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Have you been struggling with a problem lately? Maybe you or someone close to you is sick? Has death taken away a loved one? Perhaps you just broke up or had a fight with your lover? Do you have too many debts? Is your job jeopardized because the company you work for is in trouble? Are you unable to achieve a goal you have been trying to reach for weeks, months, even years? Are you feeling lonely or rejected by others? Has smiling become so hard you can only fake it? Are worries overwhelming you?

Most people will at some point in their life answer yes to at least one of these questions. We all have to deal with problems we may think will never go away. They may affect us so much that they make us unhappy, even depressed. Sir Winston Churchill once said: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Can being optimistic in front of problems really help you? While it may not actually help you solve the problem (though it often can), I strongly believe it can help you to achieve happiness while you go through those hard times. Let’s see how one could react to two of the above life challenges: a sick loved one and an endangered job.

How can you react if someone close to you has a serious illness? Pessimists will believe that all is lost and that their loved one will not survive. Optimists however will think that, depending on the illness, their loved one will either fully heal or at least they will get much better and be able to get back to a somewhat normal life (some illness are indeed still impossible to fully cure). Let’s now consider the possible outcomes of this challenge. The worst case scenario is that your loved one will suffer a long time and eventually die from that illness. A maybe slightly better outcome, though not good at all, is that they will die quickly without suffering too much. A better outcome is that they will never completely heal but will be strong enough to stay alive. A yet better outcome is that they will take a long time to heal but eventually do so completely. The best outcome would be for them to heal quickly and fully. Overall we can make things simpler by grouping the outcomes into two groups: either your loved one will live or die. With two possible state of minds (optimism or pessimism) towards the illness and two possible outcomes (life or death), we have four possible state of mind / outcome pairs.

If you are pessimist and your loved one ends up staying alive, you will have been negative, fearing something that didn’t happen. Would you have been helping your loved one by being negative all that time? Not really. They probably made it through because other people were positive. Being negative and fearful for them would have had absolutely nothing to do with them living through, except maybe making the healing longer.

If you are pessimistic and your loved one ends up dying from the illness then your fears would have been confirmed. However, is negativism really the last thing you want to live with them? Researches have shown that being positive helps people heal. How can your loved one be positive if everyone around them is pessimistic, believing they are going to die? Your pessimism surely wouldn’t have helped and could actually have made things worse!

On the other hand, if you are optimistic and your loved one still dies, you would have actually been wrong thinking they would have lived on. However, your optimism would have allowed you to be somewhat happy during that time believing in the best outcome. This happiness would have been a relief for your loved one, making the suffering easier to live with, for them and for you. You would have enough sadness coming from your loved one, you wouldn’t have needed to star being sad before it actually happened. Your optimism would give you happy memories of the last moments with your loved one - not sad memories of hopelessness.

Finally, if you are optimistic and your loved one lives on, your positivity will be confirmed. You would have had nothing to worry about and that would have been exactly what you would have done. You would have kept your happiness (and your loved one’s too) through the hard times and then it would simply be bad memories, actually not so bad since they would be filled with hope.

As you can see, whatever the outcome, being pessimistic while having to face the illness would do nothing good. Being optimistic may not help your loved one to heal (though researches do show that it could help at least a little), but it will help you and them to keep hope and happiness. If they are going to die, they surely want to be as happy as possible during the short time remaining.

What if your challenge is something else? What if the company you work for is in trouble and your job is endangered? This is something many people have to deal with and it may be very stressful especially if you have a family that depends on you and if you know finding another job may be hard in your area.

You could be pessimistic and look for another job right away without trying to see how things turn out. You would lose any motivation you had to work there and would only be willing to get away from there as soon as possible. However, it could take weeks, even months, for you to find another job and meanwhile you would probably keep your current job. Keeping a job you only want to leave will only make you less happy and you will not be as productive as you may have been before. Also, you would probably also be pessimistic towards finding another job and that will surely not help you finding one! Even if you do find another job, how can you be sure that it will be better? Being pessimistic, you would probably expect another unsafe job.

You could also be optimistic and make your best to be as productive as possible to help the company. You may still start looking for something else if you have people depending on you and if you expect that finding a new job may take long, but you would not do so willing to leave your current job. You would keep informed on how things are going for the company and how you can help it. You would keep your motivation. If you eventually lose your job, your optimism will surely help you find another great job, maybe even better than the one you had. If things get better and your job gets endangered no more, you will be happy to have stayed and to have participated in making things better. You may even be rewarded for that.

As you can see, whatever the challenge you are facing, being pessimistic never helps. Be optimistic and keep your happiness through challenges. I am currently personally dealing, along with other challenges, with the two examples I gave and I can honestly say that keeping my optimism is really what allows me to keep smiling everyday. However, I often see people facing less than I am that are unhappy, even depressed. This is why I wanted to share this with you. May optimism help you all when life seems too hard to be lived. The glass of happiness is half-full and there is not that much left to fill it.

One last note: even if optimism is a good thing, beware of overoptimism which can be dangerous. Optimism should not ignore realism. If your loved one is going to die no matter what, stay positive, but accept that fact and do your best to make those last moments as happy as possible. However, do not be overoptimistic about not having a crash if you drive at twice the speed limit. The whole point is to keep hope and stay happy as much as humanly possible when a problem arises, not taking risks and believing everything will be all right.