Optimism: Friend or Foe?

[caption id="attachment_3328" align="alignleft" width="390" caption="The Power of Being Optimistic"][/caption]

Is it better to be optimistic or realistic? When faced with different situations, most people tend to face a fork in the road: they can be real and honest about the situation or positive and hopeful.  Aline Tugend of The New york Times discusses more about the optimistic world Americans live in today in her article Lean Toward The Sunny Side, But Don't Overdo It.

I HAVE trouble with optimism. I would like to be a more optimistic person, and sometimes I can be. But there’s a long tradition of pessimism in my family; our attitude is that looking on the bright side, or expecting the best, is naïve at best and folly at worst.

But society seems to value optimism. Who would you rather hang out with — Winnie-the-Pooh (“Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon.”) or Eeyore (“Good afternoon, if it is a good afternoon, which I doubt.”)?

We’re living in a time, however, that makes it difficult to cling to our Pooh side. A Thomson Reuters-University of Michigan survey found that Americans’ expectations about the economy were the lowest in three decades and that only 17 percent of those surveyed expected their finances to improve.

But putting aside the reality of the economy, is it good to see through rose-tinted glasses? As economists, neuroscientists and psychologists look at what we mean by optimism and how it affects everything from our jobs and our investments to our marriages, they are finding that there is such a thing as too much.

First, many of us may have the wrong idea about optimism. It isn’t solely — or largely — about repeating “boosterish phrases to ourselves like, ‘Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better,’ ” Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in his book “The Optimistic Child” (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). Rather, “the basis of optimism does not lie in positive phrases or images of victory but in the way you think about causes.”

Read more at The New York Times