Power of Optimism

How important is it to live in a positive vibration? Well, the LA Times had a front page story in January 2000 on the power of optimism. The article shared the following statements based on research studies:

1. Optimists do better than pessimists in work, school, and sports.

2. Optimists suffer less depression, achieve more goals, respond better to stress, and wage more effective battles against disease.

3. Optimistic people live 2 years longer on average than pessimistic people.

4. Pessimistic people appear more prone to accidents and violence.

5. Optimists tend to face problems head on while pessimists tend to live in a greater state of denial.

The bottom line conclusion of the article was that, however researchers measure it, optimism is linked to happiness, perseverance, achievement, and health.

Norman Cousins is famous for recovering from three life-threatening illnesses by playing a highly active role in his cures. He calls this attitude of positive thinking "hardiness" and it can be summarized:

(In 1983 Norman Cousins wrote a best-selling book "The Healing Heart" in which he movingly described how he used laughter, among other tools, to overcome a life-threatening illness that doctors believed was irreversible. He used the same processes later to help him recover from an acute heart attack. Although the media "made it appear that I laughed my way out of a serious illness," he wrote, careful readers of his book knew that laughter was just a metaphor. "Hope, faith, love, will to live, cheerfulness, humor, creativity, playfulness and confidence create great expectations - all these, he believed, had therapeutic value.")

Cousins is famous for writing that "Laughter is the best medicine." Nothing could be truer for the adrenal glands. When you laugh, stress decreases and all the mechanisms in your body relax. When the body is relatively free of stress, even during those brief moments of levity, the adrenals are much freer to recover and rebuild.

The stress induced hormone cortisol (a catabolic hormone) is significantly reduced when we feel very happy and laugh. Cortisol is released when we are in the catabolic or "burning energy" state and it has an immune-suppressing effect. Research revealed that laughter results in an increase of S-IgA (salivary immunoglobulin A), which helps fight infection. It also shows that there is an increase in our physiological and immune system's natural killer cells that seek out and destroy abnormal cells and that these increases persist for a period of time after a hardy laugh.

The level of plasma cytokine gamma interferon, another anabolic substance that strengthens our immune system, doubles when we laugh long and hard, and the increase lasts well into the next day. If a single pill were discovered that could accomplish all these miraculous effects, it would be headline news.

A famous report (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968) describes a case in which researchers told teachers that a testing program had identified some students as having high potential and others as have low potential. In fact the students had been picked randomly and assigned to one of the two groups. The results after a year in school: the so-called high-potential group showed significant gains in achievement and ability as measured by standardized tests, while the so-called normal group showed no significant gains.

This initial report has been followed by decades of research: according to today's understanding, we can influence our level of performance and that of others by our expectations. Positive expectation (optimism) is one of the four key ingredients of hardiness (emotional resilience).

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