The current issue of Psychology Today examines how important academic breakthroughs in understanding what makes us happy have been co-opted and distorted by the self-help movement to the point where some psychologists are now turning tail and feeling the need to extol the virtues of sadness.

It must be almost enough to wipe the smile clean off Martin Seligman’s face.

Seligman has built his career studying the benefits of positive thinking and the dangers of excessive pessimism. But he is no flaky self-help guru. In the course of his career his discoveries have helped overturn the conventional wisdom of his field, including the belief that all behaviour can be explained without reference to a person’s mental state, and the idea that depression is a disease best treated with drugs and electroconvulsive therapy.

His first major discovery was that of learned helplessness. He subjected laboratory animals to minor electric shocks, giving one group the ability to turn off the shocks by pressing a lever, while another group were given no control over the shocks. The animals were then moved to a pen where they could easily escape the shocks by jumping over a low partition. The group which had learnt to control the shocks quickly jumped over the partition, while the majority of those that had been given no control just sat there and continued to be shocked, having seemingly given up hope.

Further experiments demonstrated that humans exhibit similar behaviour. For example, two groups were given an anagram quiz. Group 1’s anagrams were easy to solve, whereas Group 2’s were not anagrams at all, and therefore could not be solved. When both groups were then given a further identical set of soluble anagrams to unscramble, Group 1 performed significantly better than Group 2. The effect of helplessness on future attitude and performance have been confirmed in numerous other experimental situations.

The results of these and subsequent similar experiments were important in the field of psychology because they proved that mindset had an important role to play in determining behaviour, something which may seem obvious to us now, but which dealt a severe blow to orthodox thinking in the psychological community at the time. However, it was another aspect of the results of the experiments which held the key to Seligman’s later research. It was found in the experiments that around a third of all those in the ‘helpless’ group did not actually give up. Whatever hopeless situations were thrown at them, they refused to give up. Roughly the same percentage of ‘incurable optimists’ was found irrespective of whether the test subject was an animal or a human being, and regardless of the structure of the experiment. Seligman wanted to find out why most people give up, and what could be learned from those that didn’t.

He found that whether people had an optimistic or pessimistic mindset was reflected by their explanatory style. When bad things happened to pessimists, they explained them as being permanent (“things will never get better”), pervasive (“I mess everything up”) and personal (“it’s all my fault”), whereas optimists characterised the same events as temporary, unique and caused by external factors. Seligman found that optimists bounced back quickly from setbacks, whereas pessimists took a long time to recover. His research showed that excessive pessimism was a highly significant predictor of depression and poor health in general.

Around the same time that Seligman was carrying out this research, Aaron T. Beck was developing a radical new form of psychotherapy which bypassed psychoanalysis’s obsession with the murky world of the subconscious, and directly tackled flaws and inconsistencies in patients’ core perceptions and beliefs about the world. Beck found that he could teach patients how to consciously identify and evaluate their thought processes, weeding out and correcting dysfunctional and distorted thinking. Ultimately, his methods evolved into cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a method of treatment which is now widely used to treat anxiety and mood disorders, and which is considered the most effective approach to resolving post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD and clinical depression.

Seligman was quick to note the relevance of Beck’s methods to his own findings. The hallmark of extreme pessimism was distorted thinking (permanence, pervasiveness and personalisation). If Beck was right, pessimists could be trained not to generalise, personalise and exaggerate their misfortunes, and thus escape the clutches of depression and bounce back from adversity much quicker. Seligman embarked on a personal mission to develop a ‘positive psychology’ which could provide people with the tools to learn optimism. In 1990, he published his findings for a general audience in his book Learned Optimism. In 1998, in his capacity as president of the American Psychology Association, Seligman chose positive psychology as the theme for his term of office, encouraging his colleagues to divert some of their attention away from the study of mental illness and towards ‘mental wellness’. The result was a flood of research into the causes of mental wellbeing, not only in psychology but also in other social sciences, particularly economics. As the current decade progressed, the results manifested themselves into a growing body of literature. As the Psychology Today article points out, 4,000 books were published on the subject last year compared to only 50 in the year 2000.

Some of the psychologists involved in the recent groundbreaking research into the necessary conditions for mental wellbeing have published highly readable accounts of their carefully tested and peer-reviewed findings. Among the most notable are Carol Dweck, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Daniel Gilbert.

Sadly, such rigour in the self-help genre is a rarity. Most texts are little more than rehashed homespun wisdom, dressing up the ideas of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale in the regalia of the latest new age trend. While the psychologists are careful to state the limitations of their theories, as their academic background has trained them to do, the self-proclaimed authors feel themselves to be under no such obligation. Applying positive thinking without qualification and direction can lead to negative results – willing oneself to recover from illness without seeking medical attention for example. Many self-help authors seem to see such distinctions as watering down their theories. The recent outbreak of literature such as The Secret, claiming that simply asking ‘The Universe’ for what you want is sufficient to get it as long as you totally eliminate negative thought, are the worst of the bunch, but many fail to point out the distinction between constructively positive approach and simple Pollyannaism. The difference is a subtle one, well illustrated by the following anecdote.

When Jim Collins, author of business bestsellers ‘Built to Last’ and ‘Good to Great’, wanted to define the characteristics of what made the difference between an ordinary CEO and a great one, he knew that although most of the business leaders he dealt with were positive thinkers, there was a qualitative difference between how they turned this thinking into effective action. He couldn’t put his finger on it until he met Jim Stockdale.

Stockdale was one of the most decorated naval officers in the history of the US Navy. In 1965, during his term of service in Vietnam, he was shot down behind enemy lines, and became the highest ranking naval prisoner of war in the conflict. He was held for seven years, and was repeatedly tortured during his captivity. When the Vietnamese wanted to film him for propaganda purposes, he slashed his own face and beat himself with a stool to prevent them from using his image. He taught other prisoners to resist torture, earning their immense respect as a leader. When released, he had a broken back, his arms had been wrenched from their sockets and one of his legs had been shattered beyond repair, but he had not broken under interrogation. Upon leaving the Navy, he took up residency at the University of Harvard to study stoic philosophy. It was here that Jim Collins interviewed him.

When Collins asked Stockdale what had given him the strength of mind to get through his ordeal, Stockdale replied, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Collins then asked him what characterised those who didn’t make it out. Stockdale answered, “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

He added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Collins called this the “Stockdale Paradox”, recognizing that optimism is not only no substitute for, but actually needs to be complemented by, an honest confrontation with the brutal facts of one’s situation. Without this, optimism is purely wishful thinking.

For this reason, it would be a terrible mistake at the moment for me to glibly try to convince myself each morning that this wonderful new day will bring me a job. The facts are that this particular day probably won’t. However, it is also true that I will find one eventually, and working in search of that goal each day can only help to bring it closer. Being positive that not only can I make it through this tough time, but actually enjoy and learn from the challenge is not just wishful thinking, it is both positive and reflective of my current experience.