal about your future self in as
much detail as you can. By doing so, can it increase
your well-being now? How might it impact your future?
So what you do is you think about all the aspects of your
life that are relevant and important.
Academics, maybe it's athletics, artistic pursuits, friendships,
relationships, health, family, career, any of these things.
And you take the time to think about each aspect of your life
and what you want it to look like in this quote UN quote,
best future version of yourself. And you get really specific like
what happens in your daily routine?
How do you spend time with your friends?
If you're going to work out, what workout are you doing?
How do you feel as you're drinking your morning coffee?
What is your environment like when you go to work?
How does it feel to talk to your Co workers?
Do you feel fulfilled and motivated?
All of these things that would be really instrumental and
relevant to that day-to-day experience.
And the caveat here is to not journal in this activity about
any past challenges that might prevent you from achieving that
best future self, but just focus on what the potential is, what
you want, what you're hoping for, and what allows this to
come to fruition. And this is things like how do
you talk to yourself? How do you cope with challenges
that arise? How do you communicate with
others to make sure you have boundaries and your needs are
met? And like I mentioned in the
initial prompt, there are benefits with increasing your
motivation to work towards this future self and towards this
goal that you're getting really clear on.
And another 2006 study showed that people who completed the
best possible self intervention daily for two weeks showed an
increase in positive emotions. Participants who continued with
the practice reported continued positive mood up to one month
post completion. So we talked about these pieces
of the puzzle, right? Like positive emotion then
impacts positive mood and affect, then we get to optimism.
And so taking these small steps that we know scientifically do
improve mood and emotion can have a really strong impact on
that outcome. We're going to talk about
explanatory styles, which is the last thing we're going to cover
in this episode because I know I've thrown a lot at you, but
this is one of those really concrete things that you can do
on a day-to-day basis. You can start practicing
immediately that has really positive impacts on your life.
And that is back to a lot of research.
And I'm going to give you more research, but I promise it's
interesting and helpful. So explanatory styles comes from
this research about learned helplessness.
And this was research that was done at Penn by Doctor Seligman.
And this was done in the mid 1960s.
And basically what they did is they had three different groups
of dogs. They had one group of dogs that
was shocked without a way to escape.
The shock wasn't a very strong shock, but it was a negative
experience. And they were not given a way
out of that challenge or adversity.
Regardless of what they did, they experienced the shock.
They had a another group where the dogs could stop the shock
when they pressed the panel in the cage with their noses.
So they experienced the shocks, but they had an ability to stop
the shock if they did the right course of action.
And then there were dogs that got no shocks and they were the
control group, so they were fine.
They were hanging out, nothing happened.
What they found was that the dogs that experience the shock
with no way out of the situation, no matter what they
did, they still experienced it regardless of if they then took
action and they would be able to stop the shock if they press the
button with their nose. They didn't do anything to try
and get the shock to stop. They'd learned that no matter
what they did, nothing was going to change and they were just
going to have to sit with and endure the negative experience.
And they did the same experiment with humans.
They had them in a room, they played a really loud noise, and
for some they could press a button and the noise would stop.
For others, they press the button 67 times, nothing
happened, and others there was no sound.
And the same thing occurred even when they then made the button
work for the group that initially experienced the sound
without any relief. They generally didn't try to
stop the sound. They accepted that this was
happening to them, that this negative experience was what
they just had to endure and no problem solving took place.
And so the finding was that these groups of individuals,
whether it was the dogs, they also did this in mice, they did
it with humans, was that they became passive and gave up in
the face of adversity once they had first experienced the
negative events and learned that they could do nothing about
them. And this is from Flourish.
If you guys are interested in positive psychology, you
absolutely have to read this book.
It's just such a great overview of all the research.
But sharing some findings from here as we explain this, because
who else is better explaining this than Doctor Seligman?
And so when we look at learned helplessness, it's the idea that
nothing you do alters the event you are are helpless, regardless
of what actions you take to try and overcome the situation.
And the inverse of this is mastery.
So it's the opposite of helplessness and it's working to
overcome the situation that you're in.
And so when Doctor Seligman did this research, he was like, this
is really crazy. Even if the situation changed
and people were able to stop the negative experiences or the dogs
were able to stop the shock, they did it.
And there was a really small group of people who did
experience the shock and weren't able to stop it.
But then they did have the ability to stop it and they
still continue to try. And conversely, there were
people where even if they press the button, the shock would
immediately stop. But they chose to not try it
all. There's outliers and should be
the optimist and the pessimists, but the general pattern was that
when you learned that your actions don't have an impact on
the situation, you stopped trying.
And so he ended up doing a lot of additional research into
this. Again, it initially started with
dogs. They replicated in other
animals. They worked with humans, and
they really started to solidify this idea of what happens when
people are not able to change the outcome of a situation and
how does that impact their ability to try and solve a
problem going forward. And what exactly is this learned
helplessness? And why are some people still
optimistic even when they are unable to overcome these
challenges no matter what they do?
And he landed on this thing called explanatory styles, which
is very closely connected to optimism.
And explanatory styles are a thing that both optimists and
pessimists do. And the explanatory style you
use is tied to that mental state.
And so to wrap this up and explain this in the context of
this specific study, and then I'll explain it in general to
day-to-day life. Basically the finding was that
people who believe that the causes of setbacks in their
lives are temporary, changeable in local, do not become
hopeless. And so even when there was this
really annoying noise and it wouldn't go away and nothing of
they did stopped it, they thought to themselves, it's
going to go away. I can do something about it.
And it's just this one situation.
They bounce back quickly and this is consistent across other
areas. And then pessimist, on the other
hand, say things like it's going to last forever, it's going to
undermine everything. There's nothing I can do about
it. And this also carries over into
other areas of life and what we talked a lot about optimist and
pessimist and different outcomes and things it's correlated with.
But as they continue to study this in the lab, they found the
pessimist get depressed much more readily.
They underachieve in their jobs in the classroom and on the
sports field, and their relationships are rockier.
So again, so many correlations with this.
And one of the ways that we can change this and really make
positive impact in our lives immediately is explanatory
styles. So I'm going to throw some words
at you that sound really academic and are not the easiest
to remember. There should be a better acronym
for this, but there's not a great way to explain it
otherwise. But basically, when pessimists
are confronted with problems, the way that they view them is
that they're permanent, pervasive, and they're personal.
So say you get a bad grade on a test.
A pessimist will say this always happens, I always get bad
grades. So it's permanent across
multiple situations, It's pervasive, it's across
everything. Even if it's a math test, you
say I get bad grades in every class, I never do well, and it's
personal. I failed.
I failed the test, I didn't do well enough.
I'm not smart. I will never achieve what I want
to, and you're really internalizing this experience
and telling yourself that it's consistent across all these
different areas in your life. Conversely, optimists will say
that things are temporary, specific, and external.
And so if optimist fails a test, they'll say, I, I failed one
test, I failed a math test, They will make sure that it's
specific to that situation. I failed this specific test.
I didn't understand trigonometry.
I didn't understand know how to do a linear regression, whatever
it is, and it's external. They will say something related
to these external behaviors. I only studied for six hours.
I should have studied for 10. I didn't feel like I really
understood the lectures. I was supposed to meet up with
my study group, but I didn't go. Again.
It's not I'm dumb, I don't know how to learn things.
It's the specific external things didn't happen which led
to this result. And so to give you just more
general summaries that we can use that are less specific to a
situation, pessimists will say this will last forever, it will
undermine everything and it's me, it's my fault.
Optimists will say this will pass, it's just the situation
and it's not entirely my fault. Again, we take accountability
for some things, but always putting all the blame on
ourselves for everything, especially when there's external
factors is really ineffective for our mental health.
Also another caveat to add here, which is that the way that we
approach challenges and the way that we approach victories is
also different when we explain things.
So again, when we experience a set back, Optimus will say that
things are local and external, really specific to that
situation, not a reflection of you.
But when we experience good things in our lives, we do want
to say that those are permanent, pervasive and internal.
So imagine if you got an A on the test and you absolutely aced
it. You did an amazing job.
You took all the steps that allowed you to get to that
point. A pessimist would say, well, I
just did well on this one test. I never do well.
Like it was just a fluke. They'll be like, the teacher
must have graded it wrong. Like it was an easy question.
Everyone else is going to take a harder test.
Like it's just because the teacher wanted us to have an
easy A and it's only in this class, Every other class I'm
horrible optimist will be the opposite.
They'll say it is permanent. I do well academically.
I perform well on tests. I am good at studying.
I'm good at preparing for these things.
It's pervasive, so it's across multiple situations.
I know how to study for a test. I know how to do well.
I can do well. I will do well, and it's
internal. I studied hard for this.
I performed well. I did this and taking that
accountability isn't the right word, but celebrating those wins
and knowing that it's reflection of you and you get to take
credit for all that hard work in that outcome.
And so to give you a nice little wrap up on this and explain why
this is so important to externalize these losses and
internalize our wins and also be really careful about how we
explain these things that happened to us.
I wanted to give you some reasons for why this seems
important. And so one is that a big part of
this theory is that these explanatory styles and these
ways of thinking are the direct Ave. and way that people that
tend to think more pessimistically key on shift to
a more optimistic way in viewing the world.
And they did a study with middle school children and they showed
that retraining pessimistic thinking and optimistic thinking
can significantly reduce the incidences of depression.
Crazy. It's correlated with test
results and how much people try in the classroom and how likely
they are to continue to study, and not only just how much
effort they're exerting, but also the return on that, how
well they actually perform. It's related to employment rates
in insurance agents, performance in sports, psychological
well-being in academic settings, which we know is a huge thing,
mental health, especially depression, so many things.
Basically, this is a direct way that you can impact your
pessimistic versus optimistic mindset.
And we know that if we look at our pyramid again, positive
emotions and mood and affect and optimism versus pessimism is
really this foundation that so much of our mental health sits
on. And I think this is another
really important disclaimer that I'll add at the end of this
episode, which is that thinking isn't everything.
A big piece of the puzzle here is taking action towards the
results that we want. It's changing our behaviors.
It's doing the routines and habits that are beneficial and
building the social relationships and practicing
vulnerability and asking for help and all these things that
fit into this picture. But I don't think that you're
able to have the mental health outcomes that you want if you're
still talking to yourself really negatively.
And if you still have this really pessimistic view of the
world, it's like good mental health and well-being and
extreme negativity. It's really challenging for
those two things to go hand in hand.
And so establishing this piece of the puzzle early on can help
this journey feel less challenging and less
overwhelming and less like you're fighting against yourself
every step of the way while also building this really important
skill set that is so essential to your long term outcome.
So to give you guys like a little recap and summary of all
the crazy amount of information that I just threw at you.
Positive emotions are these momentary experiences that have
a really big impact on our well-being.
When we experience positive emotions, we're motivated to
build a better life for ourselves.
We can't necessarily force positive emotions on ourselves,
but it is an important piece of the puzzle and we know it's
correlated with behaviors and our health and our longevity and
all of these important pieces of the puzzle.
A more accurate picture of our day-to-day is our positive
affect, which is generally our like disposition and how we
approach the world, how happy we are versus how sad we are.
We more positive or negative with kind of our day-to-day
experiences. And affect is really strongly
correlated with our physical health, our problem solving, our
mental health, our relationships.
All of these things are really closely intertwined with affect,
and it's a really key piece of the puzzle that connects how we
think about our lives and how we feel about our lives.
Our affect is kind of like that in between piece.
And then the thinking piece is optimism and pessimism.
It's how we view the world. Are we looking through it with a
lens of positive expectations or are we expecting negative things
to happen? And so many outcomes hinge on
the way we think about things from a physical health
perspective, from a mental health perspective, there is so
much research that supports that.
Optimism is a really key piece of the puzzle here.
And it's one of those things that is somewhat essential in in
those positive mental health outcomes that a lot of us want.
So how can we do that? We can view our challenges as
temporary. It's just this moment.
It's just this thing, it's local, it's this situation.
It's not my whole life and it's external.
There were a lot of factors that led to this outcome.
It's not just you and it's not only a reflection of you.
And when we have positive things happen in our life, we do the
opposite. We make sure to say that this is
a permanent thing. This is something that generally
happens in my life. It's pervasive.
It happens in lots of situations.
I'm capable of experiencing this and feeling this way and
absolutely this will happen again.
And it's internal. You get to celebrate your wins.
You get credit for this. It is a result of you and your
hard work and all the amazing things about you and this way of
thinking. Write it on a post it note, get
good at it. I promise it'll become more
second nature that when you have a test or you have an
interaction or you get good news or you get bad news, you start
to reframe the way you think. And rather than being like, I'm
so dumb, I shouldn't have done this.
I should have known better. I didn't have all the
information. I could have studied harder.
I generally do better on these. This is a specific instance
where that didn't happen. The questions on this test were
really hard. I wasn't a good fit for this
opportunity, but it's not a reflection of me as a person or
as an applicant or whatever it is.
And again, I do think this is one of those things that's kind
of essential to mental health, even if it's not the only thing
that will get you to the place that you want to be.
It's a really important factor. So lots of rambling, lots of
information. I hope this was helpful.
If you made it this hard to the episode, send me Adm, let me
know what you thought. Share with a friend or family
member, leave a review for the podcast is seriously so helpful.
And I'd for check every day. I'm like, did anyone leave for
the new review? Any new messages from you guys?
Because I absolutely love it and it's a positive experience that
will absolutely explain is permanent, pervasive and
internal. I work so hard on this podcast
and people like me in the podcast.
People generally enjoy it and have a good time listening and I
will continue to make content that people enjoy.
So with all those affirmations, I hope you guys enjoyed this.
Let me know what else you want to hear about in future
episodes. And if you like this more
psychology style recap of things I've learned at Penn type of
episode or if you guys were like, this was too much, we
never want this again. Also let me know.
Thank you for listening and I will talk to you guys on Monday
for our Monday minis.