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Optimism: What is Your Best Possible Self?

What is Optimism?

Optimism is the belief that you can somehow accomplish your goals. Expressed in everyday life terminology, optimism is looking at the bright side, seeing the glass as half-full rather than half-empty, finding the silver lining in a cloud, feeling good about your future and the future of the world, believing that defeat is a temporary setback and not your fault, and confronting a difficult situation and trying harder (Lyubomirsky, 2007; Seligman, 2006).

A simple way to look at optimism is to ask yourself – “In the face of difficulties, do I nonetheless believe that I can achieve my goals?” If yes, then you are optimistic; if no, you are pessimistic (Peterson, 2000). An important lesson here is that being optimistic, however, doesn’t mean that you deny the negative or avoid all unfavorable information or that you constantly try to control situations that cannot be controlled.

What is Your Best Possible Self?

The Best Possible Self exercise is the most studied optimism intervention in the field of positive psychology. In a study, individuals who wrote about their Best Possible Selves in the future were less upset, happier, and got sick less often (King, 2001). The exercise is described below (King, 2001; Meevissen et al., 2011):

"Your Best Possible Self means imagining yourself in a future in which everything has turned out as good as possible. Take a few minutes to select a future time period (e.g., 5 to 10 years from now). Imagine you have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined."

Tips on the Best Possible Self Exercise
  • Visualize your best possible self in a way that is very pleasing to you and that you are interested in.
  • Be as creative and imaginative as you desire.
  • Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings.
  • Think about things that are positive and attainable and not unrealistic fantasies. Don’t compare yourself to some idealized version of yourself as this may backfire.
  • Don’t worry about perfect grammar and spelling.
Writing about your Best Possible Self helps you organize, integrate, and analyze your thoughts together in a coherent manner. This then allows you to find meaning in your life experiences and see the “big picture” of your life and where you are going (Lyubomirsky, 2007).

Benefits of Optimism

Besides promoting well-being and decreasing depressive symptoms, optimism offers a cornucopia of benefits as mentioned below (Duggal, 2018):
  • Higher levels of self-esteem
  • Positive mood
  • More resilience to stressful or negative events
  • Self-mastery
  • Active coping
  • Recovery from illnesses, injuries, various types of surgeries, and major life events
  • Better immune reactivity
  • Better survival rates in certain kinds of cancer such as breast cancer
  • Lower overall mortality risk and longevity
Thus, if you desire better mood, more resilience, better physical health, and longer life, then having an upbeat view of life may not be a bad idea. Of course, you want to avoid optimism as a coping strategy in situations where the cost of  failure is high. You wouldn't want the pilot to rely solely on optimism to safely land an airplane during a thunderstorm!

To learn more about evidence-based self-management techniques that are proven to work for depression, check out Dr. Duggal's Author Page.

HARPREET S. DUGGAL, MD, FAPA


REFERENCES

Duggal, H. S. (2018). The happiness guide to self-management of depression. Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing.

King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798-807.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The how of happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Meevissen, Y. M. C., Peters, M. L., & Alberts, H. J. E. M. (2011). Become optimistic by imagining a best possible self: effects of a two week intervention. Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 42, 371-378.

Peterson, C. (2000). The future of optimism. American Psychologist, 55(1), 44-55.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned optimism. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
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