From REAL SIMPLE Special Edition: Understanding Mental Health, December 2022
Optimism is a key ingredient to living a satisfying life. Here's how brain chemistry and lifestyle shifts can lead to a sunnier outlook.
MENTAL HEALTH is on everyone's mind, and for good reason. The pandemic and its many related challenges have led to a continued global surge in symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
Even those who haven't lost loved ones or haven't experienced serious or prolonged illness have been profoundly affected psychologically by this ordeal.
The fact that more people are prioritizing mental well-being is, for the most part, a good thing. Taking it seriously means adopting healthy behaviors and prioritizing the parts of life that matter most.
Some feelings—optimism, for example—may be among the most important ingredients in a healthy, satisfying, and successful life. "Optimism is defined as positive expectations about the future," says Tali Sharot, PhD, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. In 2011, Sharot literally wrote the book on optimism: The Optimism Bias. She says positive expectations are crucial because they motivate us to do things that contribute to well-being in all facets of life. Whether you're starting a new business or taking up Pilates, optimism about the endeavor raises the likelihood that you'll stick with it. "If you think it's likely you'll be successful, you're more likely to put in the effort and hours, and so you're more likelv to do well" Sharot says. Research has even linked optimism to a longer life span. On the other hand, a lack of optimism drags you down. It suffocates your motivation to make healthy changes or engage in behaviors that support mental health. Optimism's evil twin-pessimism, the belief that nothing will ever work out for the best-is a "core feature" of depression, Sharot says.
But there may also be a downside to over-scrutinizing your mood and attempting to improve it. Some research has found that emotional check-ins-asking yourself how good or happy you're feeling-set you up to feel a little worse. "The moment you check in-'Am I happy enough?'-you feel happiness less," says Iris Mauss, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. "The very question interferes with happiness."
Work by Mauss and others in her field has shown that our mood can sometimes resemble an obstreperous child: The more we try to make it behave, the less cooperative it becomes. That doesn't mean we should ignore our feelings or give up attempts to cultivate positive emotions. The stakes are just too high.
Taken together, all of this work presents a bit of a conundrum. Spending too much time focusing on your mental state may in some ways be self-defeating. On the other hand, optimism and other positive mood states are critical to well-being. Importantly, they are attainable through some effort and understanding, according to research.
While the findings may seem at odds, there are ways to square them. "One lesson is that if you're just paying attention to your internal state and focusing on how you're feeling, that might not be the best course toward positivity," Mauss says. But if you recognize that your mood is a by-product of your behaviors and experiences, that can energize you to make changes that have real, positive impacts on how you feel. Research has shown that some behaviors or activities support mood improvement at a biochemical level.
If you've spent much time reading about mood and mental health, you've heard of serotonin and dopamine. These two molecules perform a lot of different jobs in the human body, but both are neurotransmitters that research has linked to emotion and mood.
"Dopamine and serotonin generally are thought to play big roles in mood disorders," says Anthony Grace, PhD, distinguished professor of neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. Some research has found that "alterations" in specific serotonin brain receptors may be a feature of both anxiety and depression. Some of Grace's own work, including a 2016 paper in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, suggests that problems with the dopamine system contribute to depression and other mental disorders.
"The dopamine system seems involved in reward and motivation," Grace says. Specifically, dopamine encourages feelings of pleasure, which we need in order to feel motivated and optimistic. "In depression, there tends to be a big decrease in dopamine, so you don't get pleasure from things in your environment," he explains.
Sharot, who has conducted research on dopamine, says the molecule plays a selective role in how the brain interprets and learns from positive and negative experiences. "We've shown that elevated dopamine will reduce the ability to learn from a negative, but it will enhance learning from something positive," she says.
Like the song says, you've got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Dopamine seems to do both, and this promotes optimism, she says. The part that serotonin plays in mood and emotion is less clear. "What serotonin does is a huge mystery, Sharot says. "There have been different theories, but then the data doesn't support them, so we don't really know"
Some of the most prescribed drugs for mental health problems-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs -target serotonin pathways in the brain. While medical researchers can see how these drugs shift brain chemistry, they don't know how the shifts produce mental health benefits. In scientific terms, the "mechanism of action" is not well understood.
Experts have a better handle on the activity of the dopamine system, yet drug treatments that target it are not reliably effective. "It's often trial and error to see if it works," Sharot says. "Sometimes there are treatment-resistant individuals for whom none of these work."
While the science on pharmaceutical treatments that target brain chemicals is complex and hotly debated, there's evidence that healthy activities also affect the activity of dopamine, serotonin, and their related systems. Grace mentions exercise and time spent in nature as activities that research has linked to both mood improvements and increases in dopamine. But again, the relationship between these pursuits and mood is not well mapped. "The connection between exercise or green spaces and any antidepressant actions -what causes those is kind of a mystery," he says.
In the end, it might be best to think of neurochemicals as by-products of mood-elevating behaviors rather than as the cause of any positive feelings. Put another way, the activity of these molecules may change when you're feeling good or bad, but that doesn't mean they are the cause of those feelings.
Experts say lifestyle changes—especially those that help control stress—are among the most effective and evidence-backed ways to elevate your mood and optimism level. Sharot explains that stress makes the brain "hypervigilant" to negative information. That's not a problem in small doses. But if you're stressed all the time and your brain is perpetually preoccupied with negative information, that's going to be a drag on your optimism and, more broadly, on your mood and well-being. "Stress is a feature in all psychiatric disorders," she points out. "Anything that reduces stress will, in theory, enhance optimism." She also highlights exercise, meditation practices (such as mindfulness), and social interaction with close friends as activities that seem to counteract stress and increase optimism.
Practicing gratitude is another evidence-backed way to boost your optimism-and maybe also your life satisfaction and well-being. "Gratitude is like fertilizer for the mind, spreading connections and improving its function in nearly every realm of experience," says Robert Emmons, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Try writing in a journal about something positive that happens to you on any given day. It's a simple and research-backed habit that can boost your mood and cultivate a brighter outlook.
