Learned Optimism, How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin Seligman

As a rule, I don’t read self-help books. And when I do, I approach them with trepidation; I’m averse to raising my expectations of change just because someone I’ve never met suspects that by reducing my inner monologue to a carousel of clichés, I can earn more money, feel more worthy, be more worthy, smile less ruefully when listening to Talking Head’s Once In A Lifetime, etc., etc..

No. If I want to help myself, I find one of the few people I know who tell me things that I don’t want to hear (these people are invaluable, though they take a long time to grow and I haven’t noticed them breeding yet), and ask them for advice.

Problem is, one of them told me to read this self-help book. Then I recommended it to another one who asked me to review it.  So, here goes...

Learned Optimism was originally released in 1990 and this second reissue comes after the success of Seligman’s 2002 book, Authentic Happiness, and along with the current vogue for investigating that most curious and elusive of human states. This book isn’t about happiness though; it’s about counteracting feelings of helplessness.

Seligman is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been researching and writing about depression for over thirty years. He argues that if people believe themselves to be helpless, then they become depressed, and this depression is characterised by patterns of negative thinking, especially negative ways of explaining both bad and good events. He maintains that these negative explanatory styles have important and detrimental consequences on people’s actions, and hence on their lives. 

Learned Optimism provides a convincing and well supported argument for the value of optimistic thinking in a variety of contexts and a how-to guide for changing one’s thinking to make it more optimistic. There is a self-test in the first part of the book to help the reader understand particular characteristics of their explanatory style and what effect they might have, and the last third of the book contains techniques (cognitive therapy) for remedying negative explanatory styles.

The second part of the book is concerned with extolling the benefits of optimism in various spheres of life, and savvy readers may decide to cherry-pick chapters from this section if time is short.  My friends and I were surprised to see how pessimistic we measured on the self-test, though I did suspect that that might be because we’re British rather than because we’re die-hard pessimists!

We all rate the book highly though it is worth noting that it focuses on changing the explanatory style of those who react pessimistically to adversity, rather than those who explain away positive events. Seligman is engaging, and he writes very honestly – it’s clear what he doesn’t know as well as what he does, oh so rare for self-help writers. For that reason, I don’t hesitate to recommend the book to other self-help cynics. 

Review by Stephen Pollitt (first published in the Depression Alliance Scotland Newsletter Issue 3 2009). 

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