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National Students of AMF featured in Psychology Today Magazine!
March 07, 2008
- The following story ran in the March/April 2008 issue of Psychology Today. You can find a copy at newsstands across the US!
OPTIMISM: Make the Road by Walking
By: Kathleen McGowan
…When David Fajgenbaum was 18 years old, he had a horrible shock. Just as he was gearing up for his new life at Georgetown University, his mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Instead of jumping into the freshman whirlwind of libraries, parties, and football games, he spent every weekend at home with his family. "I had three feelings: I felt alone, I felt helpless, and I felt guilty for being at school," he says now.
Before his mother's death, an idea struck him: To honor her, he'd reach out to others who were going through the same thing. Back on campus, he quickly found that beyond ordinary counseling, the university had no services for grieving students. So Fajgenbaum launched a support group, Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers.
The project snowballed. Both affected students and their friends wanted to do something useful to combat their terrible feelings of helplessness, and so the group organized fundraisers for research money, and began helping younger kids in high schools. The organization now has more than 20 chapters, and even earned a "Brick" award, a national prize for youth service.
Even after his mother died, Fajgenbaum did not withdraw. Instead, he spent three to four hours every day building his group. "I invested everything I had in it," Fajgenbaum says now. "And it's the most rewarding thing, to honor somebody and at the same time be able to have an impact." He took action despite his own pain—a mainstay of the optimistic mind-set.
Optimists seem to be sprinkled with fairy dust. They suffer less and recover quicker. They're healthier and better-liked and have stronger marriages and more fun. It's enough to make the rest of us gloomy—except that psychologists believe that a lot of these qualities stem from cognitive habits that can be learned. More than any other major personality trait, optimism is a matter of practice.
The key to increasing optimism lies in understanding its true nature. It's not relentless cheer or "positive thinking." It has more to do with how you behave, says Suzanne Segerstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "I think an optimistic outlook can be cultivated, but it's even better to cultivate optimistic behavior—engagement and persistence toward one's goals," she says.
Anticipating a better future, an optimist takes the steps necessary to create it. If Fajgenbaum were more pessimistic, he'd probably have given up when he found out that Georgetown didn't have the support networks he sought, figuring that it was impossible for him, a bereaved freshman, to do anything about it. Instead, he resolved to build them himself.
Pessimists are skeptical that their own actions can lead to good results and tend to overlook positive outcomes when they do occur. To overcome this stumbling block, Segerstrom recommends in her book, Breaking Murphy's Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life—and Pessimists Can Too, that you train yourself to pay attention to good fortune. Keep a log in which you write down three positive things that come about each day. This will help you convince yourself that favorable outcomes actually happen all the time, making it easier to begin taking action.
Keep a journal, too, but don't write down your darkest thoughts and fears. Instead, envision a future that you desire and describe how it could evolve out of your present circumstances. By clarifying exactly what you'll need to do to get what you want, you can create your own map to a more hopeful state of mind.
Then, with the pump primed, it'll be easier to make small moves that lead to gratifying results, building further enthusiasm that will protect you from setbacks. Fajgenbaum was a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship, but didn't get the award. Never mind. His plan is to finish his master's degree in public health at Oxford—thanks to a different award—and after that, go on to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania to study oncology. He thinks he has a shot at curing cancer. The rest of us might call that Pollyannaish, but he's just calling it his life's work…
Psychology Today Magazine, Mar/Apr 2008
Last Reviewed 25 Feb 2008
Article ID: 4538
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20080225-000001&page=2
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