Am I A Pessimistic Person?

The age-old question of how you see a glass that is exactly halfway filled with water – as half empty or half full – may be a little more important than a casual conversation piece. Whether you default to an optimistic or pessimistic mindset could have significant impacts on your physical and mental health. Research indicates that people who approach the world with an optimistic mentality tend to experience less stress and overall greater well-being than those who default to negative thinking. Optimists may also live longer and have more fulfilling relationships, whereas pessimists tend to experience worse outcomes from certain medical conditions and have a higher likelihood of developing mental health disorders. 

Assessing whether you yourself are an optimistic or pessimistic person can be difficult to ascertain. You may assume that you default to one attitude more than another, but through examination of some trends associated with pessimistic thinking, you may better understand whether you lean towards optimism or pessimism. Read on to learn more.

Signs you may be a pessimistic person

Emotional tendencies of pessimistic people

• Feeling surprised when positive events happen
• Discomfort with being vulnerable
• Experiencing foreboding when good things happen 
• A predisposition towards anxiety
• Irritability around people who tend to look on the bright side
• Low self-confidence and low self-esteem
• High stress levels
• Inability to relax
• Feeling isolated and alone in your worries
• Experiencing imposter syndrome
• Feeling helpless and like a victim of circumstance
• Hypervigilance

Cognitive tendencies of pessimistic people

• Difficulty maintaining a balanced perspective
• Focusing on flaws as opposed to good qualities
• Practicing defensive pessimism (the mentality that you will not be disappointed if you never get your hopes up in the first place)
• Difficulty trusting other people
• Finding the bad aspects of good situations (i.e., a recent promotion leads to a hyperfocus on its resulting increased workload) 
• Believing in the “snowball effect” (one bad event will lead to a cascade of bad events)
• Thinking of yourself not as a pessimist, but as a realist
• Skepticism
• Conceiving of your tendency to worry as a sign that you care and thinking that no one else (especially optimistic people) cares about situations as much as you do 
• A tendency to focus on what could go wrong in a situation
• Believing it is better to live with the status quo, even if there are negative aspects, than to try and change things for the better
• Thinking in absolutist terms, often using the concepts of “always” and “never,” (such as “I always fail” or “Things never go my way”)
• Having low expectations for yourself
• Perfectionism
• Believing that other people are judging you (possibly even more harshly than you are judging yourself) 
• Assuming any success is a fluke or a mistake, not the result of your own abilities or hard work
• Questioning the validity of all positive outcomes you experience
• A lack of confidence in your position in society

Behavioral tendencies of pessimistic people

• A habit of negative self-talk
• Risk avoidance due to believing that no risk is going to prove fruitful
• Self-sabotaging in relationships, particularly intimate relationships, which can result in lower levels of social support and higher levels of social isolation
• Over-generalizing
• Complaining
• Criticizing
• Inability to accept or believe compliments
• Practicing higher levels of caution than those around you with less negative thinking
• Difficulty seeing the good in the world, in other people, or in yourself
• A heightened ability to plan for the worst-case scenario
• Rigidity and trouble accepting opinions different from your own, especially if they support a more “glass half-full” mentality
• A tendency to catastrophize
• The habit of seeking the opinions and approval of other people before acting

Finding support for changing your worldview

If you recognize yourself in many of the traits listed above, you may be interested in shifting your worldview away from pessimism and closer to one that is more optimistic. Cognitive behavioral therapy (often abbreviated to CBT), which focuses on the ways in which thought patterns can impact emotions and behavior, has been demonstrated to be one of the more effective methods of shifting an ingrained mindset. 

Since one of the core traits of pessimism is a skepticism about positive outcomes, you may have difficulty believing in the effectiveness of therapy. That belief system may stand in the way of your ability to receive quality care, especially with a traditional in-person therapist, where you sometimes may encounter scheduling concerns and wait lists that can increase the likelihood of you giving up on therapy altogether. 

In this instance, you may want to consider online therapy as an alternative method of finding care. Online therapy offers flexible scheduling options, including the opportunity to set up appointments during evening hours or on the weekends. You can meet with your therapist from the comfort of your own home, removing many of the hurdles to attending traditional in-person therapy that may turn a more pessimistic person away.

Scientific research suggests that there may not be a significant difference between the effectiveness of mental health care received in an online setting versus that of a traditional in-person therapeutic appointment. This includes when working on shifting one’s worldview from one focused on pessimism to one focused more on optimistic thinking. One study found that people who completed a course of online cognitive behavioral therapy with the goal of changing both thought patterns and behaviors had comparable outcomes to a group of people who attended CBT appointments in person.

If you are hoping to develop a more optimistic mentality and potentially reap the mental and physical health benefits associated with optimism, online therapy could be a beneficial resource for you to investigate.