Is the glass half full or half empty?
How you answer that question is supposed to be the predictor of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Do you have a sunny view of the future? Or do you constantly imagine and plan for catastrophes?
I promised both of my granddaughters that if they got good grades, I’d take them anywhere they wanted to go. One of them wants to go to Egypt. Cool, right? I looked into it, found a tour that looks perfect, presented it to my daughter who said, “It sounds dangerous. Maybe take her to California.” Guess who’s the Tigger and who’s the Eeyore.
Now researchers have come up with a new way to tell if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. They’ve found that people with an upbeat outlook have similar patterns of brain activity when they think about the future.
“Optimists seem to use a shared neural framework for organizing thoughts about the future, which likely reflects a similar style of mental processing rather than identical ideas,” says Kuniaki Yanagisawa, an author of the research from Japan’s Kobe University.
He went on to say that what the study found was that “the foundation of [optimists’] social success might be this shared reality. It’s not just about having a positive attitude; it’s that their brains are literally on the same wavelength, which may allow for a deeper, more intuitive kind of connection.”
You’ve heard the line from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, right? It seems that this is true for more than just families. Based on the brain scans, optimistic people think similarly. Pessimists each imagine something different going wrong. They imagine different scenarios and different degrees of misery.
What’s important to note is that optimism isn’t a form of reality distortion or irrationality because what the optimist sees is how a future event will impact us. It doesn’t ignore the presence of challenges, instead it motivates the individual to pursue goals.
If you tend to see calamity looming, try picturing a positive outcome in detail. See it as feasible and desirable. That changes the situation into something to value and work for, ultimately making it something you’re more likely to achieve.