“Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t be harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” — Marcus Aurelius
Habits are an ancient art. Much of what Greek and Roman Stoics taught some 2,000 years ago, modern-day science now confirms. Marcus Aurelius’s view on how to handle negativity is no exception.
The primary concern of Stoicism is differentiating between what we can and can’t control, and then acting only on what we can influence. Often, this means doing inner work rather than trying to bend the world to our will — and it’s especially important when dealing with adversity.
After three decades of researching both happiness and depression, UPenn psychology professor Martin Seligman wrote a book called Learned Optimism. Its main message is this: How you react to a negative event determines almost entirely how much it will affect you.
That’s similar to what Marcus said: You can’t choose what happens, but you can choose what you feel. That includes everything that happens to you and how you feel about it. Emotions are a choice.
For many of us, this idea sounds new and unfamiliar, maybe even hard to believe — but it’s true. And there’s no better archetype than the optimist to show us how to make the most of it.
When we hear the word ‘optimist,’ we think of someone who always expects the best to happen. According to Seligman, that’s not the case. Surprisingly, being an optimist is mainly rooted in how we approach the negative.
Seligman calls optimism and pessimism explanatory styles — how we explain the bad things that happen in our lives. They differ in three ways:
1. Optimists see problems as temporary, pessimists see them as permanent.
Everything in life changes, and it does so all the time. Pessimists, however, are least likely to acknowledge this fact when it would most help them.
When a pessimist spills their coffee, they’ll say, “I always spill my coffee and ruin my clothes,” thus creating not just a bad association with coffee, but also a self-fulfilling prophecy when they have their next cup.
