The Science of Optimism: How to Improve Your Life By Cultivating Hope

We’re all familiar with the idea. Think of the incel who feels pre-rejected by women before ever putting himself out there. Or your recently laid-off friend who’s given up on the job hunt. 

Then there are optimists; people who seem undeterred by setbacks, tragedies, and obstacles. These are the people who persevere in the face of great suffering, possessing an inhuman spirit of triumph. We all wish we could be like this, but it seems like a pipedream. But what if I told you there’s a science to becoming a more hopeful, optimistic person—that you can be the one who gets knocked down ten times and gets right back up without a second thought?

If We Can Learn Helplessness, Can We Learn Hopefulness? 

Studies on learned helplessness demonstrated that adversity can cause people to give up hope that life can be different. This internalized sense of futility prevents people from capitalizing on opportunities or recognizing they’re even there. Seminal research on learned helplessness was conducted in the 1960s by Martin Seligman, who observed that dogs who had been given unavoidable shocks in a harness became conditioned to think that the shocks were unavoidable, even when the situation was changed so that they could escape. 

Further research concluded that learned helplessness happens when a subject is repeatedly exposed to uncontrollable negative events and starts to believe they lack agency, even in new situations where control is possible. It’s a kind of psychic defense against endless disappointment. The dogs had learned that attempting to escape the shocks was futile, so they stopped even trying. But what if we can learn hopefulness in the same way that we can learn helplessness? The benefits of optimism are no secret: optimists are healthier, happier, live longer, more motivated, and more resilient to setbacks.

Our perception of the world has the ability to determine if we sink or swim.

Here’s another study, and bear with me, it’s quite tragic and unethical, but there’s a point to it. In the 1950s, Curt Paul Richter conducted an experiment on rats, “On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.” He placed rats in containers of water that they couldn’t climb out of to see how long they could tread water before giving up and drowning (told you it was sad). When they were left to their own devices, they would give up after treading water for only 15 minutes or so. However, in an experimental group, just before the rats were about to drown, the researchers took them out and dried them off. They were then put back in the water. 

How long do you think they kept swimming the second time? The answer is anywhere from 60 to 80 hours—an exponential increase. Richter observed, “The rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless” and “after elimination of hopelessness, the rats do not die.” Because the rats believed they would be rescued, they could keep swimming far beyond what was thought physically possible. Our perception of the world has the ability to determine if we sink or swim—whether we give up or keep fighting. 

Explanatory Styles Influence Our Perceived Sense of Agency 

Seligman expanded his findings on learned helplessness to humans by identifying the way that humans narrativize rather than just respond to stimuli like dogs. We don’t just act on instinct, we create narratives to help us make sense of the world. He refined his theory with what he called explanatory style, identifying three key dimensions that shape how we interpret adversity. Personalization—was it my fault (internal) or caused by others or circumstances (external)? Permanence—will things always be like this (stable) or is it only temporary (unstable)? Pervasiveness—does this affect everything else in my life (global) or just this one area (specific)? 

People prone to learned helplessness have a tendency to explain adversity in internal, stable, and global terms, which is a pessimistic style. In other words, they tell themselves, “this is my fault,” “it’ll never change,” and “it ruins everything.” People with an optimistic explanatory style frame adversity in external, unstable, and specific terms. In other words, when something doesn’t go their way, they think, “this was circumstantial,” “it won’t last forever,” and “it doesn’t define my whole life.” I run into people with pessimistic explanatory styles all the time, often on online forums or running incel accounts on X. They often lament the state of modern women and parrot back pill fatalism.

One look at their takes on viral interactions between men and women paint an obvious discrepancy between their perception of the world and the way it really is. They internalize a pessimistic worldview that funnels input from the world through negative filters that someone with an optimistic explanatory style would not. Let’s say a girl rejects him. An optimist might say, okay, maybe she had a boyfriend or she isn’t looking for something right now, it was just one isolated rejection, and I will meet plenty more women. A pessimist might see it this way: she rejected me because women think I’m ugly, I will always be ugly, and women will never like me. They see rejection not as a one-off, but as proof that all women universally hate them. 

Locus of Control: Do You Take Responsibility for Your Life?

Notice how the optimistic style is a mindset that grants the subject much more agency, and with it, resilience? But what if we want to become more agentic, resilient people and just don’t know how? We may want to see the glass half full, but we don’t have the tools or the knowledge to see it. One of these tools is surprisingly simple: ask better questions. In Psychology Today’s article “How to Stop Being a Victim of Your Past,” Scott Barry Kaufman synthesizes the research on victimhood, finding that one of the biggest predictors of happiness is locus of control. 

People with an internal locus of control believe they have control of their own life and outcomes. They attribute their successes and failures to their own actions and abilities rather than forces outside of their control. If you have an external locus of control, you believe that outside forces such as other people, circumstances, luck, or fate determine the outcomes of your life rather than your own actions and abilities. Unsurprisingly, having an internal locus of control is strongly correlated with greater happiness. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps mentality may be commonly derided in political contexts, but it really is advantageous, psychologically. 

To believe you are in the driver’s seat of your life—no one else—is to have a great sense of agency.

Cultivating Greater Agency Through Language

Kauffman suggests one way to cultivate an internal locus of control is by asking better questions. More specifically, “what” instead of “why.” Imagine a situation in your life where you felt beaten down, or suffered a poor outcome. Was it more productive to ask yourself, “what sequence of events led to this?” or “why would this happen to me?” The former leads us to actionable solutions, while the latter leads to catastrophization, over-abstraction, and self-pity. It leads us nowhere, if not backwards. “What” anchors us in the present. It reveals potential paths forward by virtue of asking the question, even if we don’t know the answer. 

Another essential tool, Kauffman suggests, is emotional granularity—describing our emotions with precise, nuanced language. The ability to identify exactly how you’re feeling in any given moment, according to research, makes us less reactive to negative circumstances and makes us more resilient. An inability to identify what you’re feeling can be treated by the brain like a vague threat. Ask anyone who experiences anxiety. 

For example, a racing heart, perspiring palms, and shortness of breath have symptomatic overlap with anxiety, a heart attack, and excitement. Identifying which applies here can be the difference between kicking ass during your presentation, having a panic attack, or rushing to the emergency room. Identifying your emotions clearly means they lose some of their power over you. When we catastrophize by assuming the worst, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Learning Optimism

Having an internal locus of control not only makes people happier, but is a protective factor against Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health issues following trauma. They’re more likely to ask for help, actively engage in recovery, and believe in their ability to overcome challenges. Those with external locus of control are more vulnerable to developing PTSD, since they’re predisposed to feelings of helplessness and experience greater difficulty regaining control or finding meaning in their experiences. Perhaps this explains why some people swear by the power of “manifesting”while others see it as self-evident pseudoscience. In some sense, the limitations of your beliefs produce limitations in outcomes.

It’s true that an optimistic worldview is somewhat hereditary, just like our personalities and general disposition. Research suggests your ability to become more optimistic may be limited to some extent by your biology, but they’re also influenced by nurture. Certain conditions increase the likelihood of an optimistic worldview—the most important of which are having warm parents who are financially stable and learning optimism during the ideal window of late childhood. 

Despite this, Seligman argued that anyone can learn to become more optimistic and benefit from doing so. He created an ABCDE model of learned optimism, which stands for Adversity, Belief, Consequence, Disputation, and Energization. It helps people unlearn negative thinking patterns. It begins with adversity—the inciting incident that triggers a response. Then comes your belief about that event, which leads to emotional consequences. This is where pessimists stop and get caught in the cycle. Optimists move on to disputation, which is the effort put into challenging the belief and questioning if it’s even true. This leads to energization, which is the shift in mood and behavior that follows from seeing adversity as temporary, specific, and changeable (optimistic). 

Our suffering can teach us to be better, wiser people.

Psychologist Charles Snyder defined hope as more than just blind positivity. It’s a cognitive skill set contingent on goals, agency, and pathways. Snyder recognized that having goals was an important part of positive psychology. To achieve a goal, it requires agency (the belief you can achieve it) and pathways (your ability to generate different ways of getting there, even in the face of obstacles.) In fact, optimistic people anticipate obstacles and conceive of alternative routes to achieve the same goal. If one route fails, they try another. While explanatory style reshapes how we interpret events, Snyder’s hope theory reshapes how we respond to them.

You can use this method to change your explanatory style and locus of control by identifying cognitive distortions. Intentional journaling is a useful way to recognize unhelpful thought patterns like black-and-white thinking, catastrophizing, discounting the positive, being drawn to the negative, and preoccupation with “should” statements. Meditation can help you create distance from your thoughts and recognize the way they’re shaping your reality. Consciously label when you notice patterns of “blaming” or “catastrophizing." Research shows that people who practice specific, consistent gratitude tend to be more optimistic, more resilient, and less stressed. Visualization is another tool to practice agency-rehearsal by anticipating that you can affect an event through your actions.

Closing Thoughts

Some people never learned how to un-victimize themselves. They’re ruled by negative thinking patterns, a lack of agency, and are burdened by humiliations of the past. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Our suffering can teach us to be better, wiser people. We don’t have to walk around feeling bitter about the humiliating incident that happened in middle school. This starts with recognizing the self-fulfilling prophecy that negative thinking is. It’s an incredibly compelling trap. There’s a twisted sense of satisfaction obtained from staying stuck in this trap, because it relieves us of the burden of trying. However, it’s ultimately a suffocating way to live. Becoming an optimist is transformative, and its effects are compounding.