In the age of COVID, what exactly does it mean to be optimistic? I get this question quite a bit from virtually everyone I meet in one form or another through my work with the George Washington Resiliency and Well-Being Center in Washington, D.C. Giving a lecture on resilience and staying positive can be a significant challenge. Especially when we wake up to the news that 1 of every 100 older Americans has died secondary to COVID. The mind doesn’t really know how to process this type of loss. It is hard to maintain any form of a positive attitude when you’re still struggling just to accept the magnitude of what humanity has experienced over the past 2 years.
Dr. Lorenzo Norris
In “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges,” (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Steven M. Southwick, MD, and Dennis S. Charney, MD, identify 10 critical factors associated with very resilient individuals. The authors based their work on science, personal experience, and interviews of people who have literally been through hell and back. One of the critical factors they identified is optimism.
“Optimism ignites resilience, providing energy to power the other resilience factors. It facilitates an active and creative approach to coping with challenging situations.”
Dr. Southwick and Dr. Charney are a lot smarter than me and far more patient to weave all this data together into a coherent story about optimism. Sounds like a damn good factor to focus a lecture on in my book! Slight problem: In my experience, many health professionals are already expert optimists. They literally eat, sleep, and sincerely breathe this stuff. So if we are going to talk about optimism, then we need to discuss realistic optimism.
How does realistic optimism differ from, say, blind optimism? Dr. Southwick and Dr. Charney’s review of the literature points to three features worthy of highlighting.
Realistic vs. blind optimism: Take-home points
- In realistic optimism, we notice the negative but don’t stay engaged with it. Realistic optimists moved on from problems that were not solvable.
- Blind optimism can lead to underestimating risk, overestimating abilities, and inadequate preparation.
Growing up in northeast Ohio, I can absolutely embrace the concept of realistic optimism. It’s overcast in Cleveland 8 months out of the year. To hope for 3 sunny days in a row in April is genuinely a fools’ errand. So you learn over time, the sun will shine; you just have to at times wait 3-4 months for it to occur.