Where would humanity be without our mild delusion? Many of the technologies we take for granted, from the light bulb to iPhones, would cease to exist without relentless resolve. Stephen King, rejected dozens of times, persisted and became one of the world’s top-selling authors. Any entrepreneur maintains a bit of in the face of the staggering statistic that nearly half of US businesses close within five years. Hopeful romantics are indeed a touch overconfident when you consider a third of Americans who have ever wed get divorced.
So we pursue longshot careers and love, buy lottery tickets, and train hard to better our 5k time due to a tendency to assume the best, known as the optimism bias. The phenomenon describes the near-universal disposition to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening, and underplaying the risk of negative ones. Whenever anyone considers themselves smarter or more capable than the average person or more likely to win big at a casino, that’s the optimism bias at work.
It stands to reason, then, that moderate delusion can be a positive force. Research has found a sunny disposition to mitigate symptoms of depression. When you expect the best, you’re less stressed and anxious and actually perceive a higher quality of life. But there are also limits. Unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behaviors: overspending (I’ll make more money soon!), not wearing a seat belt (Other people get in car accidents, not me!) or forgoing insurance (I’m healthier than most!). Then there’s the inevitable disappointment if you fail to land the promotion you swore you were getting, or if your feelings for your crush go unrequited.
“Some people say you should be very pessimistic, because then you’re never disappointed,” says Chris Dawson, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Bath, “but that’s not optimal, because pessimism, always thinking the worst, makes us feel bad. We get depressed, and [it] doesn’t motivate us to do anything. So yes, you’re never disappointed, but you’re constantly in a state of anxiety because you’re expecting bad things to happen.”
So, how to strike the appropriate balance between optimism and realism? Experts say to focus on what you can control and don’t let optimism prevent you from reading the writing on the wall.
“Optimism’s greatest power”
The optimism bias leads people to think that positive things will happen to them, but not without any effort. “It’s not a belief that things will just turn out okay by magic,” says Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and author of The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. “It’s more belief that we have control and we have the ability to make our life better, to be healthy by doing the right things, to be successful by doing the right things, to have good relationships by going out and finding them.”
The realization that we have some control over our fate is what Christian Waugh, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University, calls “optimism’s greatest power.” Even if the likelihood of, say, writing a New York Times bestseller is relatively low, “if I’m optimistic about it and I get that sense of control,” Waugh says, “then I do the behaviors that are necessary for making that thing happen. By being optimistic, I have now improved my probability of that thing happening.” The best version of optimism inspires action, whether that’s working harder or asking for help and support. Instead of assuming a lofty goal is beyond the realm of possibility, a touch of overconfidence helps you forge a path toward achieving it.
Of course, excessive optimism is subjective. Everyone has their own version of reality, Sharot says: “You have to have a somewhat delusional view of your children or of your spouse, of your relationship…of yourself, your future, and your health. … Not perceiving reality as it is is not necessarily a bad thing,” she says.
When optimism becomes unhelpful
If your view of the world is super untethered from reality, more optimism will do little to help you course correct. In a study he conducted, Dawson found that participants who thought they would be financially better off in a year, and therefore were more optimistic about their economic status, had lower long-term well-being. (The same was true for those who were overly pessimistic about their financial outlook.) This might be due to disappointment when their expectations don’t match reality. Realists, on the other hand, were happiest.
Failing to acknowledge direct feedback, evidence, and past failures creates a vacuum of unrealistic optimism. Spending too much time and effort on a pursuit at the expense of your relationships, health, and bank account when the world is giving you plenty of signs to stop is likely not going to help you achieve your goals. (For instance, skipping days of work to make a podcast when you’ve already been warned about your attendance, or pursuing a potential partner who has not shown romantic interest is not a great idea.) The world is constantly offering us feedback worth paying attention to. Are you making progress, however small, or are your efforts largely going unnoticed? Are you making the same mistakes time and again?
“We tend to forget things that have failed in the past, and we don’t incorporate failure when forming new expectations,” Dawson says. “What we tend to do is over-remember things that went well, and yes, we incorporate those things into our expectations, but we tend to gloss over a failure. Even if we do remember it, we think, well, that was probably someone else’s fault.”
How to be optimistically realistic
The line between delusion and optimism lies in your ability to learn from setbacks and mistakes and adjust accordingly. “Sometimes we find ourselves paying more attention to the reassuring facts than the less reassuring facts,” says Neil Weinstein, distinguished professor emeritus at Rutgers University. Both are valuable data points.
For example, anyone pursuing a career in the arts — notoriously competitive and not the most lucrative — may want to maintain a flexible day job that allows them to earn money while following their dreams. But they should still be aware of other signs of progress (or lack thereof); if they struggle to land an agent and opportunities to showcase their work, they might want to pivot to other creative goals and sustain optimism for those. You might not become a professional painter whose work hangs in the Met, but you can still take classes to improve because you enjoy it, or even sell some of your work for money. “I want to still learn and adjust in case things don’t work out,” Waugh says.
The goal isn’t to avoid disappointment entirely, but to accept it as one fleeting moment. Optimism is what allows us to maintain momentum in life. Experiencing disenchantment after setting your sights a little too high is still preferable to pessimism, according to Waugh. “Being pessimistic about things for months at a time lingers, and that is the thing that’s going to bring your overall mood down and affect well-being and resilience,” he says. “Moments of disappointment, however much they hurt, aren’t.”
What optimists do best is brush off those letdowns and don’t let them derail their life, Sharot says. Each failure is another data point for what you could do better next time.
A taste of delusion gives us the motivation to make our fantasies materialize. So long as we don’t ignore signs it’s time to change course, it’s worth embracing a life of fanciful dreams.
“It’s fine to be optimistic,” Weinstein says, “but not have blinders on.”
