‘Lighten up!’
‘Think positive!’
… and ‘it could always be worse’

Just some of the ‘positive encouragement’ thrown at negative people. Thousands of books have been written about ‘positive thinking’, and if we are to believe ‘the secret’, you are a few positive thoughts away from wealth, success and delirious happiness.

Is it really that simple?

Most negative people would say it is not. After all: thinking you are going to wake up rich tomorrow is not very realistic. Even if you have a lottery ticket lying on your night stand, the changes of actually waking up with a winning lottery ticket are pretty slim. Thus, a large number of people who are in some shape or form depressed (or just not very positive in general) argue that positive thinking strategies set you up for failure. If you think positively, and things do not ’start to happen’, then essentially you have fooled yourself and may feel even more depressed than you felt before.

Clearly this is not the intention of those positive thinking books and programs. However, the positive thinkings may argue that people who go into it with such a level of skeptisism are actually not really performing the techniques right to get a result.

Looking at it from a more objective perspective:
A recent study in Nature has shown that the same brain regions are involved in optimism as in depression. So perhaps depression is caused by our natural optimism levels being disturbed. After all; although thinking positively does not necessarily mean things will happen automatically, a healthy dose of optimism does make people more productive and not necessarily unrealistic.

The brain regions that light up when subjects are asked to think about positive things are the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala. It’s not clear what goes wrong in these regions in depressed people, but they do seem to play a clear role in someone’s inability to look at the world from a more positive perspective.

Here is an optimism scale, just as a guide to determine whether you rank on the pessimistic, or optimistic range.

Consider a possible future event, such as receiving a bonus at work, or finding a new job. A realistic assumption would be somewhere in the neutral range, that at least the possibility of the event happening is as likely as the possibility that it does not happen.

Ask yourself: how likely do you think it is that you may get a bonus this year, be promoted, make new friendships, go on a nice vacation or imagine a realistic but positive goal that could fit your life.

Using this rough guide, you may see whether you are realistic, negative or positive:

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