Optimists Do It Longer: How a Positive Outlook Will Boost Your Longevity | Michael Scheier

So the idea was that this coping—and the differences between optimists and pessimists is how they cope with this stress—actually helped us explain why they were less distressed across time.

A number of studies have looked at coping differences in optimists and pessimists, and there really are a number of strategies that they use; they’re really very different. Optimists tend to seek out information about what’s happening. They actively cope and plan for trying to make their plight better. They try to reframe in positive ways. They seek benefits from what’s happened to them. They use humor and they accept.

And, in general, these things are more engagement coping strategies. They’re actively dealing with the stress that’s confronting them, trying to reframe it, trying to move on with their lives. Pessimists, on the other hand, suppress their thoughts about what’s happening to them. They give up. They use self-distraction. They avoid thinking about the problem, and they use over-denial. “This is not really happening to me.” They just don’t believe that it’s reality.

Collectively, you might think of these as being disengagement coping techniques, and these differences have been found repeatedly in different studies over time. There’s really dozens and dozens and dozens of studies showing these differences between coping. So optimists do cope differently than pessimists, and the difference seems to be in optimists using engagement coping techniques, being life-focused, versus tendencies toward disengagement, pulling back, and not accepting the reality of the situation.

Okay, that was psychological wellbeing. What about physical wellbeing? Physical health. Does optimism make a difference there? Are optimists healthier than pessimists? Again, there’s been a variety of research done addressing this issue. People have looked at re-hospitalization, at the different kinds of surgery, they looked at health of newborns in terms of gestation period, birth weights.

There’s been a lot of studies looking at disease incidence, which means you get a healthy group of people at time one, and you study them across time, and you see who shows new cases of that disease, whatever it might be, down the road. And they looked at heart failure; people looked at incidence of stroke and other kinds of physical disabilities. There are also studies looking at survival and mortality, trying to demonstrate that if you get healthy people at the beginning of a study, track them across 8, 9, 10, 11 years and look and see who dies.

Does optimism predict who lives and who dies down the road? Well, it turns out that there are, in fact, very clear links, I think, between optimism and physical health. People who are optimistic are healthier, and they just achieve better outcomes. So that does seem to be this link again, between optimism and physical wellbeing, even involving things like mortality and survival across time.

Why does this happen? There really seems to be at least two possibilities. One possibility has to do with differences in health-promoting and health-damaging behavior. The other possibility is that there may be different pathophysiological reactions to optimists’ and pessimists’ distress that might be linked to disease, and it might be a biological response that causes them to obtain better health outcomes that we see.

So let’s consider health behaviors first. Optimists tend to engage proactively with things, and that proactive engagement with coping may cause them to promote health behaviors on their part. Adopting more healthy behaviors leads to better health. The other side of the coin—pessimists—they tend to engage in these maladaptive coping strategies, these disengagement strategies.

“Sure, I could lead a better lifestyle and make my behaviors more healthy to me. But why should I do that? I’m going to have a bad outcome anyway.” And because they engage in these health-damaging behaviors, their health suffers as a consequence. So there’s really evidence for both of these possibilities. Compared to pessimist...