Martin Seligman (quotes)

We’re not prisoners of the past.
I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.
Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.
I don’t mind being wrong, and I don’t mind changing my mind.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.
Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.
Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.
While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
Optimism generates hope…hope releases dreams…dreams set goals…enthusiasm follows
Pleasure is the least consequential… engagement and meaning are much more important.
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.
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I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.
Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.
I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.
The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.
Money, amazingly, is losing its power… Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good. This
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external.
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.
The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.
I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.
The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.
The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
If you were an optimistic teen, then you’ll be an optimist at 80. People’s reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.
I’m trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.
On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.
One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.
Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
The clearer the rules and the limits enforced by parents, the higher the child’s self-esteem. The more freedom the child had, the lower his self-esteem.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.
Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.
Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.
It’s no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What’s interesting is where they do better. It’s in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch.
To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water… The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.
Raising children … was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
The word ‘happiness’ always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it’s subjective.
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.
I don’t think anyone’s found a way of eliminating thoughts of danger and loss. It’s rather that, when they’re unrealistic, you become an acrobat at marshaling evidence against them.
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.
Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.
There is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.
In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we’ve been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the ‘I’ gets bigger and bigger, and the ‘we’ gets smaller and smaller.
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.
Above all, during the interval, change from ego orientation to task orientation. Think: I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they’d move away from me. … And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.
Try to reframe the provocation: Maybe he’s having a rough day. There’s no need to take it personally. Don’t act like a jerk just because he is. He couldn’t help it. This could be a testy situation, but easy does it.
Being in touch with what we do well underpins the readiness to change, David continued. This is related to the Losada ratio. To enable us to hear criticism nondefensively and to act creatively on it, we need to feel secure.
If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn’t work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems.
The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When
Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.
There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism.
I’ve been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I’m really not comfortable with the notion of present.
Optimistic people generally feel that good things will last a long time and will have a beneficial effect on everything they do. And they think that bad things are isolated: They won’t last too long and won’t affect other parts of life.
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It’s about education, work, marriage – it’s even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.
When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.
It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, ‘You want to know what’s wrong with me.’
Anger, unlike fear or sadness, is a moral emotion. It is righteous. It aims not only to end the current trespass but to repair any damage done. It also aims to prevent further trespass by disarming, imprisoning, emasculating, or killing the trespasser.
Do you have a problem with alcohol? Is it abuse, or, worse, do you depend on drinking to get through the day? It will not surprise you to find out that the lines between handling liquor well, abusing alcohol, and being dependent on it are far from clear.
Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world’s largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research – but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.
P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That’s the human dashboard.
I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
In human history, we are going from knowledge to omniscience, from potence to omnipotence, from ethics and religion to righteousness. So, in my view, God comes at the end of this long process. This may not happen in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn’t be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy – just not in the same moment that you’re sad.
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn’t very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
It’s my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we’re the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine. Martin Reese
It’s a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES.
I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.
We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children, as the feel-good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning-persistence skills.
I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.
Alcoholics are, in truth, failures, and their failure is a simple failure of will. They have made bad choices, and they continue to do so every day. By calling them victims of a disease, we magically shift the burden of the problem from choice and personal control, where it belongs, to an impersonal force—disease.
Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero.
There is an interesting scientific dispute about realism and optimism. Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.
I’m all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn’t take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.
Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical ‘experience machine’ that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings.
In the struggle to cure syphilis in the first decade of the century, Paul Ehrlich concocted a drug, 606, that worked by poisoning Treponema pallidum, the spirochete that causes syphilis. It was called 606 because before it Ehrlich concocted 605 other drugs, none of which worked. Ehrlich, presumably, experienced 605 defeats but persisted.
Sexual performance problems, such as impotence and frigidity, are 70 to 90 percent changeable. But a homosexual who wants to be a heterosexual – that’s close to unchangeable. And a transsexual – say a man who believes he’s really a woman in a man’s body – is completely unchangeable; you’d have to change the body to conform to the psyche.
It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.
So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose
The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.
Positive emotion can be about the past, the present, or the future. The positive emotions about the future include optimism, hope, faith, and trust. Those about the present include joy, ecstasy, calm, zest, ebullience, pleasure, and (most importantly) flow; these emotions are what most people usually mean when they casually-but much too narrowly-talk about “happiness.” The positive emotions about the past include satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, pride, and serenity.
To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they’re wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.
Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being—purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition—has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south. How is this epidemic to be explained?
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. And just as dieters almost always regain the weight they lose, sad people don’t become lastingly happy, and happy people don’t become lastingly sad.
I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.
Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.
TRANSCENDING Escher got it right. Men step down and yet rise up, the hand is drawn by the hand it draws, and a woman is poised on her very own shoulders. Without you and me this universe is simple, run with the regularity of a prison. Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs, stars collapse at the specified hour, crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule. But we, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years to fit this place, we know it failed. For we can reshape, reach an arm through the bars and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out. And while whales feeding on mackerel are confined forever in the sea, we climb the waves, look down from clouds. —From Look Down from Clouds (Marvin Levine, 1997)
The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.
After a heated dispute, we each undertook an assignment for the next class: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity, and write about both. The results were life-changing. The afterglow of the pleasurable activity (hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae) paled in comparison with the effects of the kind action. When our philanthropic acts were spontaneous and called upon personal strengths, the whole day went better. One junior told about her nephew phoning for help with his third-grade arithmetic. After an hour of tutoring him, she was astonished to discover that for the rest of the day, I could listen better, I was mellower, and people liked me much more than usual. The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. Time stops.
YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.

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