
How can optimism lead to depression?
What is optimism?
Optimism is mental attitude of having a belief or hope that an outcome of an endeavor, action, activity will be positive and favorable.
What is depression?
A persistent feeling of loss of interest or sadness.
Let’s connect the dots between them.
For example, you have an exam coming up, you believe you will come out with flying colors in results.
It’s an amazing mental attitude to carry and it will help you in taking the exam very cheerfully. Resulting in increase in your score or result.
But the reality of your results will always be determined by your previous test scores and your aptitude in every section of the exam and many other factors such as your exam taking ability, your presence of mind etc. Hence You can never connect the dots looking forward because you can only connect the dots looking backwards. To receive signals based on your past.
Let’s quick fasten the time to the result day, and you have received a lower score than expected. Reasons for the above can be as following :
- Not enough preparations for the desired results.
- Optimism making us believe our effort is enough to get the desired results.
Apart from these, there can be many other reasons.
Aftermath of the result will be we are depressed as we did not receive what we expected as we deserved. The only way to get out of this dogmatic feeling of depression is to keep your feet grounded, while hoping for the best.
Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
We should always keep our optimism in check with reality, by always keeping our feet on ground. And knowing where do we stand in terms of our expectations and in terms of reality.
To sum up, keep your optimism in check to not get shocked by the hard realities of life.