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Making Yourself Miserable to Succeed?
PeterAitch writes "Nature is reporting that expecting the worst - emotional cushioning - does not usually make you feel any better when you flunk or flop. The reported study indicates that you are just making yourself miserable. On the flip-side, people who are anxious are more likely to motivate themselves better to prepare for the forthcoming ordeal - defensive pessimists. Those with a generally sunny outlook on life expect to succeed and tend to deny responsibility when they perform badly."
So they think that it sucks to think you're going to fail unless it makes you anxious enough to study.
How do they get to making that leap when the study they did didn't afford people an opportunity to prepare in a way that they'd be able to perform better?
That whole thing sounded like they were taking what they learned -- the concept that if you think you can't, you can't -- and appended to it their own thoughts, unrelated to the study, to make people feel better.
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I, for one, welcome our happy, upbeat, responsibility-denying overlords! May they ever smile at whatever disaster unfolds before them! They don't need to avoid any prophesies of doom - they can embrace them and enjoy the support of all they bring with them into an unknowable oblivion. Hooray!
It's not pessimism if you WANT the world to end!
[/insanity]
Really though, this article reads much akin to a classic story of political gamesmanship. People generally would rather be lead to a horrific war on words of false hope than actually deal with the uncertainty of complex politics. Labelling optimism and pessimism as stark good or bad is a misleading guide to live your life - one should rather feed one's emotions as they need to, while striving to look at reality as clearly as one can. It'll never be an easy game to play, but it's easier to improve one's outlook through honesty than many would suspect.
Ryan Fenton
I agree with "hope for the best" — as the article says, people who expect bad things to happen are just making themselves miserable, without actually gaining anything from it.
I certainly don't agree with "expect the worst", that's exactly what's wrong. One must be prepared for the worst, not expect it. That is, you must think about the worst-case scenario and how to handle it instead of being foolishly optimistic and not worrying about it at all, but that does not mean you must actually believe that the worst-case thing is what will happen. The best state to be in is "I feel everything will turn out well (but if it doesn't, then I'm prepared for that too)."
(And as for "take whatever comes", you don't really have a choice there, do you?