First the bad news: About half of us apparently tend toward pessimism from birth. Pessimists tend to catastrophize problems. Moreover, pessimists always find exactly one person to blame for all the evils in the world: themselves. In the Stone Age, when Homo sapiens still had to fight for survival every day, pessimism was not such a bad idea. It simply paid to be extremely paranoid. Those who did not always immediately suspect the worst and prepare for it were soon history. Whether poisonous spiders, snakes, saber-toothed tigers, or simply a horde of hungry, club-wielding Neanderthals—death and destruction lurked under every stone and around every corner. Anyone who was not extremely cautious under such circumstances and constantly on guard against death and the devil simply no longer existed after a very short time. And so it came to pass that those who had many fears and worries survived and passed their genes on to us.
Physiologically speaking, we are not particularly different from Stone Age humans. What was very useful in an extremely hostile environment—our memory of pain and fear—has become a curse in the modern world. Depression and anxiety disorders, along with countless other chronic and degenerative diseases, are now responsible for a large proportion of the costs in our healthcare system. Of course, people still die in traffic accidents or from other “natural” causes. By far the greater share, however—not only of deaths but above all of the unimaginable amount of “silent decline” and miserable, helpless suffering endured by many people—is no longer caused by a hostile environment but by a corrupted “inner milieu.” Put differently: by the currently still largely neglected, but entirely learnable, ability to self-regulate.
In this painting by Albert Edelfelt, Louis Pasteur examines a bottle in which the dried spinal cord of a rabid rabbit hangs from a thread above a drying agent. Pasteur was the founder of the vaccine industry. Is it possible that the vaccine debate is missing the actual point? The benefits and risks of individual vaccines are determined by empirical research—not by this blog. What is far more interesting, however, is what the next evolutionary step of humanity might look like. The more highly developed an organism is, the greater its capacity for self-regulation. This can be illustrated by thermoregulation. While plants, fungi, fish, amphibians, and reptiles still depend on sunlight for their metabolism, birds and mammals can largely regulate their body temperature independently of the ambient temperature. Could something similar apply, within limits, to our immune system? An extreme example of this theory is the "Iceman" Wim Hof, who demonstrated in a widely publicized experiment that parts of the immune response can be consciously influenced. (Of course, being immune to viruses does not make anyone invulnerable—some sobriety is essential.)
In antiquity, people believed that human health—apart from the “will of the gods,” that is—essentially depended on the interplay of various bodily fluids. Eastern health traditions still contain similar ideas about a universal life energy, known there as “Prana,” “Ki,” or “Chi.” Even in the late nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), the “father of microbiology” and developer of the first vaccines, personally believed in a vitalistic life force that could not be explained purely physically. The term “Milieu Interieur” originated with Pasteur’s contemporary Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and refers to the 60–70% fluid content of the human body that is now called the “extracellular matrix.” Walter Cannon (1871–1945) took up Bernard’s concept of the milieu and developed it into the concept of “homeostasis.” Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), in turn, transferred Cannon’s concepts to cybernetics. And so the diffuse idea of an obscure “life force” from earlier centuries entered modern natural science as the “ability to self-regulate,” where it is still regarded as one of the primary properties of all living systems.
Now the good news: Optimism can be learned. Martin Seligman, the “father of positive psychology”—not to be confused with the rightly criticized naïve “positive thinking”—believes that an “optimistic explanatory style” can be systematically learned, which in turn has a positive effect on the “milieu.” In the 1950s, Seligman studied the phenomenon of “learned helplessness” intensively. Animals that were subjected to pain arbitrarily and repeatedly, without being able to do anything actively to stop it, soon became apathetic and resigned. The animals remained inactive and lethargic in their cages even after the simulated environmental conditions in the laboratory had long since changed again. Once conditioned, the experimental animals remained trapped in the helpless behavioral pattern of “learned helplessness” until their miserable end. Their immune systems were – as we can assume – permanently weakened. In this respect, they resemble the genetically predisposed pessimists among us, who continue to behave in an incredibly safe modern environment as extremely paranoid—and unfortunately often violent—Stone Age humans.
According to Seligman’s research, an optimistic and a pessimistic explanatory style for an experience judged to be negative differ fundamentally in three respects: 1. The expected duration, 2. The extent of the damage caused, and 3. The inferred causes. To illustrate this, let us apply it to the current coronavirus crisis. The pessimist unconsciously thinks that this crisis will last “a very long time” and change the world “forever”—in a negative direction, of course (1). These negative changes will affect “every area of life” (2). The crisis is blamed, depending on one’s preference, on nature, the government, the Chinese, the pharmaceutical cartel, “dark forces,” aliens, or Bill Gates personally. In any case, there is a sinister plan behind it, one that intends to deprive me of my personal freedoms, won through countless heroic acts of sacrifice (3). The optimist, by contrast, thinks that the crisis will be over within the foreseeable future (1) and that hardly anyone will remember it afterward (2). The optimist—who, unlike the pessimist, does not regard himself as the center of world events—cultivates an attitude of pronoia: the completely unfounded initial suspicion—an ethical decision, in other words—that the universe might ultimately have his best interests at heart (3).
The two explanatory styles can also be applied to positive experiences. Suppose—purely theoretically, of course—that someone wrote a blog post and concluded as a result that they had achieved something great. The pessimist now thinks that it must be a brief (1), completely isolated (2) coincidence (3). Someone affected by the frighteningly widespread impostor syndrome believes deep down that everything good that happens to them must ultimately be based on a mistake that will be uncovered sooner or later. The optimist, by contrast, thinks that this will be only the beginning (1) of a long series of successful experiences in their life (2), ultimately resulting from what an awesome person (3) they themselves are.
The question of the “right” explanatory style cannot be decided “objectively.” Like all ethical decisions, it ultimately comes down to a matter of faith. Faith is a decision about what I “base my actions on in all fidelity.” If “I”—as both Buddha and modern neuroscience suggest to us—am merely a habit, then with a great deal of patience and practice I can also learn to be an optimist and thereby perhaps positively influence my immune system.
You can find more about the connection between self-efficacy and the immune system in Self-Efficacy, Stress, and the Immune System: What We Can Influence and in World Peace Is Decided in the Bedrooms. You can find the complete overview in our comprehensive salutogenesis overview.