Positive Psychology Founder: How To Stop Your Negative Thoughts - Martin Seligman
In a Nutshell
Martin Seligman founded positive psychology to correct traditional psychology's focus on misery, helplessness, and determinism by proving that optimism, agency, and well-being can be learned and measured. The core techniques involve actively disputing pessimistic thoughts with factual evidence and "putting things in perspective" exercises that transform helplessness into effectiveness. His research shows agency—combining self-efficacy, optimism, and imagination—drives both individual flourishing and historical progress, with AI now emerging as a tool to amplify human creativity and storytelling.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Psychology had three major blind spots that made asking questions about human happiness and capacity for action almost impossible. The first blind spot was happiness itself - sixty years ago, psychology focused on misery, trauma, suffering, panic, depression, and anxiety. Happiness was a taboo word and no one worked on it. The second blind spot was thinking itself. If you were a psychoanalyst, you would consider thinking merely the outpouring of an underlying conflict, but if you were a behaviorist, then thinking was not present. The third blind spot was determinism - psychologists used to believe that the past and present made us puppets in the hands of the future. These three hypotheses have been proven wrong and are even hostile to human well-being.
The scientific method was to look at the basic assumptions of what people were doing in science and ask: "What if the basic assumption is wrong? What are the consequences?" Sixty years ago the basic principles of psychology excluded human happiness, thought, and the idea of our ability to choose our future.
The first work was on what is called acquired disability. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was found that animals and humans, when exposed to events over which they could do nothing, exhibited several underlying alarming symptoms. First, they become extremely negative. Second, they become extremely passive. Third, they become less intelligent - they had great difficulty knowing when to stop noise by moving their hands. The interest in this topic began from the perspective of the opposite of the concept of effectiveness, i.e., what hinders it? What makes us helpless? Twenty years of working to discover the reasons for our inadequacy led from the concept of inadequacy to the concepts of mastery and effectiveness.
Most importantly, every time experiments were conducted involving unavoidable noise or shock, there was always a third group exposed to the same noise, but pressing the button was effective. The groups are identical in terms of shock or ordeal, but the group that had the first experience with mastery, or what is now called effectiveness, had good results. When measuring them, their condition was better than the control groups. The first signs of effectiveness, influence, and control were that traumatic events that you could actually do something about actually motivated you.
After more than 10 years of research with humans and animals, when put in situations they could not control, they became passive. But only five out of eight became negative on average. A third of them could not be rendered incapable. Three out of eight people and three out of eight animals did not become disabled. The key to this resilience lies in optimism and pessimism. A method was developed to measure optimism and pessimism through a questionnaire.
When pessimists were asked questions like "If I failed a math exam," they would say "That's me. This will go on forever, and it will invalidate everything I do." In other words, they're saying "I'm stupid." The problem with saying "I'm stupid" is that it's a very pessimistic interpretation. Stupidity is long-lasting, often detrimental, and inherent to your nature. Optimists, when they fail exams, say things like "I had a hangover" or "I didn't put in enough effort." A hangover, unlike stupidity, is temporary and doesn't mean you'll fail the next exam.
At age 50, running for president of the American Psychological Association, there was a problem - presidents are supposed to have direction and initiative, but there was no idea what the initiative would be. Then a moment of inspiration came and gave the initiative: shifting focus from suffering to well-being. Psychology wasn't particularly concerned with improving people's lives, but rather with the causes of their unhappiness. Its focus wasn't on improvement, but on diagnosing problems, and it was paid for that.
The pivotal event in the history of modern psychology occurred right after World War II, when the National Institute of Mental Health was established, which allocated funding to psychologists. This funding wasn't for making people happy, but for treating PTSD, depression, anxiety, and the like. Thirty years later, the American Psychiatric Association published its diagnostic manual, and the financial compensation for therapists was limited to treating depression, anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and panic attacks. They weren't paid to make people happy. Thus, psychology became primarily driven by money, both in securing grants and in treating people, at the expense of asking the question: "Can people thrive? Is there more to life than just the absence of unhappiness?"
Something happened that changed the view about psychology and gave the subject matter for the next 30 years of life. While in the garden with five-year-old daughter Nicole, who was running around, dancing, throwing weeds in the air, and singing, she was yelled at to "get to work." Nicole looked and said: "Daddy, Daddy, can I talk to you?" She said: "Dad, do you remember before my fifth birthday that I used to complain a lot?" Then she said: "Well, have you noticed, Dad, that since my fifth birthday two weeks ago, I haven't complained even once?" She said: "Well, Dad, on my fifth birthday, I decided that I would not complain anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. If I can stop complaining, you can stop being a grumpy person."
Three fundamental things were realized about being a parent and about psychology. The first was about myself: I was a real complainer and was proud of it. I had this critical intelligence that allowed me to see the root of everything that was wrong. I was good at identifying faults. It occurred for the first time that perhaps some success in life wasn't due to being a complainer and a negative person, but to something else, something positive. Perhaps there were virtues in not complaining, and perhaps complaining was a hindrance.
The second realization was about the job as a teacher or as a parent. The job of parenting was thought to be finding out every single mistake a child made and correcting it. Somehow, if all of Nicky's mistakes were corrected, we'd have a perfect child. But that's nonsense. The result is zero. And for Nicky to grow, we have to discover her talents, like talking to an adult, and reinforcing that, and helping her to live her life, not by correcting her mistakes, but by developing her talents.
The third important realization was that psychology was incomplete. It was based on misery, suffering, divorce, and panic; there was no psychology of flourishing, happiness, and well-being. The initiative was found here, which is to create what we call positive psychology, which doesn't focus on correcting mistakes, but on discovering strengths and living accordingly.
Much work has focused on the question: "Can you change? Can you stop being pessimistic? Can you stop exaggerating things? Can you get rid of despair and helplessness?" The answer is yes. Pessimism is natural - we're descendants of ancestors who lived through the Ice Ages. Those who said "What a beautiful day in Pasadena today. I bet tomorrow will be beautiful too" were crushed under the weight of the ice. We inherited a brain that tends to magnify things and automatically think of the worst-case scenario. So negativity and pessimism are natural. Optimism, however, is not natural and needs to be learned.
First, we help people connect with the most pessimistic thoughts they tell themselves. For example, before the show, woke up at 4:00 a.m. thinking "Oh my God, in 12 hours I'm going to run into someone who's notoriously difficult to meet. I'm 84 years old. Chris is in his thirties or forties. He probably knows literature better than I do. And I'm no longer quick-witted." The voice said "You know, Marty, you've passed the peak of your abilities. You can't take on Chris Williamson." But learned to be a realistic and effective debater of more pessimistic ideas. At four in the morning, said "Hey, just a minute. I interviewed someone like Chris last week. And it was brilliant." Dealt with factual arguments, with the voice that said "Seligman, you're past your prime," as if it were a rival for the job or wife, whose mission in life was to make miserable, and argued with it. When you learn how to subtly challenge automatic thoughts, pessimism turns into optimism. It's fun. Six months later, people are more optimistic, less depressed, and less anxious.
Here's a very effective technique called "Putting Things in Perspective." Imagine you get an email from your boss on a Friday afternoon saying "Come see me at 4:00." What do you expect? "Oh my God, I'm going to be fired!" First, get people to imagine the worst that could happen at 4:00: "She's going to attack me and I'm going to be fired." Then ask: "What's the best thing that could happen at 4 pm?" Maybe "She's read my memo about the marketing campaign. She thinks it's brilliant and she's going to call me to give me a raise and a promotion." Then ask: "What's the most likely outcome? What's the middle ground?" Maybe "She's read my memo about the marketing campaign. She likes it. But she thinks the budget is too high and she's going to ask me to cut it." Then ask: "What can you do now to prepare for the four o'clock interview?" Putting things in perspective is doing about 15 different exercises to turn pessimism into optimism, to turn helplessness into action.
What sustains us is realism, or factual reasoning. When putting things into perspective, or when discussing an idea, it's crucial to make your argument realistic and provide factual evidence. For example, "I have a deformed foot, I'm homeless, and I'll be living under a bridge" - these are some of the most catastrophic thoughts we can have. But when we learn to argue effectively, rather than treating our catastrophic thoughts as established facts, people learn this very well and become much more skilled at it. This reduces depression and anxiety and promotes well-being.
There is something called meta-analysis, where all published studies are reviewed instead of just one. There are 335 studies on these positive techniques and their impact on depression, well-being, and anxiety. These studies show that there are more than a dozen techniques that increase optimism and enhance the sense of agency.
Agency consists of three elements. The first element is self-efficacy - believing in your ability to achieve your goals in the present. The second is optimism - believing in your ability to achieve your goals in the distant future. Third, imagination is the range of goals you can achieve in the distant future. To have agency, you have to believe in your ability to achieve your goals now, be optimistic about your ability to achieve them in the future, and be imaginative - that is, have a wide range of goals you can achieve.
The expanded perspective on agency, which goes beyond mere optimism, is the core of the new book. Human history, and when does human innovation happen? It happens in an atmosphere of full agency. The book examines the human condition from the hunter-gatherer era through agriculture, Homer, the Greeks, the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Renaissance, and into the modern era, and poses the question: When does humanity flourish, and when does it stagnate? In the lab, the life has been dedicated to demonstrating that these three elements, when present, produce more happiness and less depression. The challenge for the book was to look back at history and ask: What role does willpower play in human progress and innovation?
If we look at Homer, the Greeks, if we look at Homer's ancient epic, the Iliad, Achilles didn't act on his own; the gods commissioned him. Achilles has no agency. A hundred years later, we have Odysseus, the clever, cunning, and proactive one. If we trace Greek history, looking at texts from Homer through the 6th century AD, through tragedies, and up to the Golden Age, we see a strong correlation between increased belief in agency and increased progress in five different areas of life: thought, the arts, literature, and sculpture, technology, medicine, and science, quality of life and mortality rate, and political freedom. If we limit ourselves to the Greek period, we find a perfect correlation between the increasing belief in agency, as demonstrated in philosophical writings, and the increasing progress in all five areas.
This progress continued until about 350 AD. In 383 AD, something very important happened: Saint Augustine. Christian philosophers became increasingly inclined toward the idea of agency. The more people who could attain holiness, the greater the likelihood that God would hold them accountable for their actions in the afterlife. If they did good and avoided evil, they would go to heaven. This was the trajectory of Christian thought, an extension of Greek thought. Then, in the 80s AD, Augustine appeared and rejected the idea of human agency, stating that if a person resisted temptation, did good, and avoided evil, it was because God had bestowed His grace upon them. And this became the Church doctrine for almost a thousand years. As a result of these five criteria, the following occurred: stagnation and decline in thought, in political freedom, in quality of life, in technology and science, and in the arts.
If we compare human progress with the prevailing philosophical and religious beliefs of the time, when these beliefs are based on the principle of agency, people flourish, as evidenced by their individual lives. Conversely, if religious and philosophical doctrines are pessimistic and not based on the principle of agency - that is, if everything happens by chance or predestination - then stagnation occurs.
It depends on the nature of the religion. Let's take modern Protestantism as an example. Modern Protestantism traces its origins to Luther and Calvin. Contrary to what you may have learned in school about the Reformation, Luther and Calvin go further than Augustine. That is, they believe in
Luther and Calvin went further than Augustine in their theological positions, believing in absolute corruption, predestination, and the absence of free will. In 1524, the prominent Catholic theologian Erasmus wrote an important treatise entitled "On the Laws of the Reformation" - "Free Will." In it, he argued that humans are like little children who fall and need God to pick them up, but must have intrinsic motivation to be raised. Luther responded a year later, saying "This is utter nonsense. Our fate is sealed. Every time we are lifted up, it is only because God is lifting us up." This exchange represents the origin of modern Protestantism.
Catholicism became more effective while Luther and Calvin were killed, but starting in the 17th and 18th centuries, Protestantism changed. It embraced the idea that humans can participate in God's grace and can actually choose to do things that will get them into heaven. Today, it is very difficult to find a Lutheran or Calvinist who believes in anything like total decadence, the absence of free will, and predestination.
Protestantism evolved from its fundamentalist view and is, in many ways, fueling highly influential American and European society while contributing significantly to the unprecedented progress seen in the last two hundred years.
The first aspect of influence is effectiveness - improving one's ability to overcome the belief that success is impossible. The best technique, drawn from modern psychology laboratories, is doing things and succeeding at them. For someone feeling helpless and hopeless looking at a messy apartment, the advice is to go to the kitchen sink and wash one cup, which leads to a series of mastery experiences. Gradually delegating tasks to others systematically increases the ability to achieve success.
To increase optimism, challenge your most pessimistic thoughts and put things into perspective. There are literally thousands of studies proving it is possible to be more effective, optimistic, and happier tomorrow than today.
The third question concerns whether people can become more imaginative, creative, and quick-witted. While many books exist on creativity and imagination, no one has really succeeded in teaching more imagination and creativity. Traditional techniques like brainstorming, bathing, and taking breaks are not very effective. Real progress came with the encounter of Claude and ChatGPT, leading to work on the combined use of artificial intelligence and human imagination to produce unprecedented levels of creativity.
Despite pessimists claiming AI will strip away humanity and make people less human, AI has done the opposite for Seligman personally. He has two four-year-old grandsons, Danny and Max, whom he adores. Since they were two, he had become invisible to them because he is eighty years older and cannot play with them. He went to Claude and asked it to help write stories where Max and Danny are the protagonists. They are now on Book Six, Chapter Twenty-Four, with Max and Danny taking a tour of the solar system. Thanks to Claude's storytelling help and ChatGPT illustrations, the kids are now dying to see him and want the stories.
There are two views on creativity. The first holds that creativity comes from Zeus - that one person, like Michelangelo, is a genius who carves the statue of David out of marble. AI is not creative in this sense. The second theory views creativity as collaboration - the Wright brothers switching roles, McCartney and Lennon, Kahneman and Tversky, Balanchine and Farrell. One of Orville's members says something, Wilbur replies "No, that's wrong," and through this exchange of ideas they build the first airplane. This is the meaning that makes artificial intelligence incredibly creative.
Seligman had been working on a book about effectiveness for seven years. Chapter Eight covers China, where research with Chinese colleagues from Beijing traced active Chinese thought from the Shang Dynasty to the modern era, finding that when there is a good balance between individual and collective effectiveness, progress is achieved. Chapter Nine covers Israel and the Hebrews, examining effectiveness in the Torah. The five books of Moses do not show much effectiveness - God does the hard work while the Hebrews complain and argue with him. However, starting with the prophets, human agency versus God's agency appears.
When handed to his editor, she said there was no transition between Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine. After staring at these chapters for five and a half years without seeing the transition, he went to Claude and asked it to read both chapters and write a transition. The result was: "At the same time, all over the world, while the Chinese were grappling with the question of the individual's relationship to the state, the Israelites were grappling with a more fundamental question: the relationship between man and God."
Through discussions with ChatGPT and Claude, they solved what Seligman calls the Axis Puzzle. Looking at 1000 BC in Greece, China, the Hebrews, Persia, and India, these cultures were remote villages with no coinage and no measures of progress. By 500 BC, 500 years later, all five civilizations flourished. They invented new things from coins to art to tragedies, Buddha, and Confucius. The question is what happened during those 500 years that enabled innovation - known as the Great Axis Mystery.
Seligman's hypothesis was that words were the cause. In 1000 BC, none of these five cultures had words to describe human capability, but by 500 BC, they had words describing capacity for achievement, optimism, effectiveness, and imagination. Neither AI system passed through any human being - there is hardly a field called ancient philology today, and no human is proficient in Aramaic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, ancient Chinese, Persian variations, ancient Greek, or Greek in its golden age. After a day of discussion, they essentially proved that the words do not exist in 1000 BC, but by 500 BC, all five cultures had discovered words expressing human agency.
When humans have words, they can do things. The term "sexual harassment" provides an example - people have been subjected to sexual harassment in offices since ancient times, but there was no word until around 1975. Once the word existed, lawsuits, mandatory training, and the #MeToo movement followed. When there are words for effectiveness, it enhances human effectiveness.
Humans learn through language and action. The culture immersed in, the type of content exposed to, the things read, the friends surrounded by, and the stories heard all contribute uniquely to perceptions of hope or helplessness and understanding of willpower. People are profoundly influenced by local narratives, stories, and influences on their belief in willpower, and consequently their ability to exercise it.
In the Torah and beyond, the word "teshuvah" appears for the first time, meaning repentance - that one can rebuild their life. Once there is a concept like repentance, it tells people there are active things they can do to repent and improve their life. In Greek, the word for "weakness of will" appears. Before this word, civilization was dictated by the gods. When "weakness of will" is found, it points to the concept that humans have free will, and when they go astray, they are responsible for it. Complete concepts of moral responsibility did not exist in these five cultures a thousand years ago, but once words related to will, freedom, choice, and repentance appear, a completely different view emerges of what it means to be human and that humans are capable of improving their lives.
Julian Jaynes, author of "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," was Seligman's professor. Jaynes argued that consciousness itself - the thing inside that observes reality and possesses will - did not exist until the Bronze Age. For Jaynes, the shift in Homer's epic from Achilles being a puppet of the gods to Odysseus being a resourceful and cunning individual represents a monumental change in consciousness. Purists believe consciousness as known today barely existed 3,000 years ago, but by 2,500 years ago it had become widespread.
Before writing first appeared around 3500 BCE, there were no concepts of psychology or consciousness - only lists and words about gods and idols. By 500 BCE, consciousness began to emerge. The most radical hypothesis is that humans were not conscious before 3000 BCE.
Jaynes's hypothesis is quasi-neurological, saying that gods were speaking from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left hemisphere 3,000 years ago, leading to the growth of the corpus callosum. Seligman thinks it is more a matter of population pressure. Three thousand years ago, one could live in a little tribe by listening to the gods and obeying parents, but in all five cultures there were disturbances - periodic invasions from overseas. When there are disturbances and new people are met, listening to parents' gods and obeying them becomes pointless for survival. One has to think about what others might be thinking and stop listening to gods to understand other people's minds. Social upheaval stimulates awareness, specifically what is called theory of mind - the ability to sense what another person might be thinking.
Influence is a double-edged sword. Effectiveness is the ability to achieve goals, but the fact that atomic bombs can be made does not mean they should be. The steam engine was developed with huge costs in terms of pollution. The ability to do something does not mean it should be done. Optimism about things does not mean they will turn out well - it leads to foolish decisions and victim-blaming. If one believes that good character and intelligence produce wealth, technology, and freedom, then when finding people who are poor and oppressed, one might blame them for not doing that. The dark side of imagination is that AI has been imagined as the greatest technological development, but what it will do is unknown. Having competence, optimism, and imagination brings progress, but what is needed is a wise and ethical understanding of these three elements.
Seligman has been very interested in the relationship between optimism and winning elections, doing work on coding optimism from Grover Cleveland to now. Given optimism in nomination acceptance speeches, the more optimistic candidate wins more than half the elections. Trump and Harris presented an interesting contrast. Everyone thought Trump was pessimistic and gloomy - he talked about far more bad things than Harris. However, Trump and Harris's nomination acceptance speeches were roughly equal in optimism and pessimism. Following all press conferences up to October 31, starting around September 15, Trump became more optimistic. His positions were gloomy, but the reasons for his change were things he could change and would change. His statements were optimistic, and by Election Day, Trump was far more optimistic than Harris. The data was put in a sealed envelope and sent to journalists, making Seligman among the only analysts who predicted a landslide victory for Trump.
Optimism is appealing not only practically useful in life but also a magnet for attracting people. Company does not like misery. If random phone calls are made reading a script in either a gloomy or cheerful tone, people hang up on gloomy people much faster than cheerful ones. Overall, optimism is an attractive quality.
A blank expression is a passive facial expression when not doing anything. Seligman's normal face is referred to as the "stern-faced face" - someone who only looks happy 10% of the time. The stern, frowning face is the same thing as wrapping the same person and same behavior in a slightly different expression, which can change the way people interpret personality.
There are studies on fertility and optimism showing optimists have more children. This has something to do with attraction. People tend to be around positive people. Part of that optimism might stem from these people assuming they can handle more children - thinking one child is good, two would be good, three would be good, four would be good - unlike people who feel anxious about the future and may not be fully aware of their ability to cope with it.
After more than half a century of studying human flourishing, Seligman concluded two things about what makes life worth living. The first is that taking control, waking up in the morning and having things you can master, things you are optimistic about, is crucial for well-being and happiness.
Seligman is a very complaining person, especially in restaurants. When taking all his children, grandchildren, and wife to good restaurants, they get annoyed whenever wine is offered to him to taste because he rejects and criticizes it. He realized, for the first time in his life seeing them annoyed, that if his wife Mandy, who has a bright, positive personality and calm face, had complained as much as he does, he would not have wanted to marry her. About two years ago, after his last restaurant experience, he decided never to complain in restaurants again. They tried it, and about a week later at a restaurant, he ordered steak tartare. The manager came up and said the machine was broken. Steak tartare is not prepared with a machine - the meat is cut with a knife. He ordered smoked salmon instead. He has stopped complaining. It is not that he was always frowning - his face is always frowning - but he has learned the price of complaining and can get rid of it.
Taking control, waking up in the morning and having things you can master, things you are optimistic about, is crucial for well-being, happiness and longevity. The second is the importance of living in the future rather than the past or the present. The example of the human race is that we are creatures of the future, with more than half of our thinking focused on planning for the future. We are absorbing the past and the present in order to have a better future. Effectiveness and a forward-looking perspective are the keys to human prosperity.
About forty years ago, a theory was written about dreams that explains dreams completely correctly. This theory states that dreams have only three elements: First, visual hallucinations. Secondly, an underlying emotional tone. Third, the plot is built by linking successive visual hallucinations to the underlying emotion. This is the only thing ever written that has never been doubted.
The paper was sent to "Psychological Review," the main journal. For two years, it continued as follows: sixteen reviewers over two years, half of whom said "This is the best article I have ever read about dreams." The other half said "If you publish this article, I will cancel my subscription to the Psychological Review." The best research paper ever written, which was probably only read by a hundred people, was published in an obscure journal.
The favorite book is "What You Can Change and What You Can't Change." The program was hosted by Robert Plumb, and there was complete immersion in understanding genetic predisposition, heredity, and twin studies. The program also hosted Joyce Benson, and lengthy discussions were held with her on this topic.
Anyone who recognizes the fact that the basic elements of what makes you predetermined, or at least predisposed, are predetermined before they are even born, immediately begins to ask the question: How much effort do I have to put in? What are the areas where I will fall behind, and what are the areas I should focus on? The book "What You Can and Cannot Change" is truly amazing. It was reread recently, about 25 years ago.
Five editions of the book Abnormal Psychology were written. Every five years the textbook had to be revised to reflect new discoveries. There were almost no new discoveries. What was mentioned in the book about what you can and cannot change has remained largely the same. Psychotherapy and medication are somewhat effective in some cases, and completely ineffective in others. It is very important for people to understand what is changeable and what is not, so that they do not waste their money and efforts on things that cannot be changed. There are many things in human life that cannot be fixed or changed, and there are many other things that can be changed and corrected, and it is very important to know the difference.
One ambition in life is not to be boring. At the age of 21 when deciding to become a psychiatrist, one went to a professor, Peter Madison, and told him that graduate studies in psychology would be pursued instead of philosophy or becoming a professional bridge player. These were the other two options available. Peter said, "Marty, there are two reasons to become a psychologist. The first is to never make mistakes, and the second is to never be boring. I hope you choose the second."
Never woken up more excited about work than right now, and that's because there's something very new on the horizon, and that's artificial intelligence. In the field and in life, AI is changing everything. It's the most important technological development of a lifetime, and for the first time, the wish is to be 21 instead of 84. It's good that people are against AI right now, and the acquired optimism is able to counterbalance even the most negative forces regarding how people feel about the coming robot.
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