by Jenna Pope

Created on: June 01, 2009   Last Updated: June 03, 2009

Some people think that our emotions and lives are determined entirely by our circumstances. But this is not true. Our thoughts and attitudes are just as important as what happens to us.

Optimists have a tendency to perceive things in a positive way. No matter what happens, they tend to see the bright side of life. Of course, the opposite of this is pessimism and pessimistic people, tend to see negative things in every event. This has been studied by psychologists and it turns out, that it is highly predictive of many things, one of them being how long you are going to live. Optimism, more than anything else, predicts how long a life you are going to have and there are a multitude of studies that support this.

In 1938 and 1940, a study was done in optimism and pessimism with graduates of Yale Law School. They did a personality test where they would ask questions like:

When bad things happen to you, what do you do?

Here are the types of answers the Yale Law School graduates gave:

When bad things happen to me, I try to find the lesson in these things.

Versus . . .

When bad things happen to me, I feel overwhelmed and I don't know what I should do.

The scientists collected all the data and thirty-five years later, looked to see how many of those people were still alive. It turned out that the pessimists who died from all different causes of death, were five times more likely to die during that time period.

Optimism is something you can cultivate and grow within yourself, if you don't already have it. Not only does it make life more enjoyable, it makes life longer!

Take the case of the Nun Study, where scientists looked at a group of nuns who lived together in a convent. They had the same routine and did the same things together every day. They had the same religious beliefs. They were exposed to mostly the same illnesses because if one nun would get it, the others would get it. A variety of things made them a similar group of people in their environment. They were much more similar than other groups of people.

When the nuns entered the convent, they were told to write an essay of what their life was like before they got there. All the scientists did was score how many positive and negative words were used in each of the essays. Words like happy, nice, smiling those would get a +1. Words like sad, crying, got a -1.

They totaled their scores and broke the nuns into four groups: The 25% most optimistic (those using the most positive words in their essay),

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