If You Think Life Stinks, You’re in Luck! Pessimists Get to Leave Early
Be careful what you think. It may lop years off your life.
People who tend to “catastrophize”--see personal difficulties stemming from a pervasive flaw either in themselves or the world--may die earlier than more optimistic people, researchers have found. The effect is most profound for men.
A catastrophic thought goes something like this: You didn’t get a job you applied for, but you attribute the loss to “I am stupid” instead of a specific cause, such as “the company has been downsizing.” If you apply “I am stupid” to many of your life’s disappointments, it becomes catastrophic thinking.
“This research provides compelling evidence in a large sample of initially healthy individuals that a psychological characteristic predicts early death some decades down the road,” says Christopher Peterson, a University of Michigan psychologist and co-author of the study that reviewed the death certificates and “explanatory styles of bad events” of 1,179 people. “Men and women didn’t differ in the personality style [of catastrophizing], but it had a greater effect on men,” he says.
The conclusions were extrapolated from the historic Terman Life-Cycle Study, which began in 1921 to track 1,528 healthy preadolescent children (mostly white, well-educated and of varied socioeconomic backgrounds).
The subjects were interviewed every five to 10 years by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman. In 1936 and 1940, the group was questioned in detail about difficult life experiences and their own personalities.
The researchers analyzed the way individuals explained and reacted to painful life experiences such as disappointments, death, failures, losses and bad relationships. They then looked for correlations between life approaches and the timing and cause of death among those study subjects who have died. The results were published in the March issue of the Journal of Psychological Science.
Statistically, men who catastrophize increase their risk of early death by 25% over other men and women, and are more likely to die of violence or in accidents than others, the study found. Negative thinkers on average died two years earlier than those who had expressed more positive ways of addressing setbacks in life.
As to why a personality trait like catastrophizing might lead to the early deaths of study subjects, the researchers observe: “Deaths like these are often not random. ‘Being in the wrong place at the wrong time’ may be the result of a pessimistic lifestyle.”
Catastrophizing can also “be hazardous because of its link to poor problem solving, social estrangement and risky decision making across diverse settings,” the researchers say.
Martin E.P. Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study, says the link between a catastrophic world view and early death probably isn’t deliberate thrill-seeking behavior.
“The hallmark of a pessimist is passivity,” he says. “You don’t do anything to avoid or escape a bad situation or event; you just sit there.”
Seligman cites an earlier study of people’s reactions to tornado warnings. It found that optimistic people took precautions after hearing the warnings while pessimists didn’t do anything.
Seligman and Peterson have also studied smokers’ behavior after then-Surgeon Gen. C. Everett Koop declared nicotine addictive, and found that many optimists gave up cigarettes while pessimists did not. “They didn’t think it mattered,” says Seligman.
Some examples of catastrophic thinking offered by the researchers are blatant. “I can’t find a parking place because I’m a loser,” was one.
But such negativism is not always overt. “It can be subtle, as in, ‘I am not happy with my career, but then I have always been the kind of person who takes on more than I can do.’
“There is not a lot of hope in that statement compared to someone who says ‘Gee, I made a mistake at work but at least I didn’t screw up at home,’ ” says Peterson.
Catastrophizers are not doomed to a life of toxic pessimism. Seligman, author of “Learned Optimism” (Knopf, 1991), says that this personality trait can be changed.
“Optimism is a learnable trait, unlike IQ,” says Seligman. “You basically learn how to recognize the catastrophic thoughts and learn how to dispute them, as if they were set by an external person in life whose goal is to make you miserable. You marshal evidence against the catastrophic.”
