2024 is an empty canvas that we can start writing on. Our canvas should reflect how we want the year to be like. One of the things that we must include on our canvas is optimism.
What is optimism?
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), optimism is an attitude that is marked by hope. An optimistic person believes that good things will come to pass and that things can improve.
It’s generally beneficial to you and can be applied to how you interpret the world or how you perceive the future.
Types of Optimism
There are three main types of optimism you’ll encounter day to day:
Dispositional Optimism
Dispositional optimism is a generalized expectation about your future.
When people with high dispositional optimism think about the future, they recognize they may face challenges, but ultimately believe they’ll figure things out.
Unlike happiness and other emotions that ebb and flow throughout the day, dispositional optimism is essentially a personality trait and — unless you intentionally work at it — is mostly stable over time. That means we all have a set point.
Explanatory Optimism
This type of optimism, as the name implies, is concerned with how you explain why certain things happen to you.
If you have a high level of explanatory optimism, you will take good things that happen to you personally and be confident that they will continue to happen. On the other hand, you believe that bad things that happen to you aren’t always your fault and will not inevitably happen again.
Someone with high explanatory optimism, for example, who gets into college will attribute their good fortune to hard work and believe it bodes well for future career success. Someone with low explanatory optimism will claim that their acceptance was simply a lucky coincidence.
Explanatory optimism differs from dispositional optimism in that it is a thinking pattern rather than a personality trait. – in other words, it’s a habit that can change through deliberate practice. And those with higher dispositional optimism are more likely to engage in explanatory optimism.
Unrealistic Optimism
At times, feeling hopeful about the future is part of a thought pattern that isn’t entirely logical — this is known as unrealistic optimism. Also called optimistic bias, unrealistic optimism refers to the way that we tend to expect good things to happen to us more often and bad things to happen less often than they do to others.
What causes someone to be optimistic or not?
Just like most other psychological characteristics, nature (genetics and biology) and nurture (your surroundings) both contribute to dispositional optimism.
Experts aren’t exactly sure how big of a role genetics play in optimism.
One study of teenage Dutch twins, published in February 2015 in the journal European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that genetics accounted for 38 percent of optimistic tendencies.
The data show that identical twins (who usually share 100 percent of their genetics) have more similar results on surveys measuring optimism compared with fraternal twins and non-twin siblings (who share only about 50 percent of their genetics).
Because all siblings have overlap in their surroundings at home, comparing these groups helps researchers understand just how much of a role genes play when it comes to optimism.
Another earlier twin study, published in Structural Equation Modeling: An Interdisciplinary Journal, pegged the genetic contribution at 20 percent. Other estimates tend to fall in between.
These findings suggest that the genes we inherit from our biological parents at birth do bear on how optimistic we are, but don’t explain it 100 percent. They also suggest that optimism is less heritable than other personality traits like neuroticism or extroversion, which are about 50 percent heritable.
The rest of what influences optimism — aside from this genetic component — has to do with your life circumstances and what you do on a daily basis. That means there are things you can do to become more optimistic.- This is a muscle that can be developed.
Other things that can influence how optimistic you are can include, according to a research review published in 2018 in American Psychologist:
- Childhood experiences
- Financial situation
- Education level
- Relationships with other people
What Optimism Feels Like and How It Potentially Affects Your Health
Optimistic people may have better mental health. Even in tough circumstances, optimism seems to support emotional wellness. One study of women with breast cancer, published in October 2022 in BMC Psychiatry, found that those who were more optimistic also reported fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Optimistic people may have improved cardiovascular health. Optimism appears to be particularly good for your heart. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 15 studies, published in September 2019 in JAMA Network Open, found that optimistic people had a reduced risk of all kinds of cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.
Optimistic people may have better respiratory health. One study of nearly 2,000 current and former smokers found that those with higher optimism also had better lung function.
Optimistic people may live longer. One huge study — nearly 160,000 racially diverse women participated — found that optimism is linked to a longer lifespan than pessimism. The researchers even found that optimistic people were more likely to have lived to age 90 or beyond.
