Learned Optimism

Metadata

• Title: Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
• Author: Martin E.P. Seligman

Review

Too long, wish I didn’t read.

For a book that is titled “Learned Optimism”, it spends a remarkably little amount of content covering how to learn it. The vast majority of the book is context on the author’s research on depression, learned helplessness, and factors that contribute to it.

If the book were titled “The history of Learned Helplessness how I, Seligman, contributed to it”, then I would have had no problems. But the title falls far short on the promise. There are 15 chapters in the book. There is exactly one chapter, near the very end, that covers techniques for learning optimism. It provides one useful exercise. But this could have been delivered in a blog post - not in fifteen dense chapters of prose.

Takeaways

• learned helplessness is giving up
• depression
  • negative thought, mood, behavior, and physical response
• learned helplessness factor of how you explain events
  • permanence: is this forever
  • pervasiveness: is this all areas of your life
  • personalization: you vs situation
• ABCDE
  • adversity: state the adversity
  • belief: state your negative belief about the adversity
  • consequence: state the consequences of the negative belief
  • disputation: state why the belief might not be true
  • enervation: state the effect of your disputation
• role play with a friend, have them speak out loud your bad belief and then you argue against it