How Your Outlook Influences Health And Your Ability To Control Anger

The situation: Jane and Anthony have differing ways of viewing
the world. Jane is a pessimist (the glass is half-empty), while
Anthony is an optimist (the glass is half-full). These outlooks
influence how they experience similar situations.
Scene 1: Job loss. Jane is devastated, convincing herself that
she is all washed up, she can never catch a break, it is useless
for her to try to be successful, and she is never going to
succeed at anything.
Anthony, however, has a healthier inner dialogue. He tells
himself he may not have been good at that particular job, his
skills and his company’s needs did not mesh and being fired was
only a temporary setback in his career.
Scene 2: New jobs. Offered a new job, Jane, the pessimist,
believes she was able to find a new job only because her
industry is now really desperate for people and must have
lowered their standards to hire her.
Anthony, however, feels he landed the new job because his
talents were finally recognized and he will now be appreciated
for what he can do.
As these examples illustrate, optimists tend to interpret their
troubles as transient, controllable and specific to situations.
Recent research by Dr. Martin Seligman confirms this.
When good things happen, optimists believe the causes are
permanent, resulting from traits and abilities. Optimists
further believe that good events will enhance everything they
do.
Pessimists, on the other hand, believe their troubles will last
forever, will undermine everything they do, and are basically
beyond their control. When good things happen to pessimists,
they see them as temporary and caused by specific factors that
will eventually change and lead to negative outcomes.
Optimism creates better resistance to depression when bad
events strike, better performance at work and better physical
health.
In fact, one long term study at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
MN, found that optimists lived 19% longer than pessimists.
Optimism is also a powerful antidote to anger. Many
participants in our anger management classes report their anger
lessening as they learn to replace negative thinking with
positive thinking.
Here’s some good news for negative thinkers: You can learn how
to replace pessimism with optimism.
The starting point is to access your vulnerability to
pessimistic thinking by taking the self-evaluation test you can
find at www.authentichappiness.org
Your responses will be compared to thousands of other people in
various categories, down to your Zip Code.
If you scored lower than you’d like, you can become more
optimistic. As Dr. Seligman writes in Authentic Happiness, his
latest book: ‘the trait of optimism is changeable and
learnable.’
There is now a well-documented method for building optimism.
It’s based on first, recognizing, and then disputing,
pessimistic thoughts.
People often do not pay attention to their thoughts and thus do
not recognize how destructive they can be in leading to negative
emotions. The key is to recognize your pessimistic thoughts and
then treat them as if they were uttered by someone else – an
external person, a rival, whose mission in life is to make you
miserable!
Basically, you can become an optimist by learning to disagree
with yourself – challenging your pessimistic thinking patterns
and replacing them with more positive patterns.

Note: This view of optimistic thinking is not the process of
‘positive thinking’ in the sense of repeating silly affirmations
that you don’t really believe.
Rather, it is the process of correcting distorted or faulty
thinking patterns that create health, career and relationship
problems for you.
By teaching yourself to think about things differently (but
just as realistically), you can morph yourself from a pessimist
to an optimist – and tame the Anger Bee in the process.


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