From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD
My mentor in grad school, Dr. Martin Seligman was the father of positive psychology and one of the first people in the field to show that we have a choice in how we build our inner lives, and how much this choice matters to our well-being. He found that much of our suffering is caused by habits of thought, and that we are most despairing when we perceive that we have no control over the outcome of a situation – when we think we can’t control the link between our actions and the results. We might develop a pessimistic explanatory style, a negative and ultimately damaging way of telling our own story.
If I fail a test or my lover leaves me, I can explain the same event in different ways. If I’m using a pessimistic explanatory style, I respond to the bad grade of the breakup by saying, “I’m a loser.” I tell the story of failure and loss as though it is internal (I’m incompetent), stable (I’ll never succeed in this subject or in a relationship), and global (I’m bad at everything).
There is another way of explaining the same event that is external, unstable, and specific. Instead of labeling myself as flawed or incompetent, I could describe the external reality: “That test was really difficult” or “That relationship wan’t sustainable.” Instead of deciding that I will continue to fail at tests and love and everything else, I could say, “I need to study harder in the future” or “I trust that the right person will come along someday.”
Marty Seligman’s impressive body of research showed that a pessimistic explanatory style carves a path to depression, while an optimistic explanatory style leads to resilience. In other words, we experience depression and other mental illnesses in part because we’ve learned to feel helpless in the face of circumstances that we wrongly believe are going to last forever or are our fault, or the result of our damage or deficiency. Really, we have more control than we believe we do. Marty showed the therapeutic benefit of unlearning our false, negative beliefs, and choosing to see the world and ourselves differently. I wondered if this choice might have something to do with the buoyant, open, peaceful feeling I sometimes had when running or out in nature.