Optimism: A Key to Happiness

For my participant observer blog, I chose to change one trait about myself for a day. I decided to be overly optimistic and not complain at all. This past week has been a rough one for me. Last Wednesday night at volleyball practice, I broke my pinky finger. This may seem like a weeny injury (and yes it kind of is) but my pinky is completely at a 90° angle. It’s a spiral fracture, so it needs surgery to fix and I’m out for 6-8 weeks. This is the rest of my senior volleyball season. I was devastated and for the first couple days, I woke up every morning feeling depressed all over again. It was hard not to complain each day. Normally, I feel like I’m a pretty happy person and may complain occasionally, but overall I’m pretty positive. For this blog, I decided to challenge myself to be happy and cheerful despite the new circumstances.

For the past week it seems like anytime anyone sees me they get this shocked look on their face and immediately ask what happened and start apologizing. Especially other athletes who can really sympathize that my volleyball career is over. It was hard not to complain about having surgery, not being able to do my hair with one hand, how difficult it is to take a shower, more difficult to write/type, etc. Instead of complaining, on my “Positive Polly” day I talked about how supportive my team has been, how my family will be there for the surgery, and how I’ll come out of this stronger than before. At first, it was extremely difficult to remain positive, but throughout the day, it became easier and the responses came almost naturally.

People responded so positively to me after I had a positive outlook on everything! They were even more encouraging than before (if that is at all possible). It put me in such a better mood and then I really started to feel better about the entire situation. It was crazy how just one day of focusing on being optimistic really changed my outlook and made me so much happier. According to Myers and Diener (1997), optimism is one of the key characteristics of happy people, along with high self-esteem, a feeling of control over one’s life, and extroversion. Therefore, forcing myself to be more optimistic for a day made me feel better and led me to accept the situation. Although some people are more optimistic than others, optimism can be increased or decreased in specific situations (Armor & Taylor, 1998). Optimism can be flexible in some cases and I was able to increase my optimism, which led to a corresponding increase in happiness.

Taylor’s self-enhancement position states that we want a positive self-esteem because it feels good and its adaptive (Taylor, 1989). One area of evidence of this theory is self-serving beliefs, which is when we reinforce good outcomes with good characteristics about ourselves and we blame bad outcomes on situational factors (Shepperd, 1993). For me, this meant I blamed my injury and subsequent end of season on my injury (situational) instead of on personal factors (less talented, weak). In addition, Seligman (1991) states that optimists blame failure on external and temporary factors. I was able to avoid blows to my self-esteem because I could attribute my failure to a temporary injury that wasn’t my fault. Another way we protect our self-esteem is with downward social comparisons, which are comparisons with people who are worse off than you (Wills, 1981). I have done this so many times in the past week it is slightly ridiculous. Before I even knew for sure my finger was broken at the ER, I was waiting with the SU athletic trainer and I asked her what the worst injury she’d ever seen was. I was subconsciously making myself feel better by knowing that she’d seen worse injuries than mine. After it was confirmed my finger was freakishly broken and needed surgery, I kept thinking at least I don’t have a torn labrum or a torn ACL. My sophomore year, one of the seniors tore her labrum in the last couple weeks of season and couldn’t play, so surely my situation could be worse right? Throughout my entire day of optimism, I kept saying, “Its just a pinky finger, it could be worse!” We want self-enhancement when the situation is important and when our self-esteem feels threatened (Taylor, 1989). I can tell you my self-esteem definitely felt threatened this entire week, so some positive self-enhancement is definitely what I needed! My day of optimism gave me some boosts to my self-esteem and has helped me accept the situation I’ve been thrown into.

From now on, I want to continue to try to be optimistic every day and take a positive spin on everything. Thompson (1999) said that one possible reason for eternal optimism in some people is the feeling of control and the overestimation of the influence we have on personal outcomes that are not within our power to control. In other words, people who are optimistic can foresee positive outcomes in their lives even when the circumstances are out of their hands (Thompson, 1999). If I can continue to be optimistic, I will be able to envision good things happening and I’ll feel as if I have more control over my life. It’s definitely worth a try! Especially during this rough time of my life, optimism is key to my happiness!

References:

Armor, D. A., & Taylor, S. E. (1998). Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectancies and self-regulation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 309-379.

Myers, D. G., & Diener, E. (1997). The Science of Happiness. The Futurist, 1-7.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1991). Learned optimism. New York: Knopf.

Shepperd, J. A. 1993. Student derogation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test: Biases in perceptions and presentations of college board scores. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 14, 455-473.

Taylor, S. E. 1989. Positive Illusions: Creative self-deceptions and the healthy mind. New York: Basic Books.

Thompson, S. C. 1999. Illusions of control: How we overestimate our personal influence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 187-190.

Wills, T. A. 1981. Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 245-271.

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