The Science Of Real Optimism & Why Positivity Is Holding You Back
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When Deepika Chopra, Ph.D.—a clinical health psychologist and the author of the upcoming book The Power of Real Optimism—came on the podcast recently, I thought we'd be talking about mindset and resilience. And we did. But what she shared about optimism itself, what it actually is, and what most of us have gotten wrong about it, stuck with me long after we stopped recording.
Here's what stayed with me.
Optimism & positivity are not the same
If I ask most people what the first word that comes to mind is when they think of optimism, I'm willing to bet most would say "positivity." Good vibes. Glass half full. Look on the bright side.
Chopra’s work challenges all of that. She has spent years studying the science of optimism, training it in high-stakes environments, and ultimately living it through one of the hardest experiences of her life. Her conclusion: the popular version of optimism we've all been sold is not only wrong, it's actually harmful.
Real optimism, as she defines it, isn't about experiencing 24/7 bliss or pretending the hard stuff isn't hard. It's almost the opposite. A genuinely optimistic person is acutely aware of reality—the setbacks, the uncertainty, the pain. The difference is that they see those things as temporary. And they hold, even in the darkest moments, a small flicker of curiosity about what comes next.
That distinction matters enormously, especially right now. Deepika shared data from a recent Gallup survey showing that Americans are at a 20-year low in future optimistic thinking. We've been handed the wrong definition of optimism, and it's left us without the framework to actually navigate the uncertainty we're living through.
Your emotions are data
One of the ideas in this conversation that I keep coming back to is the reframe Chopra offers around emotions. Most of us (myself included) have been conditioned to treat uncomfortable emotions as problems to solve or feelings to move past as quickly as possible. Get over it. Push through it. Stay positive.
Her view is the opposite. Emotions are data. Every feeling—anxiety, grief, anger, fear is telling you something. And the work isn't to suppress it or outsmart it. The work is to meet it, understand it, and use it.
She made this so concrete when we talked about Roger Federer. Even one of the greatest athletes of all time still felt those feelings of failure and frustration in the middle of a match. The feelings didn't go away. What he developed was the ability to hold them, acknowledge them, and then pivot. Not suppress.
That's the model. And it requires something she calls emotional flexibility, which she describes as the most important skill any of us can be developing right now, and one that has to be deliberately trained, like a muscle.
Affirmations might actually be making things worse
I'll be honest, when we got into the affirmation conversation, I wasn't expecting what she said. Chopra is the person who wrote a viral piece on mindbodygreen over a decade ago about why affirmations don't always work. And the science she laid out is both simple and a little unsettling.
When you hold a deep core belief about yourself (say, that you're not lovable) and you stand in front of a mirror and say the exact opposite, your brain immediately starts doing something counterproductive. It goes through its files and pulls up every piece of evidence it has collected over years and decades to prove that the statement isn't true. And the result isn't empowerment. It's that you feel worse than when you started.
So she developed what she calls the seven-tenths rule. Before you use any affirmation, rate it on a scale from zero to ten. How much do you actually believe it? If it's below a seven, it won't work as a traditional affirmation. But you can work your way there by building affirmations that are more believable at this stage of where you are, and gradually moving toward where you want to go. Your brain has to believe something is possible before it can help you move toward it.
I think about this in the context of a lot of things beyond affirmations, like vision boards, manifestation practices, even goal-setting. She made a helpful distinction: you don't always get what you want, but you almost always get what you expect. The real work is closing that gap.
Learning real optimism while writing a book on it
When Chopra was two months into writing The Power of Real Optimism, her then-youngest son—just two and a half years old—received a rare, life-threatening diagnosis. Something so uncommon, there were only about three doctors in the world who had any meaningful knowledge of it.
She called her editor. She told me she hid under her office desk, crying, and said to her husband, "I don't think I can do this." She felt like a fraud writing a book on optimism while feeling no optimism at all.
And then something happened. She had deadlines, she had tools, and she started using them. They didn’t make everything feel okay, but they gave her somewhere to stand. Writing the book, she told me, actually saved her sanity.
The takeaway
I think we all want to know that the frameworks and ideas we're drawn to actually hold up under real pressure, not when everything is going well, but when everything isn't.
We're all going through something. The answer isn't to look away from uncertainty, to go numb, or to force a smile. It's to get better tools. Real optimism isn't a personality trait or a luxury for the naturally cheerful. It's a learned, trainable skill.