How a Dose of Optimism and a Pinch of Stoicism Helps Combat Depression And Stress
When bad things happen or we start feeling pessimistic about things, it’d be nice if we had a way to lift ourselves up and see the light.
Martin Seligman, who is a pioneer in positive psychology and optimism, says that flexible optimists see defeat as a temporary setback, its causes are specific to the event, and they believe it’s not their own fault. Very similar to the techniques the Stoics used, which I’ve increasingly used and found helpful in lots of circumstances.
Let’s take a look.
Pessimism leads to depression.
Seligman and other psychologists argue that pessimism leads to giving up easily and to more instances of depression. Depression is pessimism.
Changing our thought processes from pessimistic to optimistic is partly responsible for the prevention of depressive symptoms. And, studies now show that we can choose the way we think.
And, the more pessimistic we are, the more depressed we’ll get and the less we’ll accomplish.
One popular way to treat depression is anti-depressants. But this is really only a partial victory as the depression often returns once you get off the pills. And Seligman says they don’t help make the world look any brighter. It doesn’t change our way of thinking about failures, which is the key for preventing a relapse into depression.
And more practically, drugs don’t really make us self-sufficient, they don’t teach us skills for coping when things get rough next time around.
In the majority of cases, as Seligman states, depression is simpler than we make it out to be.
Seligman’s solution is a specific formula that’s intended to permanently change our way of thinking about things. It’s not positive self-talk.
What is learned optimism exactly?
There are two important principles to optimism: learned helplessness and explanatory style.
Learned helplessness
Helplessness is the reaction of giving up, it’s quitting that follows from the belief in our mind that whatever action we take is going to be futile and not matter. This thinking is learned and can be unlearned.
Explanatory style
Explanatory style is about the way we explain to ourselves the things that happen to us.
It regulates our helplessness. How we explain to ourselves the things that happen to us affects the degree to which we feel helpless towards those things. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness and makes us energized and a pessimistic explanatory style spreads helplessness and makes us less energized.
Explanatory style is further broken down into three different dimensions:
- Permanence
- Pervasiveness
- Personalization
Permanence
This dimension is about time. People who give up easily believe that bad events will continue and last.
And those who resist helplessness believe that bad events are temporary.
It’s about thinking in ‘always’ and ‘never’ versus ‘sometimes’ and ‘recently’ or ‘lately’.
So, if we explain events in ‘always’ and ‘never’ terms, we have a pessimistic explanatory style versus the opposite.
Seligman says that the degree of this dimension of explanatory style has a huge effect on our degree of helplessness, whether we remain helpless for only a few days, whether it takes months to get back up, or whether we never get back up.
If we make our explanations permanent, we’re producing in ourselves more enduring helplessness. If we make temporary explanations, we’re creating resilience.
Pervasiveness
This dimension is about space, about providing universal or specific explanations for things that happen to us.
People who make universal explanations for failures give up on just about everything when failure is specific to one area in their lives. It overflows into other areas. Helplessness across all areas of life.
People who make specific explanations for a failure may become helpless only in that specific area and be fine in other areas. They don’t generalize the failure to all areas of life, instead they think that it has a very specific cause. Helplessness only in a specific area.
‘I’m bad at public speaking’ versus ‘I didn’t do as I planned on this specific public speaking event’.
Personalization
This is about how we feel about ourselves. Where permanence and pervasiveness is about what we do in terms of how long we’re helpless for and across how many areas of life, personalization is about internalization versus externalization.
People with a pessimistic style blame themselves (internalization) and people with an optimistic style blame others or circumstance (externalization).
‘I’m bad at public speaking therefore I have no skill or confidence in this area’ versus ‘I ran out of time to adequately prepare due to other pressing commitments’.
Seligman’s ABCDE Formula
Now that we understand the concepts, let’s get into the cognitive formula.
Seligman breaks it down as such:
Adversity | Belief | Consequence | Disputation | Evidence
Or
ABCDE
Step 1: See the connection between adversity, belief, and consequences.
This step is about understanding that there is a connection between adversity, our beliefs about the adversity, and the consequent actions we take as a result.
That’s how the mind works.
When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. That thinking turns into beliefs. Those beliefs become habitual and these beliefs are the direct cause of what we feel and the actions we take. The beliefs can make us feel bad and quit or challenge us and tell us to get back up and continue going.
So if we can find our thoughts, we can work to change them in time and when we change them, we change the consequences.
Step 2: Identify the adversity.
It can be anything, from an emotion to an actual event.
A scratch in your car, no milk left in the fridge, your wife/husband forgetting to fill up the gas tank, etc.
Step 3: Identify the belief.
What’s the belief coming out of this event?
Our belief is how we interpret the adversity. It’s the thought that arises.
‘I feel incompetent’, ‘I’m not good at this’, ‘It’s never going to work’.
Step 4: Consequence.
The feelings we feel from the belief we created.
Sad, angry, upset, anxious, happy. The objective feelings.
It’s important that we actually log this so we can track it.
‘I went back to bed’, ‘I did nothing’, ‘I made a plan to fix it’.
Step 5: Disputation.
This is the step where we work to change the beliefs we created about the event.
It’s about objectively evaluating the beliefs we created in our mind using the below techniques.
Use evidence. Fighting belief with evidence. If we can come up with evidence that corrects or contradicts the belief, great.
Alternatives. About coming up with other viable explanations to dispute the belief. As we know, most events in life have more than one cause.
Implications. About asking what the implications are even if the belief is true. What’s the worst that can happen here?
Utility. About evaluating the usefulness of the belief in question. Is it useful, destructive? If it doesn’t help me, what good is it?
One word of caution in determining whether to use this optimistic formula:
Ask, ‘What is the cost of failure in this particular situation?’ If it’s high, don’t use optimism. If it’s low, use it.
E.g., the guy who had too much to drink and is deciding whether he should drive himself home, the pilot who’s deciding whether to continue flying for hours with an almost empty tank.
Stoic impressions
The Stoics used something quite similar, the correct use of impressions.
In a couple of articles ago, I broke this down. Here’s a quick rundown.
The Stoics had specific definitions for things.
There is good in life and bad in life.
There are externals in life and internals in life.
Things outside our control are considered externals, things like death, birth, wealth, people’s attitudes, etc.
Things inside our control are those things like our perception and moral action, notwithstanding whatever fate we may have.
Correct use of impressions are about stopping and with every seemingly bad thing that happens to us, asking, ‘what is this, is it within my control to do something about it or is it an external?’
If external, why bother getting angry or sad about it? It’s nature’s will.
Let’s focus instead on what we can control like how we can decide to perceive this situation and the good actions we can take.
That’s impressions in a nutshell.
If we compare that with Seligman’s optimism formula, we can see the obvious similarities. Both require us to stop and ask objectively what is the belief that we’re forming about the situation. Then it asks us to properly evaluate it before letting our minds run into the ground with wrong beliefs and feelings.
Both are quite practical, both work in various situations.
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