Is It Healthier to Have a Positive or Negative Outlook During the Pandemic?

This finding is not surprising: if you are in the business of predicting the future, it’s better to be accurate than to over- or underestimate it. While it’s a wonderful feeling to hope, this feeling is outshined by the self-confidence that comes from having a rational head on your shoulder that scans the environment and develops a good sense of how it—and you—will evolve. 

Why? Because realists develop a strong trust in their own abilities. Confidence, after all, comes from the Latin roots for “trust with”—so self-confidence means you have developed trust with yourself. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather trust myself more, be self-confident and accurately predict the future than trust myself less and be consistently inaccurate in forecasting what’s to come because I’m either too optimistic or pessimistic.

Yet, as none of us can perfectly forecast the future, almost all of us veer toward either an optimistic or pessimistic prediction based on our personalities, how we were raised, and the people who influence us.

So which has a more positive effect on our well-being: being overly optimistic or pessimistic? Let’s consider these options. 

First, optimism. While a gloomy outlook dampens life, hope motivates and rejuvenates. As numerous studies have found, the dopamine inspired by hope and the pursuit of our goals keeps us enthusiastically moving forward. The chase, in fact, is often more motivating than the catch: for this reason, male rats release more dopamine during the pursuit of females than in actual copulation. 

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the infamous Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Dachau, provides a poignant example of the importance of not giving up hope—no matter what. According to Frankl, those prisoners who maintained their hope in realizing a greater purpose for their lives in the future—whether to return home to care for a child or to complete a series of scientific experiments to advance humanity they had begun before the war—were the most likely to survive. 

Now pessimism. As Frankl shared, the opposite was true for those prisoners who fell prey to a pessimistic outlook. “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.” Frankl chillingly describes the look a prisoner who had lost hope would have in their eyes: glazed over; devoid of any more motivation to live. Within a day or two, they were gone.

 Yet experiencing negative emotions has an upside: it makes you more vigilant. In an age when letting your guard (and mask) down may result in being infected by a dangerous virus, emotions such as apprehension and fear have their place.

In many ways, negative emotions contain an evolutionarily adaptive advantage. Consider our hominid ancestors on the wide-open plains: human beings have never been the A predators, and those who were always happy-go-lucky and content to meander around and whistle a tune were probably the first eaten.

So if you can accurately forecast the end of the pandemic, all power to you. Please let me know! If, however, you are like most of us and do not possess a crystal ball, you can strive to discover your own unique balance between positive thinking about what awaits and a sober awareness of some of the negative health outcomes you wish to avoid.