Welcome to sheep Resisted, I'm your host Sadie Sutton, a 19 year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sheep Resisted is the teen mental health podcast made for teenagers by a teen. In each episode I'll bring you authentic, accessible and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental Wellness
you can expect. Evidence based teen approved resources, coping skills, including lots of DBT insights and education in each piece of content you consume. She Persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living. So let's dive in this week on She Persisted.
I think this is one of the most common misconceptions and something that I really struggled with when it was like, OK, just accept that you're depressed, except that you're struggling, except the cards that you've been dealt. And it felt like accepting was giving up. Acceptance was like, this is how I feel and this isn't going to change. And really it's the opposite of that fact. If we don't accept where we're at, what our starting point is, we cannot move forward.
We're not able to take those next steps and adjust the situation unless we understand where our starting point is. And so I think that's a mistake that I made in my journey. If you could even call it a mistake or something that I, I wish I would have known earlier on. And I think it's, I think he trapped that a lot of people fall into Hello, hello and welcome to she persisted. If this is your first episode, I'm so glad you're here.
If this is your 190th episode and you've been along for the ride the entire time, I'm so glad you're here. I think I'm probably the only person who's listened to every single episode, to be honest. If you are a returning listener, we have some fun things going on in the sheep resisted world.
We're going to be starting some Monday mini episodes, so these are going to be 5-10 minutes, the very most re releases of past episodes that are just edited down and optimize so you can get the most value possible in a short little period of time. You can add these to your weekly routine and get to experience some wisdom that was released last year or the year before, any point in the past five years, because there's such an incredible catalogue of content.
And I really hope you guys all get to listen to these incredible conversation. So I'm excited for that. If you are a new listener, I will give a little bit of context to this episode, which is that I am a psychology student at the University of Pennsylvania. I just finished up my junior year yesterday, so I'm an incoming senior, I guess you could say now.
And one of the areas of study that I've become really interested in and really gotten the chance to dive deeper in during the past couple of years is positive psychology. And I've been really lucky in the fact that Penn is actually kind of a home to positive psychology. Doctor Seligman, the father of positive psychology, he really created the field. He is a pen professor. And I took his class, The Science of well-being this
semester. And there was just a really incredible department at Penn sitting positive psychology. And to learn from them and get to hear these insights and findings from the horse's mouth, I guess you could say, is really the most incredible cool thing. And I try to bring as much as possible from the classroom and from my own lived experiences to the podcast and make these things more accessible and share anything that I wish I would have known earlier on.
And so today's episode is absolutely one of those things we are talking about optimism and explanatory styles. And the first time I came across this was as a sophomore in college when I took Introduction to Positive Psychology. And it's really wild because it's such a fundamental mindset shift to have. And it has so many benefits. And it can be an easy shift to make. And yet the benefits are extremely profound. I wish this was taught in elementary schools and middle
schools and even high schools. And yet it's not yet common knowledge. And so I'm really hoping that I can break this down in this episode, share a lot of fun studies that have been done talking about this and give you some tips and ways that you can implement this and your own life. Because it's been something I've been wanting to do a solo episode on for months at this point. Which if you notice, we didn't do a solo episode last month. Things were so busy with the end
of the semester. We had a lot of interviews batched. I kept being like, OK, actually interview this week, solo episode next week, but we're here. I'm really excited for the sit down and like I mentioned, you're going to have more mini episodes. And with that, I'm definitely going to throw in some some new minis that are just me talking to the mic in shorter form with those little twice a week episodes. So I'm really excited for that.
And I I need to be making tik toks like guys, every single day I write, I want to do this, make Tik toks edit videos to share these things with you. And it's been so busy, but that is definitely a goal. So make sure you're following along and actually persist a podcast.
I'm going to try and share more things like this episode in social media form because it is so important and not enough people know about it. So to give you some like broad overarching context to your positive psychology is a new field within the general arena of psychology. And the way that it is defined is the scientific study of ordinary human strengths and virtues. So if we look at the field of psychology as a whole, historically we've looked at people that are kind of below
that average point. They're struggling. Their ability to function or show up in relationships or maintain their mental health has been impacted. And so a lot of resources and research and interventions have been aimed at that population. And it's a large population. We know that more than half of a will struggle with mental illnesses at some point in their life, and that's believed to be a low estimate. And the vast majority of us spend a lot of our time not actively struggling.
And so understanding how we can thrive and flourish and succeed in our lives and how people who are really successful and effective and happy, how they're living their lives is another really important part of the puzzle.
And what's really incredible and cool about this area of psychology is that it really emphasizes and celebrates the fact that despite all the challenges and difficulties and obstacles that we as individuals overcome on a daily basis and throughout our lifetimes, generally we thrive.
Generally we are doing pretty well Despite that fact and so it's a really incredible area of study and if you are looking at college or psychology as a field, this is a fun area to check out and at least be aware of. So I think the best way to start talking about optimism and explanatory styles is to talk about emotions, because a lot of people think of these two things as synonymous.
If you're optimistic and always seeing the good in things, you must be feeling really happy, or conversely, you feel really happy. So therefore you look at the world from a more positive lens. And so it's important to kind of really understand these two pieces of the puzzle and then understand how they're actually correlating, how they fit together and how we can adjust either one to in turn impact the other. So when we talk about emotions, we aren't just talking about feelings.
The operational definition that we we use for emotions is not just subjective feelings, but also attention, cognition, facial expressions, cardiovascular and hormonal changes and more unfolding over a relatively short time span. And this is from a 1991 study. And when we see emotions as that larger, more comprehensive experience, we can better understand why emotions motivate us to act in certain ways and do certain things and are correlated with certain outcomes
in our lives. So for example, we talked about positive emotions, which can be really correlated with optimism and generally entire well-being and moods. And so we see that mild positive emotions are generally associated with improved spatial and verbal memory. So when we have positive emotions, our memory skills are improved. We use more flexible thinking, we are better with problem solving, we are more rational and utilitarian with our decision making.
We are more willing to exhibit self controlled behavior. And we also see changes in our risk taking behavior. So we wouldn't necessarily think like, oh, I'm feeling happy, I'm better at problem solving, I'm more decisive, I have more self-control, my memory is better. But these things can be correlated. So when we understand how these things are related, it makes more sense why our lived experience is so different when
our mental health is struggling. As there is this really interesting theory in positive psychology. It's called the broaden and build theory and it talks about what happens when we experience positive emotions and what the outcomes in our life are. And so this was created by Barbara Frederickson. Basically, this means that when we experience positive emotions, we are motivated to take action
to make our lives better. And so this is again, like the chicken or the egg situation that comes with a lot of positive psychology. Or we can ever definitively determine causation. We can just understand correlation. And so in this instance, it's the idea that OK, when we experience positive emotions, we want to go out and get more things that make our lives
better. And then it becomes the question of if we've accumulated all of these resources, is that in turn improving our emotions and making us feel more positive? And how, how does that relationship function? And I wanted to read you one other quote that we got this semester. We had a really fun app interaction called Uvita that was part of our science and
well-being course. And so we got these little notifications on our phone that taught us that would show a little like positive psychology quotes or learnings and also different like daily interventions and practices that we can do, which was really incredible and cool. So this one was specifically about the broad and build hypothesis, but it says that when we feel good, our minds open up to a world of new possibilities.
Think of positive emotions as keys unlocking doors to creative thinking, new friendship, and even skills we didn't know we had. Positive emotions help us discover and build new skills, resources, and social connections, fostering growth and resilience. And so kind of establishing that foundation that positive emotions are really important element to building our lives worth living, right? They motivate us in different
ways. The negative emotions do, and they're that key element to getting what we want in life. And building off of this positive emotion idea is positive affect. So if we think of positive emotions as these momentary experiences, positive affect is like our general mood on a day-to-day basis and generally how we present and people can be really high affect or low affect and it is in some ways correlated with the individual
emotions that we experience. And so individuals that are high and positive affect experience frequent and intense episodes of pleasant, pleasurable moods. Generally speaking, they are cheerful, enthusiastic, energetic, confident and alert. And so when people have high positive affect, they are more
likely to help other. They more frequently contact their friends and relatives, they have a number of close relationships, they have more satisfaction in their romantic relationships, they have higher levels of social activity, they're more involved in social organizations, and they also are more likely to make new acquaintances.
So there's and that strong correlation with social ability, but we also know that our social relationships are really strong factor and what determines our overall well-being and our mood as well. So it's really everything in this is a catch 22. And if you listen to Doctor Marissa Franco's episode, which will definitely feature in a 5 minute mini because it was so incredible.
We talked about friendship and loneliness, and she said that loneliness can kind of be a self fulfilling prophecy because when we're more lonely, we feel more irritable and we actually enjoy our social interactions less. But the reason we're enjoying those last is because we're lonely in the 1st place. And so a lot of this is putting yourself initially through the motions and doing what you know is good for you.
And then you experience the ROI and your mood and your emotions and you're more motivated to do those things in the future.
And so when we have low levels of positive affect, it's correlated with a lot of things that I'm sure most of you would expect, which is things like mood disorders and mood disorders are like depression and anxiety, social anxiety disorder, social phobia, agoraphobia, which is when you are afraid to leave your median environment or home, PTSD, schizophrenia, eating disorders and substance disorder.
So this positive affect in general, mood and emotions are very much correlated with our mental health from a mental illness perspective. And what makes us even crazier, which is why I'm like, why is this not taught in preschool and elementary school and middle school and high school? Like why is this not part of our health class? Is that positive affect and health are really, really
correlated? And so there was a meta analysis that was done and they reviewed 225 well-being papers and they compared happier to less happy people and the people that were quote UN quote happier. And when they look at happy people, they're looking at their subjective well-being. They're filling out surveys about how frequently they're happy, how that shows up in their lives. But those people perceive themselves as healthier, but they were also literally healthier when looking at
objective measures. They had better coping skills, they had more energy, they engaged in healthier behaviors, and they engaged in enjoyable activities more. So it's almost like a sales funnel. It's kind of how I think of it. We have our positive emotion at the bottom of the pyramid, and then we move into positive affect and then we move into optimism, which we'll get into. And these things build upon each other. And the further you go up the pyramid, the stronger and
stronger the benefits become. Now I have another study to share with you. This is one of my favorite studies. I heard this and haven't forgotten it. It's only been a year, but it always comes to mind whenever I'm talking about psychology or mental health. And this is the nun study. And you'll probably also remember it because how often do you hear about a nun study? So basically nuns do a lot of
journaling is the TLDR on this. And when Catholic nuns in their 20s were applying to join the nunnery, I think it's what it's called, they wrote two to three page autobiographies about themselves. And they analyzed 180 applications, again by Catholic nuns in their 20s. And they looked for statements about the frequency of positive emotions. They objectively analyzed and coded, looking for the instances of those within these
autobiographies. And they found that the nuns that expressed more positive emotions, 90% were alive at the age of 85 and 54% were alive at age 94. And nuns that expressed fewer positive emotions, 34 were alive at age 85 and 11% were alive at 94. So again, the nuns that experience more positive emotions, 90% were alive at age 85 versus 34% of those that didn't, And 54% were alive at age 94 compared to 11% for those that didn't experience positive emotions. Wild. I love this study.
It's crazy. And I'll give you some fun anecdotes on longevity because there's so many studies on this. But like to truly understand how powerful and impactful this is, I feel like I just have to throw the data at you because it's wild. But greater levels of positive affect were associated with longevity in studies in 2008, 2011, 2005, a two year study of 65 to 99 year old Mexican Americans found that those with greater positive affect were
half as likely to die. There's a lot of studies out there that support this relationship, but basically the idea is that positive affect and longevity have a strong relationship just like positive affect and health. And so if we unpack this briefly, this positive affect and health correlation, we find that positive affect potentially changes how people actually perceive their health in their bodies. So people with high positive affect report fewer and less severe symptoms.
And positive affect also is associated with healthier behaviors. Not only are you impacting how you're perceiving these things, but you're also more likely to engage in behaviors that improve your general health. So a bunch of research has been done that showed that was true for better sleep habits, increased exercise, and improved coping skills. So we're working through our
pyramid here. We have positive emotions, which we know motivate us to act in certain ways and do certain things, and is really related with things like social relationships. We have positive affect, which is our general mood, and this really impacts our health and longevity and builds upon these momentary moods. And then we move into optimism, which we define scientifically as to believe that good rather than bad things will happen.
And I really like this quote that my positive psychology professor shared with us, and she's going to come on the podcast. I need to coordinate and schedule that. But it's going to be phenomenal, amazing. And you're going to love it. But the quote is by George Bernard Snow, and it is that both optimist and pessimist contribute to society. The optimist immensely. Airplane and the pessimist
invents the parachute. Now we're going to get into the science and the context and the correlations here. So there is some nature and nurture that happens with optimism. We know that optimism is relatively a stable trait. So if you are optimistic early in life, it's likely that that will continue throughout the rest of your life. We know that it's partially inherited, so how optimistic your parents and your family are has an impact on how optimistic you are.
And we know that it is somewhat malleable. So social factors definitely do impact levels of optimisms, and studies have showed that. And so now we get into these crazy correlations, which is that optimists compared to pessimists compare better with their subjective well-being, physical health, quantity and quality of relationships, self-confidence, perseverance and challenges, coping skills, transitions to college, work performance, and enduring traumatic war or disaster events.
So basically everything. Optimists tend to fare better in those experiences. And again, there are some elements that can't be controlled for, but this is one of those things that you can work into how you speak to yourself, how you look at the world, how you solve challenges, how you solve problems, and again, has an exponentially positive impact. So how do you optimist think? If you're a pessimist and you tend to view things more negatively, you're like, OK, what are they saying to
themselves? How are they approaching these things? I got you. We're going to break it down. So the very central feature of optimism is positive expectancy. So you expect positive things to happen and we have to be realist. Sometimes positive things won't always happen, but the general trend is that you have positive expectations for outcomes and optimism really comes into play and really has an impact.
When you are going through a challenge, this is when it's really relevant to your well-being and your mental health. And so we know that during difficulties, optimists tend to use problem focus, coping, realistic acceptance of their situation, humor, and positive reframing. They also have greater self-confidence and perseverance during those challenges. So this is the biggest shift, right?
Like we talked about, hey, like we can't really necessarily change what motions we're experiencing all the time affect. We can try and adjust, but when it comes down to these challenges that we're overcoming, having that optimistic outlook and lens that we're operating in the world through really makes a difference. You guys know, if you've listened to podcast before, we're really big on coping skills. Like this is really what I hone into and talk about a lot of the time.
And it was what was such a game changer for me. So I have some research for you on optimist versus pessimist and how they cope with things. Optimists tend to seek information about problems they plan and actively cope. They seek benefits and adversity and positively reframe stressful situations and also use humor. So making light of things, looking for the positive, seeing like what are the benefits in this situation, even if it's not what I wish it was.
And again, they accept the reality of the situation. So a lot of acceptance. There's not denial. We're not in a state of delusion, like, oh, everything's going to work out for things going to be positive. It's acceptance and coming to terms with what you're experiencing. Pessimists tend to distract themselves from problems cognitively avoid stressors, or overtly deny their problems. Focus on their distress and give
up trying to cope with problems. Which when I think about my internal experience, when I was really depressed and anxious and struggling and at a low, this is exactly what I was doing. I was constantly distracting. I avoided stresses as much as possible. I'm still prone to avoidance, but we do some exposure for that. And a lot of focus on the distress all the time, every day, and a lot of giving up because there was no belief that I was able to cope through these things.
And so this is what I think is cool about optimism and why I'm sharing this episode for you. Yes, some of these things we do inherit and some of these are stable over our lifetimes. But when I think about how I view the world and navigated challenges and spoke to myself when I was struggling, I really did take a pessimistic lens. And now I definitely think I spend more time in the optimistic side of the camp.
And I think it's had a really positive impact on my mental health and just how I experienced the world. And we have a quote on denial because I love these quotes. My pressure with me. I'm like looking at my notes from this course and so many of them are relevant that I'm sharing. But denial or refusing to accept the reality of the situation means trying to maintain a world view that is no longer valid. Acceptance implies restructuring our experience to come to grips with the situation.
This means not giving up. And I think this is one of the most common misconceptions and something that I really struggled with when it was like, OK, just accept that you're depressed, except that you're struggling, except the cards that you've been dealt. And it felt like accepting was giving up acceptance was like, this is how I feel and this isn't going to change. And really it's the opposite of
that fact. If we don't accept where we're at, what our starting point is, we cannot move forward. We're not able to take those next steps and adjust the situation unless we understand where our starting point is. And so I think that's a mistake that I made in my journey. If you could even call it a mistake or something that I, I wish I would have known earlier on.
And I think it's, I think he trapped that a lot of people fall into, which again is being in denial because you don't, you don't want your life to look the way it does, which means that you're not even holding onto a valid view of the world. Maybe you're like, this isn't as bad as it is. It's temporary. I haven't felt this way for that long. It could be worse. Whatever it is that you're saying to yourself.
And when we actually do accept what our starting point is, then we are able to actually take steps forward and move in the direction that we want to. And then we have more optimism and health correlations because these are truly wild.
But optimist compared to pessimist fare better when undergoing coronary bypass surgeries and bone marrow transplants, coping with cancer, AIDS or chronic pain, dealing with aging and health issues later in life and caring for others, for example, Alzheimer's or cancer patients like wild so
insane. And also when we think back to positive affect and the behaviors that people tend to engage in when they have more of a positive affect, it makes sense is be these health promoting behaviors and these more effective coping skills. So now that we kind of understand these three pieces of the puzzle, which is positive emotion, positive affect, and optimism, we can talk about how do we increase those and how do we especially increase optimism and adjust the way that we're thinking.
And so one is CBT to enhance positive thinking. The 2nd is positive visualizations. And the third is the best possible cells activity, which I'm going to share with you guys, explanatory styles, which is kind of the CBT side of things. And then we're also going to talk about best possible cells, just an activity you guys can do after this, which is a really cool positive psychology intervention.
So I'm literally going to read you guys the prompt that we got when we did this activity this semester in Doctor Seligman's class. I really love hearing what other people are learning about in their psychology classes and how it varies from school to school based on who your teacher is and the concept that you're focusing on. And if you're like, I feel like I'm in a class, I am sorry.
But I, I hope that other people out there also enjoy this perspective and like these very concrete activities and assignments and all these things. So it may be hard at any age to find what we want out of life. That said, research shows that having a positive vision of the future can serve as effective motivation towards what we desire, thus perhaps making it more likely that it will manifest. This activity asks you to imagine your future life going as well as it possibly can.
As you imagine this best version of a specific aspect of your future life, write in journal about your future self in as much detail as you can. By doing so, can it increase your well-being now? How might it impact your future? So what you do is you think about all the aspects of your life that are relevant and important. Academics, maybe it's athletics, artistic pursuits, friendships, relationships, health, family, career, any of these things.
And you take the time to think about each aspect of your life and what you want it to look like in this quote UN quote, best future version of yourself. And you get really specific like what happens in your daily routine? How do you spend time with your friends? If you're going to work out, what workout are you doing? How do you feel as you're drinking your morning coffee? What is your environment like when you go to work? How does it feel to talk to your Co workers?
Do you feel fulfilled and motivated? All of these things that would be really instrumental and relevant to that day-to-day experience. And the caveat here is to not journal in this activity about any past challenges that might prevent you from achieving that best future self, but just focus on what the potential is, what you want, what you're hoping for, and what allows this to come to fruition. And this is things like how do you talk to yourself? How do you cope with challenges
that arise? How do you communicate with others to make sure you have boundaries and your needs are met? And like I mentioned in the initial prompt, there are benefits with increasing your motivation to work towards this future self and towards this goal that you're getting really clear on. And another 2006 study showed that people who completed the best possible self intervention daily for two weeks showed an
increase in positive emotions. Participants who continued with the practice reported continued positive mood up to one month post completion. So we talked about these pieces of the puzzle, right? Like positive emotion then impacts positive mood and affect, then we get to optimism. And so taking these small steps that we know scientifically do improve mood and emotion can have a really strong impact on
that outcome. We're going to talk about explanatory styles, which is the last thing we're going to cover in this episode because I know I've thrown a lot at you, but this is one of those really concrete things that you can do on a day-to-day basis. You can start practicing immediately that has really positive impacts on your life. And that is back to a lot of research. And I'm going to give you more research, but I promise it's
interesting and helpful. So explanatory styles comes from this research about learned helplessness. And this was research that was done at Penn by Doctor Seligman. And this was done in the mid 1960s. And basically what they did is they had three different groups of dogs. They had one group of dogs that was shocked without a way to escape. The shock wasn't a very strong shock, but it was a negative experience. And they were not given a way out of that challenge or adversity.
Regardless of what they did, they experienced the shock. They had a another group where the dogs could stop the shock when they pressed the panel in the cage with their noses. So they experienced the shocks, but they had an ability to stop the shock if they did the right course of action. And then there were dogs that got no shocks and they were the control group, so they were fine. They were hanging out, nothing happened.
What they found was that the dogs that experience the shock with no way out of the situation, no matter what they did, they still experienced it regardless of if they then took action and they would be able to stop the shock if they press the button with their nose. They didn't do anything to try and get the shock to stop. They'd learned that no matter what they did, nothing was going to change and they were just going to have to sit with and endure the negative experience.
And they did the same experiment with humans. They had them in a room, they played a really loud noise, and for some they could press a button and the noise would stop. For others, they press the button 67 times, nothing happened, and others there was no sound. And the same thing occurred even when they then made the button work for the group that initially experienced the sound without any relief. They generally didn't try to
stop the sound. They accepted that this was happening to them, that this negative experience was what they just had to endure and no problem solving took place. And so the finding was that these groups of individuals, whether it was the dogs, they also did this in mice, they did it with humans, was that they became passive and gave up in the face of adversity once they had first experienced the negative events and learned that they could do nothing about them. And this is from Flourish.
If you guys are interested in positive psychology, you absolutely have to read this book. It's just such a great overview of all the research. But sharing some findings from here as we explain this, because who else is better explaining this than Doctor Seligman? And so when we look at learned helplessness, it's the idea that nothing you do alters the event you are are helpless, regardless of what actions you take to try and overcome the situation. And the inverse of this is mastery.
So it's the opposite of helplessness and it's working to overcome the situation that you're in. And so when Doctor Seligman did this research, he was like, this is really crazy. Even if the situation changed and people were able to stop the negative experiences or the dogs were able to stop the shock, they did it. And there was a really small group of people who did experience the shock and weren't able to stop it. But then they did have the ability to stop it and they
still continue to try. And conversely, there were people where even if they press the button, the shock would immediately stop. But they chose to not try it all. There's outliers and should be the optimist and the pessimists, but the general pattern was that when you learned that your actions don't have an impact on the situation, you stopped trying. And so he ended up doing a lot of additional research into this. Again, it initially started with dogs. They replicated in other
animals. They worked with humans, and they really started to solidify this idea of what happens when people are not able to change the outcome of a situation and how does that impact their ability to try and solve a problem going forward. And what exactly is this learned helplessness? And why are some people still optimistic even when they are unable to overcome these challenges no matter what they do?
And he landed on this thing called explanatory styles, which is very closely connected to optimism. And explanatory styles are a thing that both optimists and pessimists do. And the explanatory style you use is tied to that mental state. And so to wrap this up and explain this in the context of this specific study, and then I'll explain it in general to
day-to-day life. Basically the finding was that people who believe that the causes of setbacks in their lives are temporary, changeable in local, do not become hopeless. And so even when there was this really annoying noise and it wouldn't go away and nothing of they did stopped it, they thought to themselves, it's going to go away. I can do something about it. And it's just this one situation. They bounce back quickly and this is consistent across other
areas. And then pessimist, on the other hand, say things like it's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything. There's nothing I can do about it. And this also carries over into other areas of life and what we talked a lot about optimist and pessimist and different outcomes and things it's correlated with. But as they continue to study this in the lab, they found the pessimist get depressed much more readily.
They underachieve in their jobs in the classroom and on the sports field, and their relationships are rockier. So again, so many correlations with this. And one of the ways that we can change this and really make positive impact in our lives immediately is explanatory styles. So I'm going to throw some words at you that sound really academic and are not the easiest to remember. There should be a better acronym for this, but there's not a great way to explain it
otherwise. But basically, when pessimists are confronted with problems, the way that they view them is that they're permanent, pervasive, and they're personal. So say you get a bad grade on a test. A pessimist will say this always happens, I always get bad grades. So it's permanent across multiple situations, It's pervasive, it's across everything. Even if it's a math test, you say I get bad grades in every class, I never do well, and it's personal. I failed.
I failed the test, I didn't do well enough. I'm not smart. I will never achieve what I want to, and you're really internalizing this experience and telling yourself that it's consistent across all these different areas in your life. Conversely, optimists will say that things are temporary, specific, and external. And so if optimist fails a test, they'll say, I, I failed one test, I failed a math test, They will make sure that it's specific to that situation. I failed this specific test.
I didn't understand trigonometry. I didn't understand know how to do a linear regression, whatever it is, and it's external. They will say something related to these external behaviors. I only studied for six hours. I should have studied for 10. I didn't feel like I really understood the lectures. I was supposed to meet up with my study group, but I didn't go. Again. It's not I'm dumb, I don't know how to learn things. It's the specific external things didn't happen which led
to this result. And so to give you just more general summaries that we can use that are less specific to a situation, pessimists will say this will last forever, it will undermine everything and it's me, it's my fault. Optimists will say this will pass, it's just the situation
and it's not entirely my fault. Again, we take accountability for some things, but always putting all the blame on ourselves for everything, especially when there's external factors is really ineffective for our mental health. Also another caveat to add here, which is that the way that we approach challenges and the way that we approach victories is also different when we explain things.
So again, when we experience a set back, Optimus will say that things are local and external, really specific to that situation, not a reflection of you. But when we experience good things in our lives, we do want to say that those are permanent, pervasive and internal. So imagine if you got an A on the test and you absolutely aced it. You did an amazing job. You took all the steps that allowed you to get to that point. A pessimist would say, well, I
just did well on this one test. I never do well. Like it was just a fluke. They'll be like, the teacher must have graded it wrong. Like it was an easy question. Everyone else is going to take a harder test. Like it's just because the teacher wanted us to have an easy A and it's only in this class, Every other class I'm horrible optimist will be the opposite. They'll say it is permanent. I do well academically. I perform well on tests. I am good at studying.
I'm good at preparing for these things. It's pervasive, so it's across multiple situations. I know how to study for a test. I know how to do well. I can do well. I will do well, and it's internal. I studied hard for this. I performed well. I did this and taking that accountability isn't the right word, but celebrating those wins and knowing that it's reflection of you and you get to take credit for all that hard work in that outcome.
And so to give you a nice little wrap up on this and explain why this is so important to externalize these losses and internalize our wins and also be really careful about how we explain these things that happened to us. I wanted to give you some reasons for why this seems
important. And so one is that a big part of this theory is that these explanatory styles and these ways of thinking are the direct Ave. and way that people that tend to think more pessimistically key on shift to a more optimistic way in viewing the world. And they did a study with middle school children and they showed that retraining pessimistic thinking and optimistic thinking can significantly reduce the incidences of depression.
Crazy. It's correlated with test results and how much people try in the classroom and how likely they are to continue to study, and not only just how much effort they're exerting, but also the return on that, how well they actually perform. It's related to employment rates in insurance agents, performance in sports, psychological well-being in academic settings, which we know is a huge thing, mental health, especially depression, so many things.
Basically, this is a direct way that you can impact your pessimistic versus optimistic mindset. And we know that if we look at our pyramid again, positive emotions and mood and affect and optimism versus pessimism is really this foundation that so much of our mental health sits on. And I think this is another really important disclaimer that I'll add at the end of this episode, which is that thinking isn't everything. A big piece of the puzzle here is taking action towards the
results that we want. It's changing our behaviors. It's doing the routines and habits that are beneficial and building the social relationships and practicing vulnerability and asking for help and all these things that fit into this picture. But I don't think that you're able to have the mental health outcomes that you want if you're still talking to yourself really negatively.
And if you still have this really pessimistic view of the world, it's like good mental health and well-being and extreme negativity. It's really challenging for those two things to go hand in hand. And so establishing this piece of the puzzle early on can help this journey feel less challenging and less overwhelming and less like you're fighting against yourself every step of the way while also building this really important skill set that is so essential to your long term outcome.
So to give you guys like a little recap and summary of all the crazy amount of information that I just threw at you. Positive emotions are these momentary experiences that have a really big impact on our well-being. When we experience positive emotions, we're motivated to build a better life for ourselves.
We can't necessarily force positive emotions on ourselves, but it is an important piece of the puzzle and we know it's correlated with behaviors and our health and our longevity and all of these important pieces of the puzzle. A more accurate picture of our day-to-day is our positive affect, which is generally our like disposition and how we approach the world, how happy we are versus how sad we are. We more positive or negative with kind of our day-to-day
experiences. And affect is really strongly correlated with our physical health, our problem solving, our mental health, our relationships. All of these things are really closely intertwined with affect, and it's a really key piece of the puzzle that connects how we think about our lives and how we feel about our lives. Our affect is kind of like that in between piece. And then the thinking piece is optimism and pessimism.
It's how we view the world. Are we looking through it with a lens of positive expectations or are we expecting negative things to happen? And so many outcomes hinge on the way we think about things from a physical health perspective, from a mental health perspective, there is so much research that supports that. Optimism is a really key piece of the puzzle here. And it's one of those things that is somewhat essential in in those positive mental health outcomes that a lot of us want.
So how can we do that? We can view our challenges as temporary. It's just this moment. It's just this thing, it's local, it's this situation. It's not my whole life and it's external. There were a lot of factors that led to this outcome. It's not just you and it's not only a reflection of you. And when we have positive things happen in our life, we do the opposite. We make sure to say that this is a permanent thing. This is something that generally happens in my life. It's pervasive.
It happens in lots of situations. I'm capable of experiencing this and feeling this way and absolutely this will happen again. And it's internal. You get to celebrate your wins. You get credit for this. It is a result of you and your hard work and all the amazing things about you and this way of
thinking. Write it on a post it note, get good at it. I promise it'll become more second nature that when you have a test or you have an interaction or you get good news or you get bad news, you start to reframe the way you think. And rather than being like, I'm so dumb, I shouldn't have done this. I should have known better. I didn't have all the information. I could have studied harder. I generally do better on these. This is a specific instance
where that didn't happen. The questions on this test were really hard. I wasn't a good fit for this opportunity, but it's not a reflection of me as a person or as an applicant or whatever it is. And again, I do think this is one of those things that's kind of essential to mental health, even if it's not the only thing that will get you to the place that you want to be. It's a really important factor. So lots of rambling, lots of information. I hope this was helpful.
If you made it this hard to the episode, send me Adm, let me know what you thought. Share with a friend or family member, leave a review for the podcast is seriously so helpful. And I'd for check every day. I'm like, did anyone leave for the new review? Any new messages from you guys? Because I absolutely love it and it's a positive experience that will absolutely explain is permanent, pervasive and internal. I work so hard on this podcast and people like me in the podcast.
People generally enjoy it and have a good time listening and I will continue to make content that people enjoy. So with all those affirmations, I hope you guys enjoyed this. Let me know what else you want to hear about in future episodes. And if you like this more psychology style recap of things I've learned at Penn type of episode or if you guys were like, this was too much, we never want this again. Also let me know.
Thank you for listening and I will talk to you guys on Monday for our Monday minis.