CrushPessimism.com

An Inspiring Story Of Determination

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:20:00 +0000

IN AN EARLIER POST, Rocky Balboa and Determination, I mentioned the persistence Sylvester Stallone showed in becoming an actor. Yesterday, I was using StumbleUpon, just channel surfing the Internet for fun, and I came across an audio clip of Tony Robbins, who knows Sylvester Stallone, telling the story of how Stallone got into the acting business. It's a great story well told. Check it out:

Tony Robbins Tells Rocky Story

It's about nine minutes long. Stories like this are inspiring, but if that's all they are, they aren't worth a lot. But when an inspiring story is instructive, that can be worth a lot indeed. Luckily, Stallone teaches us in the Rocky movies, and especially the last one, Rocky Balboa, what kind of thoughts gave him the persistence he needed to make it. And in the post I mentioned above, I describe the way you can think those kinds of thoughts and completely believe them, not by forcing yourself to believe something you doubt, but by searching your disheartening thoughts for the hidden mistakes. Once you find them and recognize they are false, you are free from their demoralizing effects. Your determination and motivation and persistence can then remain strong, and this makes you more likely to achieve your important goals.

So listen to Tony tell the story, and then do the work necessary to develop the kind of persistence Stallone has demonstrated in his career.

Black Or White

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:02:00 +0000

DAVID BURNS IS ONE of my favorite cognitive-therapy authors. He wrote, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. I love his list of ten cognitive distortions. Very helpful. One of the cognitive distortions is All-or-Nothing Thinking. Burns argues that in the real world, there are very few absolutes. The world is not made up of black and white. It consists of innumerable shades of gray. "If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories," says Burns, "you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will never measure up to your exaggerated expectations."

All or nothing. Black or white. Really, it is a form of overgeneralization.

There are consequences to the accuracy of your thinking. Alistair Ostell, a researcher in England, tested school principles for how black or white their thinking was. Here's what he found: People who frequently thought in black and white terms had more emotional problems and more health problems.

People who thought in more shades of gray were less stressed by their jobs, enjoyed better health, and got more enjoyment from their work.

You can learn to catch yourself making this thought mistake (All or Nothing Thinking), and when you do, you will avoid some negative emotion you don't need.

I once did a speech in Toastmasters (a club that helps you learn to speak in public) on the day before Saint Patrick's Day. It was my tenth speech in their program, called the Inspirational Speech. I wrote and memorized a speech about the story of Saint Patrick, and then rehearsed it thirty-seven times start to finish flawlessly. I actually counted because I wanted to see how many times it would take before I knew the talk by heart.

A key element of my speech was the mystery: I didn't reveal who I was talking about (Saint Patrick) until near the end.

But the Toastmaster that day (the Master of Ceremonies), in her opening remarks, told the brief story of Saint Patrick — essentially summarizing my talk before I gave it. That really threw me off. When I got up to speak, I stumbled and then said, "The Toastmaster gave away my punch line." Then I felt embarrassed that I'd criticized her and then I was really distracted and couldn't think of the next line of my speech. It was a lousy speech and I'm sure it was rather uncomfortable for the audience to endure.

In the Toastmasters Clubs, after your speech, someone comes up to evaluate your speech. My evaluator tore me apart.

For someone who had been anxious about speaking, this hit me pretty hard. When I was feeling embarrassed and ashamed of myself and really down about the whole thing, I decided to check my thoughts for unrealistic thinking, and found I had two thoughts that qualified as irrational, and they were the main source of my bad feelings: "I'm not cut out for speaking," and "I'm not an inspirational speaker." Both of these are the mistake of all-or-nothing thinking.

After I uncovered those, I realized I had simply made a preparation mistake: I memorized my speech. Usually in speaking, memorizing the whole speech is a bad idea. I also realized that if I ever had an element of mystery in a speech again, I would check with the master of ceremonies to make sure nobody else was going to give away my punch line, or I would just do without the mystery element.

In other words, after realizing that my fretting and negative emotions were being generated by unreasonable thoughts (thoughts containing cognitive distortions), I stopped fretting and actually solved the problem. I decided what to do differently in the future that would prevent such an embarrassing incident from happening again.

I became much less bothered by my "failed" speech after uncovering the two all-or-nothing assumptions I had made. My thinking became more rational and more effective because I knew what to look for. And now you do too.

See a list of 22 thought mistakes to look for in your negative thoughts and learn how to use them.

Argue On Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:59:00 +0000

WHEN YOU FEEL ANXIOUS or demoralized, get two pens of different color, say red and black. In red write a thought you have about the situation. For example, "I'll never feel safe again." Now in black, argue with that statement. Consider yourself personally affronted by the statement, as if your worst enemy had said it to you with a sneer. Once the statement is outside your head, it becomes more objective and less subjective, so it becomes easier to argue with than when it is inside your head, part of you, something you think.

Stare at your written statement (in this case, "I'll never feel safe again"). Try to find something wrong with it. What can you say to that statement? How could you argue with it? Why is it a stupid thing to think? What is mistaken about it?

You might write, "I don't really know that. I'm just guessing."

That's pretty good. And that's true, isn't it? Nobody knows if you'll ever feel safe again. Do you see how that is different than trying to look on the bright side or repeating to yourself (without conviction) "I am safe I am safe I am safe?" So that's your first doubt: Your thought might not be true. Good job.

But don't stop there. Come up with as many arguments as you can against each statement. You might write, "Maybe there are actions I could take that might help me feel safer. A feeling of safety isn't all-or-nothing anyway." And so on. Here is a complete list of 22 thought-mistakes to look for in your negative thoughts.

The method is simple: Write something you think about the situation (something negative you truly believe) and then argue it into the ground. This is a very effective way to change the way you think about something. It's kind of fun too, once you get going. And you can feel the negative emotion dissipate as you destroy the validity of the pessimistic assumptions that have been lurking in the back of your mind. You will feel better rather quickly.

Let me remind you that your arguments must be real. You're not just playing the "devil's advocate" here. Really look at the statement and find what is really wrong with it. This is not glossing things over with nice thoughts. Negative, pessimistic, self-defeating thoughts are almost always wrong. They are incorrect. They are exaggerations, overstatements, conclusions you have jumped to, rumors you have heard, or merely bad habits of thinking you picked up while growing up.

Your goal with this exercise is to look at your own written statements long enough to discover what's really wrong with them. As Carl Sagan said, "Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."

The moment you recognize one of your negative thoughts is nonsense, it has an immediate impact on your feelings. If you think, "I'm helpless to do anything about it," and you really look at that assumption and find you have very little evidence to justify such a sweeping allegation and plenty of evidence against it, your anxiety lifts. As soon as you recognize you have been mistaken, your demoralization vanishes, literally within minutes. Your feelings are influenced by your thoughts, but only the thoughts you truly believe. That's why positive thinking sometimes doesn't work. But it's also why as soon as you find something wrong with a pessimistic thought, the moment you stop believing it, your feelings change.

ANOTHER WAY TO APPLY this method is to write out everything you think about what's bothering you. And then go back and argue with each sentence one at a time. This is a good variation to use on a computer. Type out every negative thought you have about the situation. And then go back and separate out a sentence and rip it to shreds in a different font. Then take the next sentence and tear it to pieces. And so on. Print it out and carry it around in your pocket for a few weeks. Re-read it a couple of times a day.

In his book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin Seligman has a very good list of what to look for in your arguments when you're arguing against a negative thought. Read his list here.

A good list to memorize ahead of time is the 22 Virus Definitions. This is a complete list of thought-mistakes humans are prone to make.

Test your level of poor thinking and where you can specifically work on improving it. Go to Martin Seligman's site take some of the questionnaires. They're free and they are some of the best online assessment questionnaires you can get. Seligman's site can be found by clicking here.

Make the process of changing your thoughts easier by calming your body first. This is similar to the increased effectiveness of cognitive therapy when it is combined with antidepressants. With the body in a better state, thought habits are easier to change.

Your brain has a naturally-occuring negative bias and when combined with an imperfect brain that makes mistakes, it is a combination terrorists can exploit. Take actions to shore up this weakness, first in yourself and then in those around you.

Paracelsus

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:15:00 +0000

HAVE YOU EVER heard of Paracelsus? He did a very good thing for you and me. In the year 1500 AD, the doctors in Europe studied the work of a man named Galen. His works had been respected for 1300 years. That's an incredibly long time. You talk about well established! What he wrote became like sacred doctrine. If Galen wrote it, it was so, and that's all there was to say about it. Now a lot of the things he wrote were accurate. But a lot of it was garbage. For example, supposedly inside each person were what were called the Four Cardinal Humors. Humor comes from the Latin umor (meaning fluid or moisture).

The four Humors were Phlegm, Choler, Blood, and Melancholy. In order to be in good health, so the theory went, a person had to have a proper balance between these humors. The whole thing sounds pretty humorous, don't you think? But if you didn't have enough of one of these humors, or if you had too much of one, then you were sick. That's what disease was. So to make you well, the doctor's job was to restore the balance.

Galen also believed that each person had a certain balance that was just right for that particular individual. Therefore, each illness in each person was unique.

So the doctor, with his special knowledge, might find you had, say, too much of one of your humors, like blood for example. And he would treat you by making you bleed for awhile. One of their techniques was to attach leaches to your body to suck out some of your blood. And then you would be well. Now this sounds like a good Monty Python gag, but here were well-respected authorities, diligently studying for years to get their "Doctor of Physic" degree so they could go out and make people sweat and purge and bleed and vomit, and thereby supposedly make them healthy. A lot of the time, as you can probably imagine, the treatment killed the patient. But after 1300 years, this was a very well-established status quo.

Then along comes a rebel by the name of Paracelsus, who came up with the scandalous idea that something from outside your body, like smoke or germs, could make you sick. What a radical! He was viciously attacked by the medical profession so he never stayed in one place very long, and he lived his life in poverty.

But he never gave up. He felt pretty sure he was right, and he knew if he was right, it would have an enormous impact on the health of everyone.

Since he had no Doctor of Physic degree, he was never allowed to publish his ideas — including his studies of people who worked in mines who all seemed to die of the same thing (now called Miner's Disease) which seriously put in question one of Galen's "sacred" ideas that all diseases were unique.

It wasn't until a couple of decades after Paracelsus died that his work became known and published. He turned out to have been right, and although he never knew what he did, he opened up the way for a whole new approach toward disease, and doctors dramatically increased their effectiveness because of that persistent rebel.

Now some people might consider themselves a failure if they lived a life like Paracelsus — in poverty and scorned and all. But there are more important things in life than just winning or getting everyone's admiration, or collecting and spending a lot of money. Nothing wrong with these things. Not at all. But there's at least one thing that's more important: Being true to your own aspiration.

If it stirs you, if a vision captivates you, if the ideas for an invention haunt you and won't leave you alone, if you have a goal that may even seem petty to others, but it's something you feel is good and right, and you want to try...then do it, no matter how long it takes or who thinks you're a fool. Never give up on something that matters to you.

This is an excerpt from a longer article called Never Give Up.

Find out how you can become as determined and persistent as Paracelsus: Antivirus for Your Mind.

Are You Thinking, "I'm Not a Pessimist?"

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:23:00 +0000

YOU ARE PROBABLY RIGHT. But optimism and pessimism are on a sliding scale. You may be more on the optimist side, but it is very likely you have some pessimism still lurking in your mind. And if you don't right now, you may tomorrow, because the world, your own brain, the media, and communication in general all function as if they had a negative bias, and if you don't know how to protect yourself, that negativity will worm its way into your mind, ruining a little motivation here, spoiling a little good feeling there, and establishing an outpost of pessimism in your mind — an outpost that will grow if you don't crush it.

Pessimism is insidious. It sneaks into your mind against your will, bringing you down and making you feel bad unnecessarily. You have the tools here to protect yourself and raise your mood.

Probably the best way to use this site would be to wait until you feel down. When you feel discouraged or disheartened, browse around this site. The first, best place to go is Undemoralize Yourself. Do the writing exercise, and if you still feel disheartened the next day, do it again. And every day until you feel better.

If you have a friend and you want to share this site with her or him, but you feel sure s/he would take offense because s/he might think, "I'm not a pessimist," send this post first. Many people don't know enough about optimism and pessimism to know that it is not a matter of being one or the other. Almost everybody is somewhere between those two extremes, which also means almost everybody can move themselves a little higher, and doing so will improve their health, their mood, their productivity, and and their motivation.

Another good post for sharing is The Purpose Of Crushpessimism.com. It gives a good overview of the purpose and reason for this work.

Overgeneralization and Unnecessary Negative Emotions

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:12:00 +0000

RIGHT NOW YOU SPEND a certain percentage of your life feeling negative emotions — nervous, frustrated, sad, angry, worried, whatever. I don't know what the percentage is. One percent of your waking hours? Five percent? Ten percent? Whatever the percentage, the information in this section will help you lower it. You can spend less of your time feeling badly. One way to do that is overgeneralize less often.

But before we accidentally throw the baby out with the bath water, I need to point out that your ability to generalize plays an important role in making you intelligent. The ability to generalize — to see patterns, to be able to predict what will happen, to see cause and effect — is extremely useful.

For example, back before doctors knew much about disease, Paracelsus noticed people working in mines all seemed to die of the same disease, later named Miner's Disease. His discovery was a generalization. It was accurate and helpful. Even in the face of tremendous opposition from the authorities, his observation was enough of a crack in the wall that it gave people a new way to look at disease and our present understanding has developed out of that original intelligent generalization.

Ignaz Semmelweis noticed when doctors helped deliver babies right after performing a dissection, the women tended to get childbed fever. This observation and generalization eventually led to the practice of using antiseptics.

Charles Darwin was able to see a general principle that governed the development of all life: Quite a generalization! And accurate. And useful. Much of our understanding of disease, antibiotic resistance, etc., has come from Darwin's original generalization.

We make generalizations all the time. If I notice I'm cranky the day after drinking alcohol, and then a couple weeks later I drink again and find I'm cranky the next day again, I might predict it the next time, and see if it's true. If I find a pattern there, I can decide to drink less often and therefore feel better more often. The ability to generalize has helped me make an intelligent decision.

Imagine someone who could not see patterns. Imagine someone who was unable predict effects from causes. They wouldn't be able to make intelligent decisions.

So one of the things about your brain that makes you so intelligent is your ability to generalize. The problem is, your brain is so good at generalizing — so wired to do it — sometimes you see patterns that don't exist. Generalizing makes people smart. Overgeneralizing makes people stupid. Prejudice, for example, is a form of overgeneralization. Sexual discrimination is a form of overgeneralizing. Labeling someone is an overgeneralization. No human being can be summed up by a label. Overgeneralizing makes things go badly more often, and creates unnecessary bad feelings too often.

The two primary mistakes that turn generalizations into overgeneralizations are:

1. Holding the generalization as a fact rather than an hypothesis. Any generalization you make is a guess. And you have some degree of certainty about your guess — you can be quite certain your guess is correct, you can be very uncertain about your guess, or anywhere in between. When you have more certainty about your generalization than the facts can justify, it is an overgeneralization. You've gone too far.

2. Generalizing from too few instances. Researchers have discovered that people don't have a very accurate sense of what chance sequences look like. People expect sequences of coin flips, for example, to alternate more than they actually do. So truly random sequences can often look like a pattern to our pattern-seeking brain.

In a series of twenty coin tosses, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting four heads in a row; you have a twenty-five percent chance of getting five in a row; you have a ten percent chance of getting six in a row! And yet we sometimes predict a pattern from only one or two incidents. A person has two bad relationships in a row and they conclude all members of the opposite sex are idiots.

Everybody makes these kinds of mistakes, at least sometimes. Even the experts. Our brains are so ready and willing to generalize, it's inevitable we're going to go overboard now and then and overgeneralize. Here are a few examples:

In 1958, Business Week printed this: "With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market."

Marshal Foch said, in 1911, "Airplanes are interesting toys, but they have no military value." Foch was an excellent, well-informed military leader.

"Whatever happens," said Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, "the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping." He said this on December 4, 1941. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor three days later.

On October 16th, 1929, the economist Irving Fisher said, "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." The stock market crash that started the Great Depression happened two weeks later.

These were experts in their field, stating their opinions with too much confidence. And stating them publicly. It's a common human error, but you can compensate for that natural weakness by withholding your confidence until you have strong evidence to support your belief (if your belief has negative consequences).

What we're concerned about here is overgeneralizing bad stuff. That's what to look out for. Overgeneralizations can cause doubt funks, depression, giving up, hopelessness, failure, unnecessary suffering, anxiety, worry, and tension.

when you are vulnerable

You are especially vulnerable to overgeneralizing in a way that makes things worse whenever something happens you didn't want to happen.

In a test of the Berkeley swim team, those who overgeneralized about their failure defeated themselves, deflating their drive and worsening their performance. They were given a failure experience and then tested again. Those who overgeneralized about the failure swam the next heat slower. They had defeated themselves with their own explanation. They had taken the wind out of their own sails by overgeneralizing. They explained their failure with things like, "I'm a slow swimmer" or "I'm a loser" rather than being more specific: "I swam that one too slow."

Overgeneralizing causes despair and hopelessness. The researcher Martin Seligman and his colleagues have discovered that the two most deadly assumptions you can make about a setback is: The cause of the setback is 1) permanent, or 2) pervasive. Permanence and pervasiveness both tend to be overgeneralizations — and dangerous ones at that.

Permanence says, "This is always going to be here," or "There's no way out of it." Pervasiveness says, "It has ruined everything," or "My life is over." These are overgeneralizations that evoke feelings of demoralization. They make you want to give up. That's usually not a very useful response to make to a setback.

Interestingly, one of the things Napoleon Hill hammers on in his books (Law of Success, Think and Grow Rich, and Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude) is that failure is only temporary defeat. Hill and Seligman are trying to get their readers to do the same thing: Don't jump to the conclusion that this setback is permanent. It's a deadly overgeneralization. It stops action. It kills motivation. It destroys dreams. Don't ever do it again!

Napoleon Hill was commissioned by the richest man in the world at the time, Andrew Carnegie, to write a philosophy of success. Carnegie thought it was a shame that each person had to figure out what it takes to succeed by trial and error, only to have that accumulated know-how die with them. He thought it should be written down. And he asked Hill to do it.

So Napoleon Hill interviewed some of the most successful people of his day: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Wrigley, Jr., George Eastman — over five hundred of them. He found out how they succeeded and shared his findings in his books.

Hill was famous in his day, and well-respected. President Woodrow Wilson put Hill on his staff as a advisor during World War I. Hill also served as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt throughout most of the Depression. It was Napoleon Hill who came up with, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

When I was first learning to make public speeches, I had some embarrassing moments. But I also had many good moments. I made a typical mistake: I came up with an overgeneralization that blocked out the good moments. I said to myself, "I get too nervous." And that thought made me more nervous than I needed to be, creating still more embarrassing moments than I would have had otherwise. Overgeneralizing the bad very often makes things worse.

For example, I was looking for a store in the Yellow Pages. I have always hated looking stuff up because I "never" seemed to be able to find what I was looking for. I wanted to find a mall so I looked under "mall." It said to look under department stores or outlets. I got a headache. Then I realized my thought was, "I always have trouble finding stuff in the Yellow Pages." The word always was a generalization.

You have to watch your "evidence" for your generalizations. Our memories can be skewed merely because some things naturally make more of an impression than others. If I look something up in the Yellow Pages and find it right away, what is there to remember? But if I search and search and get frustrated and throw the phone book at the wall, it is very memorable.

So just because of this difference, I could easily get the impression that I "usually" have difficulty finding what I want in the Yellow Pages. And it would seem to me I have plenty of evidence for my conclusion — I remember plenty of times of frustration and I don't recall ever finding something easily.

Stressful moments are more memorable than emotionally-flat moments, and because of that, we can overgeneralize — falsely see a negative pattern that doesn't really exist. It's an illusion caused by the way our brains selectively store memories.

An interesting experiment clarifies this point. At the University of California, researchers showed subjects two narrated slide shows. One was a boring account of a boy visiting a hospital and watching the medical staff preparing for a surgical procedure. The other one showed the boy getting run over by a car and getting emergency care.

Before watching the film, half the people were given a beta blocker — a drug that blocks two stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline. The other half were given a pill containing no active ingredients of any kind (a placebo).

A week later, everyone took a test to find out how much of the slide shows they remembered. They all remembered everything equally, except the stressful parts. The ones who got the placebo remembered the traumatic parts of the story with greater clarity than the ones who took the beta blocker. Interesting, eh? In Consumer Reports on Health, they had this to say about the experiment:

Mundane happenings can be difficult to remember. But upsetting events are often hard to forget...A separate, more durable system for storing emotionally charged memories has survival value, the researchers pointed out, enabling animals to remember and avoid threatening situations. Presumably, the stronger the emotional response, the stronger the memory.

what to do about it

Your brain has a natural tendency to generalize. Remember that. Remind yourself of it. When writing this article, I was thinking up examples, one after the other, and writing them down. Then I started writing one down but I stopped because it was a stupid example. I crumpled it up and thought, "Maybe I'm out of good examples." See what I did? I overgeneralized from a single example of failure. Then I reminded myself that my brain has a natural tendency to generalize.

We can derive a simple, practical method based on this information: When you feel doubtful or anxious or angry or frustrated or worried, look into your thinking and see if you can find an overgeneralization.

They are hard to detect because you assume whatever you think is true. Overgeneralizations would be easy to detect if someone was angry at you and said something like, "You never wash the dishes." The first thing you'd think of is all the times you washed the dishes! But when you say something like that to yourself, you don't question it, do you? You just feel bad.

But if you stop and look, you'll be able to find your own generalizations. The moment you discover an overgeneralization in your thinking — the moment you recognize a thought as an overgeneralization — your negative feelings start to diminish. The negative feelings were being generated by your mistaken assumption. When you recognize your mistake, your feelings change — immediately.

seeking evidence

Researchers have found that our brains automatically seek evidence to confirm rather than disconfirm an already existing conclusion — whether we have any stake in it or not.

When you allow yourself to come to a conclusion that you aren't very organized, for example, you'll see and remember everything you do that confirms your conclusion even if you don't want it to be true. And you'll ignore times you were well-organized because they don't confirm anything; they would disconfirm.

When you decide your spouse is a slob, you'll notice and remember (clearly) all the times your spouse acted like a slob, and you'll ignore or explain away all the times your spouse was neat and clean.

Coming to a conclusion prematurely alters your perception to some degree — at least it alters what you notice — so what you see agrees with your conclusions. It's a natural flaw of the human brain. And telling other people your conclusions makes it even worse.

In an experiment, people were asked to determine the length of a line. One group was told to decide it in their heads; another group was told to write it on a Magic Pad (pads for children that erase what you write when you lift up the top sheet) and then erase it before anyone saw it; and a third group was told to write their conclusions on a piece of paper, sign it, and give it to the researcher.

Then the subjects were given information indicating their first conclusion was wrong. And they were given an opportunity to change their decision. Those who decided in their heads changed their conclusions the easiest; those who wrote it on the Magic Pad were more reluctant to change their minds; and those who declared their conclusions publicly remained convinced their first conclusion was correct.

Their feeling of certainty was an illusion; it wasn't related to their conclusion's accuracy. It was being influenced by another factor — how publicly they had made their conclusions.

Be careful about coming to conclusions too quickly in public. Slow yourself down before you conclude anything. Remind yourself that your feeling of certainty might not mean anything. It'll allow you to place less confidence in your conclusions. When your conclusion is giving you negative feelings, your skepticism can make you feel better and act more sanely.

Confucius said wisdom was "when you know a thing, to recognize that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it."

When I was making cold calls for radio interviews, I often used this technique. Here's what I found. I made about fifteen calls for every interview I landed. When I called, I usually left a voice mail. They'd call back and grill me.

When I first started doing it, this made me feel bad. So I looked into my thinking to find an overgeneralization. These are some of the thoughts I wrote down:

"This is too hard."
"I'm never going to make it."
"Nobody is interested."
"Nobody cares about improving their lives."
"My book isn't marketable."
"I can't take the strain."

I slowed myself down and immediately realized these conclusions weren't necessarily true. My negative feelings subsided and my success rate improved (probably because I came across better because I was in a better mood).

When I first started public speaking, I had to do the same thing. My explanation for why I couldn't be a public speaker was permanence. "I'm constitutionally shy, always have been, always will be."

I was overgeneralizing. I thought, "I'm a shy person" rather than "I'm shy in certain circumstances."

Since I was nineteen, I had wanted to give public speeches, but I knew I couldn't. Some people can, I thought, and some can't. I was one who couldn't. That's a permanent explanation. That's an overgeneralization. And when you make a conclusion like that, you see lots of evidence "proving" your conclusion is true.

Pessimistic assumptions change the way you feel which changes the way you perceive the world to match your assumption. You are less likely to see contradictory evidence.

I like to read true-life survival stories. It is interesting to me to see what people do in their minds that helps them make it out alive. When people survive life-threatening situations, one common denominator is they did not overgeneralize. They didn't decide it was hopeless. They didn't say "Nothing has worked yet, so nothing will ever work." They retained a glimmer of uncertainty about their own pessimistic assumptions, and kept trying, and that is what saved them.

It would be equally instructive to know what went through the minds of those who didn't survive. No doubt they made pessimistic overgeneralizations that prevented them from taking actions that would have saved them. They defeated themselves, I would bet, in their own minds. And so do we all in so many ways if we're not careful.

the grinder people

When I was young, I worked in a restaurant that served Prime Rib sandwiches, which for some reason, in the restaurant business they call "grinders." In this restaurant, we had a waiter named Scott. One day a couple came in and sat in Scott's section and ordered two Prime Rib sandwiches.

Scott was very busy this day and didn't give the couple very good service. And they tipped him poorly.

Scott overgeneralized. He decided, based on this single instance, that this couple was "cheap." He talked it up and grumbled about it to everyone who would listen. He made his conclusion public.

As it turns out, a few days later, the same couple came in and landed in Scott's section again. And again, they ordered two Prime Rib sandwiches.

This time Scott wasn't very busy, but since he already "knew" they weren't going to tip him much, he gave them lousy service, and they proved him right: They tipped him poorly again. This is one of the problems with overgeneralizing. It often serves as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

From then on, when that couple came in, no matter whose section they sat in, Scott would go talk to that waiter: "See those two people? Those are the Grinder People I've been telling you about!" And that waiter would then give them lousy service, and they tipped badly.

But they kept coming in. They must have really loved those Prime Rib sandwiches!

One day they sat in my section. I decided to avoid overgeneralizing and gave them great service. And what do you know? They tipped me really well!

After that, they asked for my section. I served them many times and they always tipped me well.

The tendency to overgeneralize is built into our brains. But there is a cure for it. The cure is simple: Catch yourself overgeneralizing. Over and over and over. Keep it up and your tendency will gradually diminish.

The real trick is to keep reminding yourself to catch yourself over a period of time. It won't work to remember it for a week and then forget about it. Extended effort is what is required. Here are some ideas to help you remember over time:

1. Ask your spouse or children to catch you. We often say our overgeneralizations out loud, and children, especially, will work overtime to catch you doing something wrong. Use that force for good.

2. Put a message on your screen saver using the Scrolling Marquee.

3. Get an alarm clock that wakes you up by playing a cassette tape. Record a message about overgeneralizing and it will remind you first thing every morning.

4. Write OVERGENERALIZING on a card and carry it with you.

5. Post a note on your bathroom mirror.

The possibilities are endless. But the principle is important: Use a system to remember to catch yourself overgeneralizing again and again over a period of time, and your tendency to overgeneralize will dwindle. As it does, you'll experience negative feelings less often and less intensely. In other words, you'll feel good more often. And who doesn't want that?

You'll also be more persistent, your motivation level will remain higher, and you'll be healthier.

You may now realize this would be a great thing to change in your thinking. But then you might think, "I'll never follow through on it — I'm not persistent enough about stuff like that." That is your first overgeneralization to question and you're on your way.

The Principle: When you feel a negative emotion
check your thoughts for an overgeneralization.

A Negative Bias In Our Perception

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 22:33:00 +0000

STEVEN JAY GOULD, a famous zoologist, says the general public tends to believe humans are a violent species. But we are remarkably friendly and kind to each other. He says that when an ethologist (a person who studies wild animals living in their natural environment) sees individual animals only have one or two aggressive encounters for tens of hours, they would rate it as a peaceful species. "But think," he says, "of how many millions of hours we can log for most people on most days without noting anything more threatening than a raised third finger once a week or so."

The problem is, of course, that an act of aggression or violence is supremely noticeable, and normal courteous interactions are not nearly as noticeable. When the lady at the checkout counter is polite, what is there to notice? Does it make your day? Do you remember it later? Do you tell anyone about it?

But what would happen if she insulted you or slapped you? Would you remember it later? You bet you would! Tell anyone about it? Are you kidding?!

There is a natural bias in our perception and memory of reality. It is heavily biased toward the negative. Not for all experiences — obviously, we do remember good events. But for a certain class of experiences, the bias is negative (experiences where the expected event isn't very noticeable and the negative event is very noticeable). This is one very important way pessimism worms its way into your mind.

For example, Gilovich says that at big schools, professors "learn early on that unless they are careful, it is easy to be exposed mainly to the alibis and complaints of the most difficult students and rarely see the more successful and more pleasant students who make teaching so gratifying."

And of course that would be the case. The good students listen in class so they have fewer dumb questions, and fewer problems with the work, and they do their homework so they don't show up in the professor's office asking for an extension on a due-date or whatever. They are not nearly as noticeable as the slacker students. Just by the nature of reality and perception, the professor's experience will be biased toward a negative opinion about students in general unless she compensates for it by deliberately trying to notice the good students.

This glitch in reality is a major source of the development of cynical beliefs. Think about how many things function well in government, for example. Thousands upon thousands of things go right every day. But when a senator does something wrong, we hear about it for days or weeks — in the news, in the late night comedian's jokes, in conversations with your co-workers. It is noticeable. It is easily remembered.

When senators do their normal work, what is there to notice? What is reported? Would you ever hear on the news, "A senator today did his job well?" No. It's not newsworthy. You're not going to go around telling all your friends about it. And why not? Because most senators on most days do what they are supposed to be doing and that just isn't news because it's so normal. And yet the end result of the media magnifying reality's negative bias is that many people have formed a cynical view of the world and of politics and big business and you name it — a view that isn't really justified by the facts, but a view that seems completely justified by the facts because the only facts about those things that makes it to the normal person are negative events, which are newsworthy because they are unusual.

Read more about negative biases .

Find out what you can do about it .

Negative Emotions Are Bad For Your Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:41:00 +0000

ACCORDING TO a research team in Chicago: "People who often feel negative emotions may be more likely to develop memory problems as they age." Read about it here: Chronic Worry Tied to Memory Problems. The study focused on worry, but of course thought-mistakes of all kinds cause negative emotions. Thought-mistakes make you worry more than is necessary, make you frustrated more often than is fitting to the circumstances, make you feel disheartened by a setback that really won't be as difficult to overcome as you think it will, etc.

If you'd like to reduce the amount of negative emotion you feel, if you'd like to feel good more often, the most effective technique, according to over 600 studies, is to make fewer thought-mistakes in your usual way of thinking. I'm talking about mistakes like overgeneralizing or black-or-white thinking.

And the easiest, quickest way to make fewer thought-mistakes is to use the method outlined in Undemoralize Yourself. Start today cleaning up your thinking. You'll feel better, it'll be good for your relationships and good for your health, and you just might prevent memory problems down the road.

Control Your Input

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:46:00 +0000

YOU LEARNED EARLIER that you are especially vulnerable to a lamprey invasion when watching the news or talking with people (read about that here). These are input channels, and negativity can flow in on them. A natural response is to wonder what can be done about it. Certainly, we must protect our vulnerable places. But how? Avoid watching any news? Don't talk to anybody? Sit in a room by ourselves? Of course not. But we have many opportunities to exert some control over these input channels. Let's look at some of the more important ways.

The first thing we can do is to avoid all-or-nothing thinking. We don't have to choose between watching the news or not watching the news at all. Although the media is a source of negativity, it is also a source of information. The media may have a tendency to encourage pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism, but it ain't all bad. When you call a country a "free country" one of the main things that makes it free is a free press. In places where the government controls the media, such as in South Africa up until the late 1980's, the government can get away with atrocious crimes because nobody finds out about them. In places without reporters snooping around digging up the most negative things, corruption is rampant and terrible things happen more often.

The international media helped the freedom fighters in South Africa quite a bit. They dug up the facts and published them around the world. Governments then imposed political and economic pressure on the South African government and opened the way to change. Information in the news can be helpful.

But you need to filter your news. You need to be active about it, choosing and directing and guiding rather than passively inflowing. When you get a piece of news, ask yourself, "Is there anything I can do about this?" If not, think twice about how much exposure to it is helpful. And choose your battles; you can't fight them all.

Keep trying to upgrade the quality of your news sources. Some sources concentrate on worthless negativity you can do nothing about and some have a more productive approach.

The more the media is in your control, the better. And the more accurate, the better. Television is the worst way to get news because a) it is visual so unnaturally compelling, b) it is chosen and fed to you by someone else, and c) it is riddled with commercials. You can't skip a story when you're watching it on television. In a newspaper, you can glance at a headline and move on, reading only what you want to read, giving you more control over your news. But what is news today might be nothing a week from now, so newspapers are better than television, but not as good as a weekly newsmagazine. Why? Because newspapers have a daily deadline, making it more difficult for them to check their facts, and less likely to have enough time to decide what is really important and what is only surprising. You can't know it all, so be as choosy as you can.

And while reading the information, cultivate a healthy skepticism. Protect yourself from incorrect information with skepticism. This is not the same as cynicism. The opposite of cynicism is not gullibility. You don't need illusions to have a positive attitude. You don't need to fool yourself about the world. But you do need to be skeptical because some information you will get is bunk. Even information being passed off as scientific data is sometimes bunk. We can't throw out science, however. That would be more all-or-nothing thinking. The scientific method is the best way to discover what is true and what isn't. Science is not perfect, of course. Scientists are human. They make mistakes. They sometimes bias their results. Often their results are relayed badly by the media. But all in all, our knowledge about the world keeps improving because of the scientific method.

We would all do well to have a more scientific attitude, especially when reading information in the news. You might not know this, but you can gain information without "believing" it, and without dismissing it either. You can hold it as possibly true. If you read a report of a scientific study that says drinking tea is good for your health, you can hold that as possibly true. You can look into it further. If you find ten studies, all by different scientists, all using different methods, funded by different sources, and they all say tea is good for you, you can now hold it as quite possibly true, and you can begin to drink tea.

And you can drink tea without being a believer. You can have a level of confidence in the idea that tea is good for you while still leaving your mind open to new information. Your own knowledge can advance just as the general body of scientific knowledge advances: By holding tentative theories and testing them. When the results of an experiment confirm a theory, it doesn't usually prove the theory. It only gives us more confidence in the theory. You can have more or less confidence without producing certainty that something is definitely true or definitely false. This is not difficult. Most people are more accustomed to making up their minds definitely, but that is an outdated way of thinking.

Your mind naturally wants to decide and be done with it, but it doesn't take much effort to remind yourself that's just what a human brain does automatically. That's the default setting. But you don't have to go along with it. Be skeptical. This is one way to control your input. Find good sources of news — sources that are as reliable as you can get and as free of pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism as you can find.

sources of input

Beyond news, you have many sources of input. What you read, the movies you watch, what you listen to in your car, the people you talk with and what you allow those conversations to be about, what kind of music you listen to, and so on. All of it is input you have some control over.

You can read sordid novels or self-help books, history books or science fiction. Whatever you read will have some sort of effect on you. The question is, what effect do you want? Books have the potential to really improve your life. You probably hold that as possibly true already or you wouldn't be reading this. Scientific studies indicate that you can have some confidence that it's true.

In one study, researchers gave depressed people a self-help book to read. The volunteers were randomly assigned to read either Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns, or Control Your Depression by Peter Lewinsohn. A month later, using self-reports and also clinician ratings, there was a "significant reduction" in depression according to the lead researcher, Forrest Scogin. A six month follow up showed a continued relief from depression.

And you don't have the choice between reading some boring self-help book or reading an enjoyable novel. Some self-help books are very enjoyable to read just as some novels are boring. Control your input. Make it serve you.

The same holds true for what you listen to in your car. Most of us spend several hours a week in our car with nothing to do but drive. What an opportunity for growth! There are an enormous number of audio programs available. One of the advantages of audio programs is the likelihood of listening more than once. It is an excellent medium for things you'd like to really learn well.

For example, John wants to improve his ability to deal with people at work. So he gets the book, How to Win Friends & Influence People on tape and listens to a little every morning on his way to work. The ideas are fresh in his mind at work, allowing him to put more and more of it into practice. Over a period of six months, he may be able to listen to the entire book several times, deeply ingraining the ideas in his mind and behavior, and really improving the environment he works in.

In your car you can listen to motivational tapes, using that time to keep bringing your mind back to your goals and giving you a little shot of encouragement on a regular basis.

Let's do a little mental experiment. Think about what might happen to you over the next year if you listened to motivational and informational tapes whenever you were driving alone. Compare that with the result of merely listening to the radio whenever you were driving alone. The difference in the quality of the rest of your life might be significantly different. I know it takes a little discipline. But only a little. It actually feels good to listen to something useful rather than feeling you're just wasting time in traffic.

You don't need to throw out music, of course. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. But if you listen to the radio, you are bombarded with advertising and the songs are what the DJ wants to play rather than what you want to hear. Music is input. Some lyrics improve your attitude. Some cultivate pessimism. Choose your music. Control your input. You might think I'm going to far, but you're going to listen to music anyway, right? And you have an abundance to choose from, right? Some great music has positive lyrics and some great music has negative lyrics. Make your choice. Control your input.

The same goes for what you watch for entertainment. Some movies lift you up and make you stronger and more determined. Some movies bring you down. And you have plenty of each to choose from.

Also consider the difference between TV and movies. In a movie, you avoid commercials. You don't have to get input you don't want. Watching TV, you get lots of input you can't control.

If you still indulge in a little bad news, make sure you balance it with at least an equal amount of good news. Use this resource to get your started. Here's a way to stay informed about world events without too much extra negative input: How To Stay Informed Without Being Upset Unnecessarily.

and people too

That goes the same for who you choose to interact with. Some people are chronically negative. You can avoid them or try to make them less negative. Maybe you enjoy trying to convert people to positivity. If you do, I salute you! But some people may not be worth the effort. In an extreme example, it would not be worth your effort to spend your entire lifetime working to convert a single person from pessimistic to optimistic when you could help hundreds with the same lifetime. Use your time well.

And even if you don't want to convert people directly and just let your example teach, you still need to be aware that some people squash positivity wherever they find it. People who bring you down are probably the most powerful source of pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism you will personally encounter. Be careful of these people. Don't interact with them if you have a choice. If you must talk with them, interact as little as you can and interact superficially. Being superficial is a way to protect yourself. One of your points of vulnerability is communication with others — especially people who are well infected with lampreys already. Protect yourself with superficial communication.

Along the same lines, there are also people who aren't really riddled excessively with negativity, but whose conversation tends to cultivate pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism. When you converse with them, they tend to talk about events in the news you are helpless to change, or they talk about grievances they have with a third party. For these situations, I recommend exerting a little more influence on the topic of conversation. You can be subtle about it but less passive. You can bring up topics. You can ask questions. You can direct and guide the conversation into more positive waters, without anybody knowing what you're doing. You will make your input more positive, more life-affirming and healthier, for you and for them as well. Keep attempting to influence the direction of your conversations and learning from your attempts. Develop the skill. It will protect you from many lamprey invasions, and as a side-effect, you'll have a positive impact on the world.

When you are guiding conversations, do it in a way that doesn't cause the other person to have to argue or defend his negative point of view. You have to use some finesse. When you approach negativity in a forceful or attacking way, you cause the person to more deeply entrench themselves in their own negative position, making them even more committed to it. Don't do that.

These are some of the more important ways you can protect your vulnerable spots by controlling your input. Read about another important way to protect yourself: Question Motives.

Using Your Strengths

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:15:00 +0000

I CAME ACROSS THIS and thought it was good. One way to crush pessimism is to be happier, and one good way to become lastingly happier is to know your "signature strengths" and exercise them.

A signature strength is a characteristic that you are not only naturally good at, but that makes you feel good when you exercise it. For example, my top signature strength is Love Of Learning. I am naturally curious and I am good at learning, and it actually makes me happy to learn new things.

Anyway, The Chief Happiness Officer had a great little mission for his readers: A seven-step process to discover your signature strengths and exercise them at work in order to be happier at while you're on the job. A worthy mission! Here's a link to the article and one of the seven steps:

Monday Tip: Use your strengths at work: "What strengths do you rarely or never use at work? These represent untapped potential for you and your workplace. Is there any way you could get to use them more often?"

What's In It For You?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:01:00 +0000

THE PURPOSE OF Crush Pessimism is to give you tools to help you protect yourself against infection by pessimism. There are many different ways pessimism can worm its way into your mind without your consent (learn more about that here), but if you have the tools, you can protect yourself. We also provide you with the tools to rid yourself of any "pessimism infection" you already have. What will these tools do for you? They will make you stronger, healthier, more motivated, more productive, more persistent, and you'll feel better. Whenever you feel demoralized or disheartened on your way to your goal, you will have the know-how you need to undemoralize yourself. You will have more determination than you ever thought possible. You will be more successful, whatever your goals are.

We've also got tools here to help you help others cure their pessimism infections.

In other words, Crush Pessimism shows you how to feel better more often, and how to help your loved ones feel better without reducing your effectiveness in life. In fact, you and your loved ones will feel better while increasing your effectiveness.

You will find the tools here to accomplish something very specific. The tools will help you feel better and do better by learning to protect yourself against pessimism infections, and curing whatever infections you may have gotten already. Result: You'll be happier, healthier, and more successful.

Even though I'm talking about something very specific, it has a broad effect on your life. Your level of pessimism influences every important element of your life. The reason pessimism has so much influence on so many different areas is that we're talking about the source of determination. At each little crossroad of your life, at each little setback you get several times a day, you will respond with either determination or discouragement. Over time, your responses one way or the other will have enormous consequences. You can learn here what causes which response, and how to make your responses more and more determined. It can't be done with willpower. You have to know how it works. That's what this crushing pessimism is all about.

Here is where to start: The Purpose Of Crushpessimism.com.

Never Give Up

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:35:00 +0000

If you have a challenging goal, every once in awhile you are probably going to feel disheartened or discouraged. I have the perfect thing to read at that time. It's an article called, Never Give Up. Bookmark it for when you need a shot of inspiration. Or if you know someone who is in a challenging field and hitting setbacks, this is just what they need to hear. It is full of true, inspiring stories of people overcoming odds and mounting obstacles that seemed impossible, and information about how they did it. Good stuff.

One Obstacle to Your Goal

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:33:00 +0000

If you feel blocked in some way, you have two beliefs going at one time: an "I should" and an "I want."

So said Albert Ellis, and I think it's worth pondering if you feel blocked. If you have an important goal and you feel frustrated or disheartened about your goal, do you have an "I should" getting in the way of what you want?

Instant Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 07:46:00 +0000

Check out this little video clip called Power of a Dream. I love this organization. All they do is advertise positive values like persistence, honesty, and generosity. They advertise on billboards and with television commercials. They don't ask for any donations, and in fact, they don't accept any. I've never seen anything like it. They are called The Foundation For a Better Life.

Pessimism Is Bad For Your Immune System

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:45:00 +0000

THE HUMAN immune system is incredibly complex. As living organisms, we are constantly bombarded by invading viruses, fungus, and bacteria and it is a constant battle with first, second and third lines of defense against invaders. We have immunoglobulin A, for example, in our saliva, to help kill invaders as they enter our mouths. We have many different immunoglobulins in our lungs, our intestines, our tears, etc. — in our points of vulnerability — the places where an invader can invade. At those points, we have immune defenses, guard posts, forts, standing guards. Our lives are at stake and the immune system that has evolved is amazing. The benefit of an advance in immune system technology all along our billions of years of evolution were enormous: The ultimate benefit — life or death.

We have T-cells that circulate in the blood and when they recognize an invader they have fought before, the measles or a flu virus for example, they reproduce the antibody for that invader and overwhelm it to kill it off.

When a virus invades your body, it's always a race between your T-cells and the invader. Whichever one can multiply fastest wins. You are invaded fairly often, but if your T-cells reproduce faster than the invader, you never even know the war went on. You won. You didn't get sick. But if your T-cells are sluggish, if they don't reproduce fast enough, the invaders multiply too quickly and overwhelm your defenses, and then backup defenses take over: Fever, excess mucous, whatever tools your immune system can muster to destroy the invader and prevent your own death.

Another battalion in your immune system is natural killer cells (NK cells). They cruise through your blood looking for anything foreign, like cancer cells, and kill it off. Your NK cells are more effective under certain conditions than others.

In one study, the researchers measured the level of pessimism, cynicism and defeatism (the deadly triad) in a group of elderly people and also once a year took blood samples to check the activity level of their immune system. The immune system was less vigorous and less effective in those with the highest measure of the deadly triad. Pessimism is bad for your immune system. Pessimism weakens your defenses against disease.

In another study, researchers looked at what might happen if people learned to think less pessimistically (which you can do here).They divided cancer patients into two groups. Both groups received standard medical care, and one group also received training in thinking less pessimistically once a week for twelve weeks, and also learned some relaxation techniques.

Taking blood samples, the researchers measured the NK cell activity. It was dramatically higher in the people trained to think differently.

In a study I mentioned in my book, Self-Help Stuff That Works, people were tested for their level of pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism. Then they were given some health-related information to study on health topics (like cancer, for example). Here's an interesting finding that really ought to be obvious: The most pessimistic spent less time studying the information and remembered less of it. It ought to be obvious but it was surprising to me when I first read about it, and it's surprising to a lot of people (especially pessimists).

But if you think about it, the outcome of the study makes perfect sense. Pessimism of course makes you less inclined to believe you can do anything to successfully change the course of events. And if you assume you can't do anything about preventing cancer, for example, you're not going to be very motivated to learn anything about it, are you? By assuming you're helpless, you become more of a victim.

What I like about this study is it counters what seems to be a common belief negative people have about optimists. They believe it is a form of sticking your head in the sand and ignoring reality. How else, the pessimists ask, could you avoid being pessimistic, cynical and defeatist? But this study shows that it is actually the people infected with the lamprey of the mind who are avoiding reality. People who haven't had their strength drained by the lamprey know that their own actions have an impact on the world. They know they aren't helpless. They know they have an influence on the outcome of events, so they are more open to information that can help them influence those events.

Because they get more information and they don't make themselves feel defeated, optimistic people are more likely to take action like eating better, exercising, getting checkups at the doctor. A pessimist is less inclined to take those kinds of actions because they feel it won't make much difference. And their lack of positive action makes them statistically more likely to die prematurely.

An optimist (and here I'm using the word in the scientific sense, which really has nothing to do with looking on the bright side or saying nice things to yourself; read more about scientific optimism) might say, "I can quit smoking." And if they try once and fail, they wouldn't give up. They aren't defeated so easily. They'll try again.

A pessimist would be less likely to try in the first place because they explain events in more defeatist ways. "I can't help it. Nicotine has me completely addicted." But if they try anyway but fail, their explanation will not motivate them to try again: "I guess I just can't do it." They are more likely to accept their fate and die prematurely.

In a study of cancer patients, those who thought most pessimistically had the highest death rates, even though they weren't any more diseased when the study began.

Here's another interesting study. Researchers from California and Finland teamed up to ask 2400 men how much they agreed with these two statements:

1. The future seems to me to be hopeless, and I can't believe that things are changing for the better.

2. I feel that it is impossible to reach the goals I would like to strive for.

Clearly this simple questionnaire measures how thoroughly the lamprey has done its work.

Six years later, the ones who answered with pessimism, cynicism and defeatism were two to three times more likely to have heart attacks, develop cancer, or die of any cause.

Researchers are amazingly creative. Some people collect stamps. I collect studies. I love the way researchers go about discovering how things work. Here's another good one. Researchers in Texas tested 2300 people over the age of 65 for the following:

1. Hopefulness about the future.
2. How much they enjoyed life.
3. Self-worth.
4. Their average walking speed.
5. Their happiness level at the time.

Two years later, the researchers followed up on these people. Using these measurements of emotional health, they found that the least pessimistic participants were:

1. Half as likely to have trouble with their daily activities.
2. Were twice as likely to be alive.
3. Had faster average walking speeds.

And these results were independent of their sex, weight, education level, or how much they drank or smoked.

In a Carnegie Mellon University study, researchers gave a cold virus using a nasal spray to 400 volunteers. They found that the most stressed out were twice as likely to catch the cold. Pessimistic, cynical, defeated ways of thinking make mildly stressful situation into more intensely stressful events, and as their actions ensue from their thoughts, they make things get even more stressful (by snapping at people, for example, causing people to snap back). The stress and the cortisol it produces then impairs the immune system.

Another great study was done by the Mayo Clinic. This one followed 800 people for 35 years. Every ten point difference in their level of pessimism increased their chances of dying from any cause 19 percent.

cortisol: the stress hormone

When you undergo stress, your body responds by pumping cortisol into your blood stream (read more about that here). Scientists all over the world have shown how cortisol influences the immune system, sometimes quite directly. For example, college students volunteered to have their mouths injured once during their summer vacation, and once again three days before the first test of a new semester. Cortisol levels are lower during summer vacation and higher right before exams.

The wound given in the mouth was very exact and measured carefully. Then the researchers measured a wound-healing substance in the blood and measured how long it took the wounds to heal. The ability to heal a wound is another of the immune system's line of defense.

During vacation, the wounds healed, on average, in eight days. During the exams, the wounds took eleven days. During the exams, the amount of the wound-healing substance in the blood dropped a whopping 68%.

Psychological stress is one of the side-effects of pessimism. And stress alters the level of certain hormones, like cortisol. These changes in hormones then alter the synthesis of other compounds. For example, cytokines are a compound that help regulate the immune system. When stress levels go up, it changes the level of cytokines.

This kind of roundabout causal chain explains some of the many different influences pessimism, cynicism and defeatism have on the immune system. For example, when people are given a vaccination for Hepatitis B or the flu, their immune system responds. Researchers have found that stress suppresses T-cell activity and measurably lowers antibody levels.

It's a common observation of doctors that people don't recover from surgery as well if they are very anxious and depressed before the surgery, but researchers have only recently begun to find out how this could be possible. Like the study above, another experiment deliberately injured volunteers and then carefully measured the immune response to see if the more stressed volunteers' immune response differed from the less stressed ones. It did.

The researchers created minor blisters on the volunteers' forearms and then removed the top skin layer of the blisters, sterilized it and covered it with plastic. They then tested the fluid in the blisters five hours later and then 24 hours later.

They were looking for two specific cytokines and the number of cells called neutrophils (a key cell your body uses to repair an injury).

The number of neutrophils was no different in stressed and unstressed people. But the number of cytokines was significantly lower in stressed people. They tested the volunteers' stress level by measuring the cortisol in their saliva. There was a strong correlation: The higher the cortisol level, the lower the cytokine level. Stress directly suppressed their immune response.

And thinking pessimistically, cynically, and defeatedly increases your stress level. That is one reason pessimism must be crushed! ;-)

Researchers at the University of Texas Cancer Center discovered that stress hormones like norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) blocked the ability of macrophages to kill tumor cells. Macrophages are one type of white blood cell that surrounds and destroys invaders.

Here again, we see a chain reaction: An event happens and you interpret it. If the lamprey has a hold of your mind, the event causes stress hormones to be released into your blood stream. The stress hormones then weaken and hobble your immune system, making you more vulnerable to any number of health problems.

Feelings of confidence can influence your immune system. UCLA researchers tested the immune systems of a group of first-year law students at the beginning of a semester. By mid-term, those who thought pessimistically about their chances of succeeding had weaker immune systems by mid-term. Those who weren't under the influence of pessimism still had strong immune systems by mid-term.

If you know anything about evolution, you have probably had the thought, "Wouldn't our immune systems have evolved to kick into high gear during stress rather than slowing down?" But the body is making a trade-off. Stress hormones activate your body to deal with an immediate, physical threat. Stress hormones release blood sugar and rush it to your muscles. They speed up the heart and breathing rate, etc. When a virus enters your system, however, it doesn't upset you. No adrenaline is poured into your blood stream. You don't even know it happened until later. It is an altogether different kind of threat, and we have evolved an altogether different system to deal with it.

A stress response is an evolved response designed to be brief and infrequent. During a stress reaction, your immune system is temporarily hampered, but for a good cause: You moved quickly up a tree and evaded the pride of lions. Given the world we now live in, which is much different than the environment our bodies evolved to handle, pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism can produce more frequent stress reactions that last longer, which puts our immune systems are in danger.

marriage

As if this wasn't enough, it gets worse. Pessimism influences the way you speak, and the way you speak influences the way you argue with your spouse, and the way you argue determines how stressful those arguments will be.

Negative speech patterns obviously express negative thought patterns. And when you argue with your spouse using "negative fighting behaviors" as the researchers call them, it causes extra stress for your spouse. And the stress you cause your spouse impairs your spouse's immune system. But your negative fighting behaviors also impair your own immune responses.

Negative fighting behaviors stem from negative thinking patterns. Pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism are expressed in arguments in the form of name calling (labeling your spouse with a negative label), being sarcastic, finger-pointing, and withdrawing in hopeless exasperation (giving up, feeling helpless and defeated).

These negative fighting behaviors have been studied and they do indeed result in impaired immune functioning. They also increase the chance that the marriage will end in divorce, and divorce itself usually has an enormously negative impact on the immune system.

The average married couple has a serious argument about once a month, with small quarrels in between. Studies show if a couple never disagrees, if they avoid conflict, they will have less intimacy and problems are more likely to go unsolved. That's pretty obvious.

But if they disagree badly — if they think pessimistically, if they are cynical, if they get defeated easily by setbacks — they are more likely to divorce, and, more to the point for this section, it will be bad for their immune systems.

Howard Markman of the University of Denver, an expert on marital discord, has tried to figure out what the financial costs of marital fighting is. He estimates that Americans lose almost three billion dollars a year in diminished productivity. That's not even counting the damage to doors and frying pans.

Conflicts between husbands and wives lead to more illnesses and sick days. And even when they go to work, an argument with a spouse is likely to impair their performance at least a little.

Ohio State University researchers coaxed married couples to spend a half hour arguing about whatever topic got them the most angry at each other. The researchers looked at their fighting behaviors and measured their immune systems.

The researchers labeled behaviors like accepting responsibility, finding points of agreement, and suggesting compromises as "positive fighting behaviors." They labeled behaviors like criticism, blaming, sarcasm, disapproval, dismissal, and withdrawal as "negative fighting behaviors."

The couples' immune functions were tested before and after the half-hour argument. Everyone's immune function was weakened at least slightly from the argument. But the immune function was significantly weaker in those who used the most negative fighting behaviors.

So this is another angle on the same point: Pessimism is bad for your immune system. The researchers also found that the negative fighters had more antibodies for the Epstein-Barr virus, a virus that most of us keep in check fairly easily. The presence of more antibodies means that their immune systems were not just impaired from the immediate stress, but that their immune systems were not as effective in general. The way they fight is only an easily-seen display of the way they think, and the way they think is constantly disabling their immune system.

This information only scratches the surface. The studies go on and on. New ones are continually coming out. You can use this summary, however, to give you ammunition when you influence your loved ones to destroy the lampreys in their own minds. This information gives us a strong motivation to do something about it. It is not merely "nice" to feel more positive — it is imperative if we want to live a healthy life.

And hopefully it motivates you to root out and destroy the last remnants of pessimistic thinking lurking in your own mind. And to protect yourself from further infection from the pessimism that is constantly trying to worm its way into your mind. Here is where to start: Undemoralize Yourself.

Who Is Adam Khan?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:32:00 +0000

The author of Crush Pessimism is Adam Khan, who is also the creator of the web site, youmeworks.com, author of moodraiser.com, and the author of the books, Self-Help Stuff That Works. and Principles for Personal Growth, which is being used as a textbook for a college course in San Diego. Adam has been published in Prevention Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Body Bulletin, Your Personal Best Newsletter, Wisdom, Think and Grow Rich Newsletter, the Success Strategies newsletter, and he was a regular columnist for At Your Best for seven years (his column was voted the readers' favorite), and he has been a regular columnist for Josh Hind's Let's Talk Motivation newsletter and nine other ezines.

The Danger of Keeping Up With the News

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:33:00 +0000

I'VE HAD MANY DEBATES with friends about the virtues of "knowing what's going on in the world." It seems like a common belief that keeping up with the news is important. If you have that belief, I invite you to really examine its merit. I think you'll find it comes up short. The belief itself is probably another fear-tactic used by the news media. It is in their interest to make us all believe something bad will happen to us if we don't know what's going on in the world. But I haven't read a newspaper or watched television news or listened to it on the radio for about eighteen years now, except for very few times, and nothing bad has happened to me. And something good has happened: I have saved myself from being steeped in a worldview that makes the world a scarier, more dangerous place than it really is. (Read more about that here.)

Keeping abreast of current events gives workmates something to talk about besides the weather, but that's not much of a benefit, considering the cost of living your life in a frightening world, which seems to be the end-product of years of "keeping up on the news." People who regularly watch the news have a world view that would never have formed if the only thing they dealt with was the real world they live in.

A survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that although a person's risk of getting seriously injured in a car accident is only about five percent, most people believed it was more like fifty percent. Men thought they had a one in three chance of getting prostrate cancer, but it is actually more like one in ten. Women thought they had a forty percent chance of getting breast cancer when actually it's more like ten percent. And for diabetes, HIV and strokes, most people thought they had twice the chance as they actually do.

Where do you think we get these worries? Do we make them up because we're all worryworts? Not likely. Newscasters have a choice: Scare the bejeezus out of us, or go out of business. (Read more in Media's Negative Bias.)

the safe route

In a brilliant article called The Rout of Doubt, Jacob Weisberg criticized the pessimists in the media and pointed out that there is a "built-in media bias toward pessimism." Defeatism gets better ratings than confidence. The cards are stacked in favor of pessimism. As Weisberg points out, if a pessimistic commentator later turns to be right, he looks great. If things turn out better than the commentator predicted, he only looks cautious. Looking cautious is not a bad thing for a commentator.

On the other hand, if he speaks positively and confidently and turns out to be wrong, he looks naive, foolish, and unsophisticated. And it is much better for a commentator to look careful than to look naive. The result is an automatic pessimistic stance on everything. It's the safest thing to do.

The problem is, of course, that this pessimistic point of view is being broadcast far and wide, influencing people, infecting minds with pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism, undermining the viewers' determination, weakening their ability to achieve their goals, ruining the viewers' moods, impairing their health. Have I overstated my case? Look at the facts in the post Pessimism is Bad For Your Heart before you pass judgment. I may actually be understating my case.

Norman Schwarzkopf, the general in charge of operations in the first Gulf War, deliberately underestimated the damage they were doing to Iraq's military during the war. I remember being surprised when the war suddenly ended and surprised at how thoroughly Iraq's army had been destroyed. "We're trying to be deliberately conservative," said Schwarzkopf at the time. "We don't want to mislead anybody. We don't want to tell you we've done something we haven't done…When we announce something to you that something's happened, you can take it to the bank."

All good intentions. And you can see how these good intentions can lead to a continuous representation of the world as worse than it really is. It is easy to see why so many people seem to be so pessimistic and cynical.

The good news is that once you know how it operates, you become somewhat immune to its influence, rather like being familiar with a sales technique makes you immune to its influence. And also, now that you know this, you will probably become more selective about how you inflow your news, which I will talk about a few posts from now.

More on the Danger of News Watching

How to Advance the Cause

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 02:13:00 +0000

IF YOU'D like to crush pessimism, ruin negativity's popularity, and promote positivity, the first and easiest thing you can do is simply share this web address with people:

crushpessimism.com

Most email programs allow you to create a custom signature. You could add crushpessimism.com to your signature, adding it to the bottom of all your outgoing mail, and without ever pushing anything on anyone, people who are interested will check it out. This is an easy way to promote positivity.

Not only will those web addresses direct people to a site that could change their minds, but the web address itself is a message. And to help you share the message, we've created a Crush Pessimism store with products advertising positivity and the crushpessimism.com web address.

What you can do is learn all you can and become as unthwartable as possible. And as you find what works, write to us here and we'll post your ideas on this page.

Here's one idea: People ask you all the time, "What's new?" It's an innocent question. It's an opening. It's a person wanting to talk, wanting to connect with you. You can have fun with that opening and create a conversation something like the following.

They say, "What have you been up to?"

YOU: I've been busy ruining pessimism's popularity. Would you like to help?

OP (OTHER PERSON): What?! How?

YOU: Going here would be a good start (hand them a card with crushpessimism.com written on it). It teaches people how to crush pessimism and promote positivity.

OP: How'd you get into this?

YOU: Pessimism makes people feel bad, makes them less capable, and it's bad for their health. And it's not a character trait — it is learned, and it can be unlearned.

OP: What do you mean by "pessimism?"

YOU: In a nutshell, pessimism is a way of thinking — a way of seeing the world — that's false. And it's false in a way that demoralizes people. It takes the fight out of them. So things they could have achieved don't get achieved. Goals or "New Year's resolutions" that could really have been accomplished don't get accomplished. It's just a shame, and it doesn't have to be. But part of the reason it's so common is that pessimism and cynicism are cool. They're chic. So I'm out to ruin pessimism's popularity.

OP: Do you really think that's possible?

YOU: Sure it is! What, are you demoralized already? Just kidding. But think about how cool and chic smoking was just 30 years ago. Opinions are changing. The facts are being promoted widely. The same could happen to pessimism, and it could happen much faster. Pessimism could be widely seen for what it is: Damaging, destructive, harmful. And foolish.

Read more: A Handy Tool For Defeating Pessimism Worldwide

More On The Danger Of News Watching

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:03:00 +0000

ANOTHER ASPECT of television is how passive it is. This is more important than you might realize. In an experiment, researchers gave volunteers two short stressful experiences. One was a twelve-minute memory test. The other was a twelve-minute video showing awful, ghastly, disgusting surgical procedures. The researchers measured the immunoglobulin A in the volunteers' saliva.

Immunoglobulin A is a protein the body uses as a first line of defense against invaders. It shows up in saliva and on the wet surface of the lungs. It prevents microbes from invading the body. It is an easy-to-measure indicator of how well a person's immune system is working.

The researchers found that the stress of the memory task increased the amount of immunoglobulin A the body produced. But the gruesome video decreased it. The immune cells produced less of this vital immune defense when watching the film.

Both tasks were stressful. The study was trying to look at two different kinds of stress: passive and active. What they found was that passively enduring something stressful is bad for the immune system. Although the memory task was stressful (because of difficulty and time pressure), it was active. The person was doing something about it. But they could do nothing about what they saw in the video.

This is one of the dangerous things about television news. Sometimes terrible things happen. The newspeople bring it to you dramatically. It's hard to turn away. They deliberately make it as compelling as possible. But like a fish dangling on the end of a spear, you're stuck there almost against your will, suffering, and being stressed by something you can do nothing about. It's bad for your health. It allows lampreys to invade in force.

In the 1970s a small American town in the mountains had no television. They were studied before and after the arrival of cable television. After they had television, children and adults slowly became less persistent and less creative when solving problems. The nature of the medium keeps you passive.

In 1992 and again in 1999, Gallup polls showed that forty percent of adults and seventy percent of teenagers felt they watched more television than they wanted to. I know that isn't surprising, but think about it. Isn't that strange? I mean, it's pretty easy to turn off a television set. Just push a small button. Physically, it's about as easy as a task can be. But psychologically, television programmers try to make it as hard as possible to turn it off or change the channel.

orienting response

One intriguing theory that explains the compelling nature of TV watching is that television producers and editors are exploiting our "orienting response." Ivan Pavlov first described the orienting response back in the early 1920s. When we see or hear something new, and it occurs suddenly, our brains and bodies go through a sequence of reactions. Alpha brain waves are blocked for a few seconds. The heart slows down and blood vessels to the big muscle groups constrict while blood vessels in the brain dilate.

It appears to be a reaction designed to stop the body and perk up attention. That makes sense. We've all seen animals do this. They hear a twig snap in the forest and what do they do? They freeze and pay close attention to what happens next.

Television producers are trying to arrest your attention, so they use fast edits, constant movement, and novel, surprising sights and sounds to keep you in a constant state of "orienting." Your body feels paralyzed, but you're highly focused.

And because the competition for your attention is so intense, they keep getting better and better at irresistibly forcing your attention on their program or advertisement. Cameramen used to hold the camera steady. Now even the camera is constantly moving. It keeps you in the orienting response; fixated; mesmerized, and (if you're watching a typical news program) inflowing an impression of the world that cultivates pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism. (Read more about that here.)

Read more: News Infection

News Coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:29:00 +0000

THE CENTER FOR MEDIA AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS studied network coverage of murder between 1990 and 1995. During that period, the murder rate in the U.S. went down thirteen percent. But during that period, network coverage of murders increased three hundred percent. Danger equals ratings. So murder equals ratings. If you watched the news during that period, you probably got the impression murders in America were escalating out of control when in fact the situation was improving.

Between 1990 and 1996, the number of pregnancies in the United States dropped by 500,000. The most dramatic drop was for teenagers. During the time it was dropping, we got the impression teen pregnancies were increasing. People with something to gain by scaring us, scared us. Those who were trying to convince parents to teach children stricter morals talked about the teen pregnancy "epidemic." Those who wanted to do something about welfare or the school systems trotted out frightening statistics about teen pregnancy. I never heard at the time, "the situation is improving." That doesn't scare anybody and doesn't get ratings. It doesn't compel people to cough up money.

Our brains were not carefully designed. They weren't designed at all. They evolved and are not perfect in any sense of the word. The human brain evolved in a world where it was obviously adaptive to respond to potentially dangerous information with increased alertness. During the millions of years of our evolution, there were no advertisers or evening news programs. We evolved no defense against their negative influence. So we have a built-in reaction to potential danger and the media exploits this natural instinct.

Teams of persistent people scour the world to find the unusual, the shocking, the scary, the things that will compel the viewers' attention and won't let them turn away or change the channel. They gather it all up and pack as much of it into a half hour as they can, giving your brain and nervous system the impression that this is happening in your world, and making you feel more threatened and more helpless than you really are.

Studies have shown that most television news leaves the viewer depressed, because it is primarily bad news the viewer can do nothing about. The problems shown on the screen are too big or too far away or too permanent to do anything about. This sort of news nurtures a pessimistic view of the world.

A research team edited news programs into three categories: Negative, neutral, and upbeat. People were randomly assigned to watch one category of news. The viewers who watched the negative news became more depressed, more anxious about the world in general, and had a greater tendency to exaggerate the magnitude or importance of their own personal worries.

The point of view from which news is presented is similar to the negative view of depressives.

It is a fact that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness cause health problems. And studies have shown that the greater majority of network news is about people with no control over their tragedy. Christopher Peterson, one of the first researchers to show that pessimism negatively effects health, said, "What the evening news is telling you is that bad things happen, they hit at random, and there's nothing you can do about it." That is a formula for pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism — and their inevitable results: unnecessary, unhealthy, unproductive feelings of worry, anxiety, apathy, helplessness, and depression.

In one study of network news, seventy-one percent of the news stories were about people who had very little control over their fate. This is neither an accurate nor a helpful perspective on the world. The way the stories are presented gives the impression that those kinds of events are more common than they really are. Just the fact that something is on television automatically makes it seem more common than it really is. If your world view was based only on what you experienced in your daily life, without any input from the media, you would probably feel that the world was a much less dangerous and hostile place.

Media's Negative Bias

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:57:00 +0000

PEOPLE WHO WORK IN TELEVISION are under intense pressure. The competition is unbelievably stiff. In any given hour, a television show is competing with lots of other stations for your attention. When you're watching television — you or any other viewer — it's very easy to change the channel, right? You don't even have to get up out of your chair. A television show is not only competing with other shows, it is competing with anything else you might want to do: Go sailing, read a book, visit a friend.

If a station can't capture enough peoples' attention, the station loses advertising and they go out of business. So a top priority of any television producer is to prevent you from changing the channel. One of the most effective tricks a television producer can use is to scare you. Fear compels attention better than anything else. The threat of danger is captivating, arresting, mesmerizing.

When a station is thinking up ways to let you know about an upcoming program on healthy living, for example, they have a variety of possibilities. They could appeal to your natural desire to be healthier. They could appeal to your self-esteem, implying that watching their program proves you're a good person. And so on. Or they could threaten you with danger.

Here are two possible announcements of the same program; which is more compelling?

1) "Find out if your children are safe from this terrible disease."
2) "Get some health tips from a doctor."

The fear appeal is more upsetting, but it's more likely to get you to watch the program.

Other kinds of appeals work, of course, and television isn't all bad. But it is an important point of vulnerability. You are vulnerable to lamprey invasions (metaphor for pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism) when you watch television because producers and advertisers use fear to compel your attention. They even use certain kinds of voices to tell you about programs coming up. Listen to how the announcer tells you about an upcoming news program or drama. It sounds like he's telling you something of vital, life-saving importance. They do everything they can to make you feel you must watch the program.

In the Christmas movie, Scrooged, Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a television producer. His staff shows him their latest ad for an upcoming Christmas special. Frank watches it and then gets angry at his staff. They protest: "People like the ad; it's getting a great response."

Frank bursts out, "That isn't good enough! They've got to be so scared to miss it! So terrified!"

Scrooged is a comedy. Frank's response is obviously a joke. But one of the things that makes a joke funny is the truth in it.

Producers and advertisers and television executives hire read about psychologists' experiments on what holds attention. Unfortunately, the threat of danger does very well in these tests. Our ancestors didn't survive by ignoring danger or potential danger. No animals could survive very long ignoring danger. So our emotional and perceptive systems are on stand-by alert for anything that seems threatening. Add to this the stiff competition between stations and what do you get? You get television stations that try harder and harder to scare you into watching their programs.

What do you think that does to your general perception of the world? What effect do you think it has on your world view?

Television is the most unprecedented point of vulnerability for lamprey invasions that has ever occurred. The television-watching population gets infected with pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism — against their will and without even supposing a single evil intention on the part of anyone.

I'm not saying there are no evil intentions in the television business. I'm sure there are, and I'm equally sure they're a minority. But even if a producer wanted to emphasize good news or create a positive attitude in viewers, or to simply slant the news in a less threatening way, what would happen? Imagine a viewer channel surfing. He'd find pleasant stuff on one channel, and gripping, compelling, threatening, can't-take-my-eyes-off-it stuff on another channel.

Guess which channel will have the most watchers over time (even against the watchers' will). Who will get more money from advertisers? Which station will eventually get taken off the air because it wasn't pulling in enough money from advertisers to support it?

After decades of this kind of competition, what we have are a lot of negative, alarmist, danger-oriented programs. Even some positive programs are advertised using the threat of danger. Television watchers are compelled by millions of years of natural selection to be taken in by it. Television programmers are no more likely to be evil than the rest of us. But like the rest of us, they need to pay their bills. To stay in business, they need to stay on the air. They need to get enough people watching their programs so they can have enough advertising money to keep going.

The result of all these ways of trying to exploit your most fundamental drive for survival is that you get the impression the world is a more dangerous place than it really is. You can easily get the impression things are getting worse, even when things are getting better.

News Infection

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 06:08:00 +0000

IF YOU EMPHASIZE some points and play down trivial details when you're telling a story, it makes the story more interesting, more entertaining, or more attractive. Emphasizing some points and underplaying details is called "sharpening and leveling." Because of the pressures people in the media are under, and the fact that they are all competing with each other for your attention, they sharpen and level their stories fairly often, and the result is a misleading view of the world, broadcast to millions.

For example, a student at Duke University named Lee Fried gave an envelope to the president of the university. Supposedly the envelope contained a prediction about an important event.

A week later, the envelope was opened. Inside was a description of two 747 jet airliners that crashed into each other. The event had happened that week, killing 583 people. Astounding!

News media people interviewed Lee Fried. In the interviews, Fried told the interviewers that he was a magician and the "prophesy" was just a magic trick. The magician James Randi tried to find all the newspapers that covered the story. He found seventeen. Only one of those newspapers passed along the "trivial" detail that it was a magic trick.

In the process of making a story more compelling, sometimes stories fail to give an accurate impression of what really happened.

Along the same lines, Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate.com says U.S. citizens are suffering from a terrible sickness called social hypochondria. This is an unreasonable terror of horrible diseases and trends that are wiping out or traumatizing huge numbers of Americans. Child abuse, suicides, teen pregnancies, cloning, whatever. Americans are worried. Why? Is it because we're stupid? Gullible? Prone to anxiety? Or because we have enough wealth and leisure to watch enough television programming that results in the seemingly legitimate point of view that the world is a frightening, dangerous place?

I remember once asking thirty-four people I worked with whether they thought the world was going to be a better or a worse place a hundred years from now. Thirty-three said worse. I couldn't believe it.

If you get your information about the world primarily from the evening news, you'd definitely say "worse." If your main source of news is Scientific American, you'd definitely say "better." Why? Science is all about solving problems.

Think about the headlines you normally see in any given newspaper. The most common kind of headline says something terrible has happened or is happening or is about to happen. Contrast that with some headlines from a typical ScienceDaily (an email update on what scientists are working on) for the week of January 7th to 11th, 2002:

* CANCER-FIGHTING DRUG MAY WORK IN PREVENTION AND TREATMENT

* NEW CONTACT-LENS MATERIALS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE INDUSTRY, UT SOUTHWESTERN RESEARCHERS REPORT

* MICROBE FIRST TO BREAK DOWN PCBS

* PHYSICS RESEARCH SUGGESTS IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE TO LENGTHEN BATTERY LIFE

* CLINICAL TRIALS FOR "CYTOBRUSH" DETECTION TECHNIQUE SHOW PROMISE IN FIGHT AGAINST ORAL CANCER

* NEW TREATMENT EXTENDS LIFE FOR PATIENTS WITH SMALL-CELL LUNG CANCER

* PROTEIN POINTS THE WAY TO SALT-TOLERANT CROPS, PURDUE SCIENTISTS SAY

I didn't give you all the headlines for that issue. There were fifty in all. But you get the idea. A few were negative findings, some were neutral (about the composition of the sun or primordial air). But as you can see, the overall impression is that things are being found out and problems are being solved. Smart people are spending their time making the world a better place. That is an entirely different impression than you get from television news.

You're not just getting facts from news sources. You're getting a feeling about the world you live in, and often that feeling is not an accurate reflection of the world. The more you know about how it works, the easier it will be for you to protect yourself against a "pessimism infection."

Read more: When Newscasters Catastrophize For Profit

Learn more about how it works in the category how pessimism worms its way into your mind.

Points of Vulnerability

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:30:00 +0000

WHEN YOU GET THE FLU, a virus has invaded your body through a very specific point of vulnerability. Here's how it usually happens: First you get the virus on your hand. Someone sneezed or coughed and the virus landed on a counter you touched. Or someone touched their face, and you should hands with them. You get the virus on your hands, but it doesn't enter through the skin on your hands. Your skin protects you. Skin is not vulnerable to a flu infection.

But at some point, you touch or rub one of your eyes. The virus is washed into the moisture of the eye, washed down through the eye's drainage tube into the back of your throat and that is where the virus enters a cell in the lining of your throat and starts its parasitic life cycle. The eye is the point of vulnerability. It is a vulnerable opening, a chink in your armor, and that is where your defenses can be breached by a virus.

And just as a virus comes in through our body's points of vulnerability, the lamprey of the mind infects us through specific points of vulnerability. We have four main places where negativity can invade:

1. The brain. We have a brain that evolved to pay special attention to potential danger.

2. Communication. We have a strong, biologically-driven urge to be accepted by others.

3. The nature of reality. The lamprey can invade us through the inevitably misleading experiences we get under certain conditions.

4. The media. Perhaps most powerfully, we can be infected through a mutation called television. TV functions like the Erie canal, opening us to unprecedented numbers of lampreys we have developed no natural defense against.

The three main ways to protect yourself from a pessimism infection are:

1. Remind yourself of the four biases.
2. Question motives of the source.
3. Control your input.

Overconfidence in Pessimistic Conclusions

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Sun, 22 May 2011 23:20:00 +0000

THE FOLLOWING quote is such a great example of "experts" having far too much confidence in their own pessimistic conclusions, and not learning from history (or from their own personal experience) that overcertainty is one of the natural thought-mistakes our brains tend to make.

Such claims [that the world is running out of oil] have been made repeatedly in the past, and all have proven false. For example, as Learsy notes in Over a Barrel, in 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the world’s leading oil producer, estimated that the United States had only enough oil for another four years. In 1914, the Federal Bureau of Mines said we had only ten years of oil left. In 1940, the bureau revised its previous forecast and predicted that all our oil would be exhausted by 1954. In 1972, the prestigious Club of Rome, using an inscrutable but allegedly infallible M.I.T. computer oracle, handed down the ironclad prediction that the world’s oil would run out by 1990. The club said at that time that only 550 billion barrels were left to humanity.

Since then we have used 600 billion barrels, and are now looking at proven reserves of a trillion more. There is little new about today’s fascination with “peak oil”; since 1972, there have been repeated predictions of imminent oil-supply exhaustion published every few years by various authorities, and not one has come true.

In fact, if we look at the ratio of proven reserves to consumption rate, the world has a bigger oil supply today than it ever has at any time in the past. The argument that we are threatened with near-term oil exhaustion is simply untrue.

Read the rest of the article here.

More on Reality's Negative Bias

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Khan) — Fri, 06 May 2011 20:10:00 +0000

REALITY FUNCTIONS as if it has a negative bias in a couple of ways. One we've already covered here. Here's another one: Sometimes, no matter what decision is made, the chances are good it'll turn out badly. But since reality is not an experiment, you don't get to see what would have happened if another decision had been made. We don't get to look at a control group.

For example, the U.S. used a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many people believe that was a bad idea. So many lives were lost. So much destruction. It wasn't necessary to end the war.

Another alternative was to use conventional warfare until Japan surrendered, which, given the way they fought on the other islands, and given the fact that they did not believe in surrender, may have cost many more lives on both sides. But we don't get to see how it would have turned out had another decision been made.

As horrible as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, that decision may have been the least horrible of the alternatives. And if a different decision had been made, no doubt that decision would have been criticized too. Reality was biased — the cards were stacked against the decision-makers — no matter what was decided, it would have terrible consequences.

Sometimes life demands you make a decision between a bad choice and an even worse choice. The result is sometimes a cynical attitude for all the terrible things people have decided to do without really considering that we don't know if the alternatives would have been worse.

Another way reality can appear to have a negative bias is in dealing with others. Psychologists use a game called The Prisoner's Dilemma to test various ideas. The game mimics real life in a way: We need to choose to either cooperate with someone for our mutual benefit or do something that benefits only ourselves, and maybe even takes away from someone else.

For example, Joe steals a stapler from the company he works for. It benefits him and takes something away from the company. But Joe is also taking the risk of getting caught and having a lot taken away from him. The Prisoner's Dilemma has that feature also.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, a game is set up with two people who imagine they have committed a crime together. They are brought in for questioning in separate rooms. Each are offered the same deal. Let's say you are one of them. Here's the deal: If you confess and your partner does not confess, you go free and your partner gets ten years. If neither of you confess, you each get only one year. If you both confess, you each get five years. Imagine yourself with that dilemma. What would you choose?

This is often considered a way to test cooperative versus competitive attitudes. Usually the people in a given experiment play it again and again with the same partner, because this mimics real life even more closely. Most of the people you interact with are people you will interact with again and again. And how you interact in the future — how competitive or cooperative you treat any given person — usually does (and should) take into account how they have interacted with you in the past.

One of the findings of these experiments is pretty obvious: If you are a naturally cooperative person, which I'll bet you are, and you are pitted against a competitive person, you will lose. If I put a piece of candy on a table between you and a competitive person, who is likely to get the candy? The competitive person, not trying to be fair, will quickly grab the candy. You will get nothing.

Hopefully you would learn in multiple interactions to be more competitive with that person. But let's look at what has happened. A more beneficial strategy (cooperation) has been replaced with a less beneficial strategy (cut-throat competition). This phenomenon can lead to a cynical or pessimistic view of life.

When you have interactions with the same people over and over, you're likely to see more cooperative behavior. But when interactions are between people who will never see each other again, you're likely to see more cut-throat behavior. This is simple to explain. If you are a natural cooperator, and you let people in front of you on the freeway and yield and be polite and kind, you'll sometimes run into competitive behavior, so you'll get the short end of the stick again and again. Eventually, because you remember negative events better than positive events, your point of view will change and you may develop the belief that the "world is full of selfish people" and since you need to get to work on time too, you'll exhibit more competitive behavior, and as time goes on in an impersonal environment, cooperative people will turn into more competitive people out of what feels like self-preservation.

And so you're likely to find people in small towns being "nicer" (more cooperative) to strangers and people in big cities colder and meaner (more competitive) toward strangers. When people are packed together and forced into impersonal interactions, reality is biased toward the negative, toward selfishness, toward meanness, as cooperative people feel forced into a lower state by the circumstances.

Another aspect of this is that if a person has been convinced to deal with people competitively, their own experiences will tend to validate their belief. If a person is selfish and inconsiderate with others, she is much more likely to experience a world that seems to be full of selfish and inconsiderate people, making it seem obvious that with all these selfish and inconsiderate (competitive) people around, she'd better act selfish just to survive. Her original proposition that the world is a tough place that requires a cold-hearted attitude will make itself true. It functions as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

And one final way reality functions as if it had a negative bias is that the brain seeks evidence to confirm rather than to disconfirm. So as soon as one of these pessimistic, cynical, or defeatist beliefs start to form, your mind starts looking for evidence that you're right, and the belief starts to coalesce and harden into a firm belief — a firm, mistaken, unnecessarily negative view of the world — a view that makes you less effective at dealing with the world (especially other people), makes you feel bad more often, and a view that actually harms your health. Reality's quicksand has caught another victim.

More about this: A Negative Bias In Our Perception

Still more: Promotional Distortions

Further reading: How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. One of my favorite books.