The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external.
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.
Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair...
I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.
One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn’t be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy – just not in the same moment that you’re sad.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism.
Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.
On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
There is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?
Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.
Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.
Alcoholics are, in truth, failures, and their failure is a simple failure of will. They have made bad choices, and they continue to do so every day. By calling them victims of a disease, we magically shift the burden of the problem from choice and personal control, where it belongs, to an impersonal force – disease.
Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.
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.
Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being – purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition – has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south. How is this epidemic to be explained?