The following review is a mix of some notes, personal interpretations and some personal feelings I had while reading the book (on the writing style and similarity of some concepts to other books). The book starts with nice introduction on:
Bad things are temporary
Your innocence should not be your guilt
The modern world thinks of "personal fulfillment as a legitimate goal, an almost sacred right"
Ways to work on depression:
"gain insight into the childhood origins of turning rage upon the self": but author claims this to be blaming the patient and thus suggests to look for other non-Freudian analysis
understand the biomedical reasons and get treated - but treatment means you are dependent on an external force for the feel good and cant give yourself credit
"But failure also can occur when talent and desire are present in abundance but optimism is missing"
"Our physical health is something over which we can have far greater personal control than we probably suspect"
"What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.” Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism"
The book basically has two concepts: learned helplessness : "the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter." and explanatory style :"manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen. " - "word in your heart"
Explaining the experiments with dogs, the main conclusions were (Rather too long!) that passiveness is either because it gives rewards (people looking after you) or because you have lost hope and think that whatever you do would not matter, and "Learning beforehand that responding matters actually prevents learned helplessness."
Somehow, I love how this book contradicted on surface with the other book on Bodhisattva I was simultaneously reading - Bodhisattva talks about being calm irrespective of any moment (looks to me as being helpless of the situations) and not get too excited and sad, while learned optimism teaches you to train yourself to not to feel helpless to go through any process of pain/happiness. The interesting point here was that Seligman saw this as: helplessness during sorrow would bother you and also when you are trying to achieve something more in your life (e.g. excel on a project). But reflecting further it made me realize that actually both of them have some crux - one asks you to train yourself to explain better and not feel helpless (Seligman) and other explains you that everything outside you is just noise and do not try to control it and thus do not feel helpless.
The initial reservations I had about the extreme depth of the personal journey Seligman was telling me got interesting after the chapter 3 because he started sharing his own reservations about his own theories. Thus now it felt more like he was on the same journey of self-discovery like the way we as readers were. For example he shares this story of oxford university which made me super excited to understand his rebuttals on the criticism of his work.
Then the other nice thing about this book is its practicality - it has some tests which make you reflect on yourself before giving answers to questions like : "why some people never become helpless", with the underlying assumption that helplessness makes you feel rejected and not come out of any sorrow. And the answer to this was explanation that we make to ourselves.
[After again some irritating digression, like Talking about the others theories on success and failures attribution by the people - "what makes them successful" - actually decides WHO becomes successful. Also following PREE, he said that if you always got rewards for your efforts, you give up much more easily. Relating these two - it was important to note that people who were successful were influenced by the schedule and how they explained to themselves that why they were successful. Seligman talks again on why some people become helpless:]
First he discussed on permanence stating that saying "always" for bad things is pessimism, and saying "always" for good thing is optimism. Then going to pervasiveness this is about taking things limited to their context and not universally in all aspects of your life. in case of bad events and taking good things universally. HOPE (permanence+pervasiveness) is an important point, Seligman says, because it tells how much you take bad things as universal and permanent - which leads to pessimism. Finally, personalization leading to your self esteem is important on how you blame the situations in terms of good and bad situations. Good should be it was because of me and Bad should be it was because of external events (there is a warning here of undermining responsibility - but it is also imp. for depression).
With good explanation to the problems about pessimistic lifestyle: affecting thought mood, behavior and physical responses. He mentions importance of acting rather than thinking - and a distracting task would help more. Then he mentions the steps to apply cognitive therapy to conduct an optimistic personal dialogue:
Learn to recognize automatic self-blaming thoughts
Gather evidences why they are wrong
Make different explanations - reattributions
Learn to distract
Change your general assumptions or premises
Moving on to the premise of success, Seligman talks about three characteristics important in challenging job: aptitude, motivation and optimism. Interestingly, he also discusses that pessimists are usually wiser and thus important for a company, but this means moderate pessimism is fine if it does not make you suffer and cause depression. Then he goes explanining the need of optimism for a good health summarizing to pessimism makes you passive.
It is nice that Seligman explains the effects of school, college, childhood, religion and culture on our actions - but if you are determined to just work on what to do better you can skip these chapters. Though, frankly, I enjoyed going through them (sometimes they were too much extended again with his personal experiences).
Then finally he moves to the most practical part of the book explaining the need of the ABC - Adversity, Belief and Consequences - for understanding your thought process. The two steps possible to change this loop is to use distraction, distancing and disputing. Distraction can be physical (shouting stop, e.g.), dispute is the last D in ABCD and distancing is buddhism :P
Another method is to argue with yourself on negative thoughts : asking if there is any evidence, alternative, implication or usefulness for all of this negativity. Then he asks to add another E of energization in the process of ABCDE to change your adversity and Belief (Adversity can be replaced with bad situations created by a friend as tests).