Consider another study that focused on the role of optimism and pessimism in coronary heart disease (CHD). A group of over 1,300 men were carefully evaluated as to whether they had an optimistic or a pessimistic way of looking at life. A follow-up ten years later found that over 12 percent of those men had suffered some form of CHD. Among them, the pessimists outnumbered the optimists by nearly 2 to 1. Laura Kubzansky, assistant professor of health and social behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, comments: “Most of the evidence for the notion that ‘thinking positively’ is good for your health has been anecdotal​—this study provides some of the first hard medical evidence for this idea in the arena of heart disease.”

Some studies have found that those who rate their own health as poor actually fare worse in the wake of surgery than do those who rate their health as optimal. Even longevity has been linked with optimism. One study looked at how the elderly are affected by positive and negative views of aging. When older people were exposed to fleeting messages linking the aging process with increased wisdom and experience, they were thereafter found to walk with increased strength and energy. In fact, the improvement was equivalent to the results of a 12-week exercise program!

Optimism, Pessimism, and Your Life

Researchers have found that optimists benefit in many ways from their positive outlook. They tend to perform better in school, at work, and even on the athletic field. For example, a study was made of a women’s track team. The coaches provided a thorough assessment of the women’s pure athletic abilities. At the same time, the women themselves were surveyed and their level of hope carefully assessed. As it turned out, the women’s measure of hope was a far more accurate predictor of their performance than were all the statistics evaluated by their coaches. Why does hope have such a powerful influence?

Much has been learned by studying the opposite of optimism​—pessimism. During the 1960’s, experiments yielded an unexpected finding regarding animal behavior, leading researchers to coin the phrase “learned helplessness.” They found that humans too can suffer from a form of this syndrome. For example, human test subjects were exposed to an unpleasant noise and told that they could learn to stop it by pressing a sequence of buttons. They succeeded in stopping the noise.

A second group was told the same thing​—but pressing the buttons had no effect. As you can imagine, many among that second group developed feelings of helplessness. In later tests, they were hesitant to take any action at all. They were convinced that nothing they did would make any difference. Even in that second group, though, the optimists refused to give in to such a helpless frame of mind.