Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism: A Must-Read for Anyone Looking to Improve Their Mental Health and Well-being
As personal trainers, our role is not only to help our clients achieve physical fitness but also to empower them to improve their overall well-being, and this starts by understanding the power of optimism. Personal training is often focused on the physical aspect of well-being, but we must not forget the crucial role that the mind plays in achieving optimal health and fitness.
Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism delves into the concept of optimism and its impact on an individual's overall well-being. By studying this text, we can gain a deeper understanding of how optimism can affect our clients' mindset, and how we can help them to develop a more positive outlook on life. This can lead to increased motivation, engagement, and adherence to their workout plans, but it can also help them to improve their overall well-being, not only physically but also mentally.
Furthermore, by understanding the concept of optimism, we can create a more positive and supportive environment for our clients, one that encourages them to reach their full potential and to achieve their goals. We can also help them to develop a growth mindset, which is a crucial aspect of achieving optimal health and fitness.
The Book and The Author
Learned Optimism : How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (1991) is a popular psychology book by Martin Seligman. The author argues that people can learn to be optimistic through a process of identifying, challenging and side-tracking habitually pessimistic ways of explaining events.
According to Seligman, there are three habitual ways of explaining events that characterise pessimism:
Permanence: This will last forever and will never change, "I will always be a failure."
Pervasiveness: This will affect every aspect of life, "My poor grades will ruin my entire future."
Personalization: This is a result of the person’s actions or character, "It's my fault I didn't get the promotion."
Seligman says that such a way of explaining events can lead to “Learned Helplessness”. This concept refers to when an individual, after experiencing repeated failures in a certain situation, stops trying to escape or change the situation and instead becomes passive and resigned to their fate. This can occur in both animals and humans, and can lead to a decreased ability to take action in similar situations in the future. It is often studied in the context of depression, where individuals may feel hopeless and unable to improve their circumstances.
Seligman claims that by examining and managing the ways in which people explain negative events, individuals can learn to think more optimistically, develop resilience, and improve their chances of well-being, and supports his claim with his own research conducted in the 1960s. He also extends his research, showing that optimistic people are more successful in various areas of life, such as school, work, and relationships, and are less likely to suffer from depression.
Seligman is the co-founder of the Positive Psychology movement along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and a leading authority in the fields of resilience, depression, optimism, pessimism and learned helplessness:
He is the Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center, and Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology.
He was the President of the American Psychological Association in 1998.
He is also Director of the Penn Master of Applied Positive Psychology program (MAPP).
He is a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression, and that build strengths and well-being.
Seligman was ranked the 31st most cited psychologist of the 20th century according to a Review of the General Psychology survey published in 2002. He has written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books, including Learned Optimism (1991), Authentic Happiness (2002), and Flourish (2011). Along with Christopher Peterson he also co-authored, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004).
Summary
Learned Optimism : How to Change Your Mind and Your Life has fifteen chapters grouped into three parts:
Part One: The Quest
1. Two Ways of Looking at Life
2. Learning to be Helpless
3. Explaining Misfortune
4. Ultimate Pessimism
5. How You Think, How You Feel
Part Two: The Realms of Life
6. Success at Work
7. Children and Parents: The Origin of Optimism
8. School
9. Sports
10. Health
11. Politics, Religion, and Culture: A New Psychohistory
Part Three: Changing: From Pessimism to Optimism
12. The Optimistic Life
13. Helping Your Child Escape Pessimism
14. The Optimistic Organization
15. Flexible Optimism
In the first chapter, Seligman contrasts pessimism and optimism. Pessimists habitually explain misfortunes as long lasting, affecting everything, and as the their own fault. Optimists, in contrast, habitually explain such events as temporary, confined, and accidental. He also contrasts the concepts of personal control and helplessness, and claims that pessimistic explanation styles prevent people from acting, and that this reduces their chances of success.
In the second chapter, he discusses his discovery of “Learned Helplessness” and the experiments that lead to that discovery. Seligman discovered the concept through experiments he conducted in the 1960s while he was a graduate at the University of Pennsylvania and as part of his research on the psychological processes underlying depression. At the time, the dominant theory of depression was that it was caused by a lack of reinforcement or rewards in a person's life. Seligman believed that there was more to depression than this. He proposed that it was caused by a sense of helplessness that developed as a result of repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events.
In the third chapter, he provides a questionnaire for measuring optimism, explains the concept of “Explanatory Style”, and discusses three parts of the pessimistic explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness and personalization.
In the fourth chapter, he discusses the concept of depression, as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, Third edition, Revised (DSM-III-R), in light of his research on pessimism, and provides a questionnaire for measuring it.
In the fifth chapter, he discusses the history of cognitive therapy, and argues that this therapy works because it legitimizes the power of the self and it changes explanatory styles from pessimistic to optimistic in a way that lasts.
In chapters six to eleven, he discusses the applications of his research on how to measure, predict and change pessimistic explanatory styles to those that are optimistic in various contexts, such as work, parenting, school, sports, health, politics, religion and culture.
And in chapters twelve and thirteen, he shares tools and techniques changing explanatory styles from pessimistic to optimistic, such as the Adversity-Belief-Consequences (ABC) model. This model helps outline the emotional consequences of one’s beliefs about an adverse event. He also suggests multiple techniques for addressing pessimistic beliefs, including distraction, disputation, distancing, and de-catastrophizing:
“First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”
“Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.”
“Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.”
“Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.”
“Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do”.
He groups these strategies under Disputation and Energization, and extends the model to ABCDE.
Discussion Questions
Are pessimism and optimism the only ways of looking at life?
Is helplessness learned?
Does the way we explain our misfortunes cause us misfortune?
Does pessimism ultimately lead to depression?
Does the way we think determine how we feel?
Quotes
“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 harder.”
“The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors.”
Pros and Cons
In contrast to the typical advice given in self-help literature, such as positive affirmations, Martin Seligman’s concepts of “Explanatory Style”, “Learned Helplessness”, and the “ABCDE” model are based on evidence, and he responds to criticism using reasonable arguments. His techniques also seem useful for developing resilience.
However, some critics argue that Seligman’s concepts are simplistic and question whether his experiments apply to real-world situations. Others also question the ethics of his experiments on animals. Additionally, some critics argue that positive psychology is a mixture of moralizing, mysticism and commercialization, and that it is implicated in damaging business practices, politics and health care. Others may also criticize its focus on a narrow range of positive emotions rather than the full range of human experience.
Overall Assessment
Martin Seligman's work on learned helplessness and optimism has had a significant impact on the field of psychology and the understanding of human behaviour. His research on learned helplessness helped to establish the theory that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can develop as a result of repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events, and this theory has been applied to a wide range of human problems, such as depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
His work on the "ABC" model of explaining the link between event, thoughts and emotions, and the identification of the types of negative thoughts that can cause people to feel depressed or anxious (permanence, pervasiveness and personalization) has been widely accepted and is still used today to understand and treat emotional disorders.
His theory of learned optimism, that people can learn to be optimistic through a process of cognitive restructuring, has been a significant contribution to the field of positive psychology and has been applied to improve well-being, resilience and successful outcomes in different areas of life such as school, work, and relationships.
Additionally, Seligman's work has been influential in developing interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, that aim to help people change their negative thoughts and beliefs, and improve their emotional well-being.
Similar Books
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Peak: How All of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Further Information
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, 2008. The new era of positive psychology | Martin Seligman. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBxfd7DL3E> [Accessed 15 November 2022].
References
Azar, B. (2011, April 1). Positive psychology advances, with growing pains. Monitor on Psychology, 42(4). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/04/positive-psychology
Ehrenreich, B. (2010) Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. New York: Picador.
Is positive psychology all it’s cracked up to be? (2019). Available at: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/13/20955328/positive-psychology-martin-seligman-happiness-religion-secularism (Accessed: 13 January 2023)
Schein, M. (2023) Positive Psychology Is Garbage (And Why You Should Follow Its Founder's Lead), Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelschein/2018/07/05/positive-psychology-is-garbage-and-why-you-should-follow-its-founders-lead/?sh=4e90889071a9 (Accessed: 13 January 2023).
Seligman, M. E. P ( (2018) Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Seligman, M. E. P (no date) Martin E.P. Seligman | Positive Psychology Center. Available at: https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/people/martin-ep-seligman (Accessed: January 13, 2023).
Why we should think critically about positive psychology in our universities | Carl Cederström (2017). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/07/positive-psychology-universities-buckingham-martin-seligman (Accessed: 13 January 2023).
Yakushko, O. and Blodgett, E. (2018) “Negative reflections about positive psychology: On constraining the field to a focus on happiness and personal achievement,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 61(1), pp. 104–131. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167818794551.
