Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

If you see it as half full, good for you. You're an optimist. You generally believe that good things will happen and you look on the bright side of life.

Pessimists see you as too pollyanna or as always having on rose-colored glasses. They believe that if something bad's gonna happen, it will. While you have hope, they have negativity.

Years ago, I went to a traditional African wedding. Before the ceremony started, a barefoot African woman entered with a very wide shallow wooden bowel. Her movements were slow and purposefully exaggerated as she lifted this bowl back and forth across the aisle towards the guests and chanted "Put the negativity in the bowl." It was so tangible, this bowl, and so such a simple concept. "Here, in the bowl. Put your negativity" And then, in a final swishing of her flowing colorful dress, she was gone as quickly as she appeared, carrying our negativity far, far away. Despite my optimistic disposition, I still felt unburdened as that bowl was taken away. 

Not only do cynics have their negativity, they also have ill health effects. A recent study published last month, "Optimism, Cynical Hostility, and Incident Coronary Heart Disease and Mortality in the Women's Health Initiative" *, investigated the association of optimism and cynical hostility with coronary heart disease. While this isn't the first study to evaluate how negativity affects cardiovascular disease (which it affects negatively), it is the first study to evaluate how optimism affects cardiovascular disease.  

Almost 100,000 women were tested to see if they were optimists or cynics. In case you're wondering, no, they didn't use the glass half full or half empty test which probably would've been alot easier. Instead, researchers used validated questionnaires to assess levels of optimism and cynical hostility. You can try the optimism questionnaire for yourself.

So what's that score mean in terms of your health? Having a positive outlook has a positive correlation with a lower incidence of coronary heart disease and death. Women more prone to cynical hostility had a higher risk of total and cancer-related deaths.

I hear the pessimists saying, but wait, maybe the ones with cynical hostility had more risk factors for cancer or heart disease. Maybe it was their poorer baseline health that made them less optimistic and contributed to the study results. Those comments show that you're thinking, but the researchers thought of that, too, and even after adjusting for baseline characteristics, the link between optimism and better health outcomes still persisted.

Why and how does cynical hostility affect health outcomes? While no one knows for sure, there are several ideas. Imaging studies show different neural responses between optimists and pessimists. Blood pressure may be negatively affected in those with more negative attitudes. The body's autonomic nervous system, that "fight or flight" response, may be on high alert in non-optimists. This may "speed up the process of diseases such as atherosclerosis." Finally, those with cynical hostility may be more likely to have unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking, poor diets, or they may not follow their doctor's instructions. After all, if you think the worst is going to happen anyway, why bother?

Well, there really is a reason to bother as this study showed. Honestly, has having a negative attitude really ever helped? Nah, just put it in the bowl.

"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true."                                                                                                 J. Robert Oppenheimer     

*A little more background about the Women's Health Initiative: This is "one of the most definitive, far reaching programs of research on women's health ever undertaken in the US". It is a huge study. Researchers studied over 161,808 postmenopausal women between the ages of 50-79 over fifteen years. WHI focused on heart disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer and fractures from osteoporosis.