Stress, And Creating Your Own Reality

Bobby McFerrin’s popular song informs us that, when you worry your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down so don’t worry, be happy. This may sound like some kind of Norman Vincent Peale power of positive thinking pap, but it turns out that your subjective feelings impact your objective measures of health.  

Researchers have measures of optimism and pessimism for many kinds of personalities. They can then correlate these measures with health outcomes to see whether there is any connection at all.  

What they find is that – and I don’t mean to bum you out – but the list of health issues caused by pessimism is just depressing. Across 83 different studies, “mortality, survival, cardiovascular outcomes, … immune function, cancer outcomes, outcomes related to pregnancy … pain” were all significantly affected by whether you thought your glass was half full or half empty. On the other hand, in heart patients lower scores on pessimism happen in people with lower risks for stroke.  

This may be because, even if you are free of heart disease, levels of inflammation and vascular dysfunction are lower when optimism scores are higher. And in this long term, this may be why positive outlook on life is also linked to longevity. 

Given all this, it’s not off base to think about optimism as a medicine and pessimism as a toxin. And the impact of this medicine is dose dependent – the more you have it, the greater the impact. In this study of 1306 men, the likelihood of suffering any cardiac event varied in lockstep with measures of optimism/pessimism: the greater the optimism score, the greater the protection; the greater the pessimism score, the greater the risk.  

The bottom line is that, if you can influence your own health. If are optimistic about your health, you’re more likely to be right. If you are pessimistic about your health, you’re also more likely to be right. It’s the equivalent of Henry Ford’s comment that “whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”  

Can you create your own reality and make yourself instantly healthy forever? Nope, but the good news is that these data show that you may just be able to move the needle on your health in a positive direction by being positive about your health.