[LifeStyle] How being realistic can be key to your wellbeing

[_Klay_]

 

Life coaches and motivational speakers often treat positive thinking as the key to happiness. Self-help books tend to promote a similar message, with Norman Vincent Peale’s bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking claiming:When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.The idea is not merely that optimistic thinking dispels present gloom, but that it also launches a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby simply believing in success delivers it. In happiness terms, optimistic thinking seems to be a win-win strategy.Perhaps this is why unrealistic optimism – the tendency to overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen and underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen – is one of the most pervasive human traits. Studies consistently show that a large majority of the po[CENSORED]tion (about 80% according to most estimates) display an overly optimistic outlook.But pessimism does have its advocates. Despite the fact that expecting the worst can be extremely psychological painful, pessimists are, by their nature, fairly immune to disappointment.As the English writer Thomas Hardy noted:Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.This view receives implicit support from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his late colleague, Amos Tversky. According to their concept of loss aversion, we feel twice as much pain from losses than we experience joy from equal gains.For example, the pain of an unexpected loss of £5 is twice as strong as the joy of an unexpected gain of £5. In most cases, whether a gain or a loss is perceived, depends on what was expected. Getting a pay raise of £5,000 may seem like a loss if you were expecting £10,000. Unrealistic optimists, by expecting a lot, are setting themselves up for large doses of destructive disappointment.These behavioural views of the merits of an optimistic or pessimistic mindset contrast with the perspective of mainstream economics according to which it is best to have realistic beliefs. The point is that to make good decisions, accurate, unbiased information is required.