Seeing life on the bright side promotes emotional well-being by limiting the frequency of stressful situations, a new study reveals.
- According to a survey carried out in 2016, nearly 1 in 5 French people almost always feel stressed (19%), i.e. nearly 10 million people.
- In addition to risks to well-being and mental health, stress is responsible for certain skin infections, insomnia, or amenorrhea.
- It would also aggravate certain diseases such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
How can we avoid suffering from stress and its harmful consequences on our health? By being optimistic!
Whether it’s coping with stressors in your daily life or tempering distressing news, being optimistic makes it possible to better react emotionally to stressful situations, and therefore to recover more easily. This is all the more true as you get older, reveals a new study published in Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences.
According to the authors of this new work, attached to the boston university medical school (United States), seeing life on the bright side and detaching from the untoward aspects would promote emotional well-being by limiting the frequency with which older men experience stressful situations or by modifying the way they interpret situations as stressful. .
“This study tests one possible explanation, assessing whether more optimistic people deal with daily stress more constructively and therefore enjoy better emotional well-being”explains Lewina Lee, corresponding author of the work.
Less negativity and less stress
To find out, the researchers followed 233 older men who first completed a questionnaire on optimism. After fourteen years, the participants completed a questionnaire again about their daily stressors, but also about their positive and negative moods for eight consecutive evenings, up to three times over an eight-year period.
The researchers then found that the most optimistic men not only had lower negative moods, but also felt more positive on a daily basis. They also reported having fewer stressors, which was not related to their higher positive mood but explained their lower levels of negative mood.
The authors of the study point out that, although the idea that optimism is a resource likely to promote good health and longevity, there is currently little work on its underlying mechanisms. “Stress, on the other hand, is known to have a negative impact on our health. By investigating whether optimistic people deal with everyday stressors differently, our findings add to knowledge about how optimism can promote good health. health as people age”concludes Lewina Lee.