In the age of COVID, what exactly does it mean to be optimistic? I get this question quite a bit from virtually everyone I meet in one form or another through my work with the GW Resiliency and Well-Being Center. Giving a lecture on resilience and staying positive can be a significant challenge. Especially when we wake up to the news that 1 of every 100 older Americans has died secondary to COVID. The mind doesn't really know how to process this type of loss. It is hard to maintain any form of a positive attitude when you're still struggling just to accept the magnitude of what humanity has experienced over the past 2 years.
In Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges, (Southwick and Charney, 2018), the authors identify 10 critical factors associated with very resilient individuals. The authors based their work on science, personal experience, and interviews of people who have literally been through hell and back. One of the critical factors they identified is optimism.
"Optimism ignites resilience, providing energy to power the other resilience factors. It facilitates an active and creative approach to coping with challenging situations."
Southwick and Charney are a lot smarter than me and far more patient to weave all this data together into a coherent story about optimism.
