Are you struggling to stay positive in these rather testing times? There’s an LA-based psychologist who wants to help us but not in a “have a nice day!” way. Dr Deepika Chopra is a celebrated behavioural scientist known as the Optimism Doctor. She holds a doctorate in clinical health psychology and uses scientific evidence and holistic practices to provide her clients (individuals, couples and corporations) with practical ways to become more resilient and optimistic.
Some people are naturally optimistic but she argues that that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t join them. “I am not the most optimistic person,” she says. “I never really have been. But optimism is not a personality trait. It is a psychological skill that can be learnt.”
Her new book, The Power of Real Optimism, has just been published in the US and the UK, and truly couldn’t be better timed.
“It’s giving people a framework for dealing with the uncertainty and heaviness which, unfortunately, more people than not are feeling right now,” she says. “Because we are living in a state of chronic uncertainty globally, this is actually the most important time for real optimism. Real optimism in this context isn’t about trying to feel positive about what’s happening, it is about not losing your ability to think, engage and respond.”
Three years ago, while she was writing her book, Chopra’s own psychological resilience was seriously tested. Her two-year-old son, Dio, was diagnosed with an extremely rare and serious illness, afflicting just two in a million children. “It felt like a cruel irony,” she says. “I had been through hard times before but this was so much more harrowing, so much worse. We were initially in shock, in survival mode. It levelled me.”
She had unwavering support from family. “My husband and I walked through this together. My mum and dad — my mum came to every treatment for a year and a half. My mother-in-law flew in, lived with us.”
Yet the situation was close to unbearable. “For the first couple of months I was paralysed emotionally. I have to be honest, I really didn’t feel any sense of hope. There were many days I hid underneath my office desk, fully crying and saying, ‘I cannot do this.’”
Her son needed to visit the hospital weekly, over 18 months, for treatment. “Friends would say, ‘Oh, you’re so brave!’ I didn’t feel brave. As a parent, something like that completely shatters you and you have no choice.”
Chopra, who was pregnant at the time with her third child, Jia, says: “I was ruminating over this idea of ‘why him, why us, we’re good people. He’s an innocent toddler. How could this happen?’ Being told that something is chalked up to just bad luck could not have been more of a slap-in-the-face sentiment.”
Chopra doesn’t want to go into the details of the rare condition but says: “There were only three doctors in the world that knew about this.” Fortunately, she adds, “one was in Los Angeles”.
The family did everything possible to understand the illness, she says, “and came up with a whole load of nothing. What was so levelling was the extreme level of uncertainty”.
Even when surgeons removed a mass from Dio’s body, they didn’t know whether it was benign, a rare disease with a potential treatment, or a third equally rare immediately fatal disease. Chopra felt such despair. As she read to her son at bedtime, she’d think, “What if this is the start of goodbye?”
The mass wasn’t benign. But there was hope. Her family’s raw, heart-rending story is included in the prologue of The Power of Real Optimism, subtitled A Practical, Science-Based Guide to Staying Resilient, Curious and Open, Even When Life Is Hard. Chopra says: “It just didn’t feel true to not share what I was going through as I was writing.”
Inevitably, in the darkest season of her life, she used the optimism tools and research she was citing. She says frankly: “Some days I didn’t feel I could access them, and then some days I could.”
Chopra has changed since that hellish first year, when she was so desperate to know the future in the “delusional” hope that she could control it that she visited a psychic. Then it struck her: “We don’t need to know what will happen tomorrow to know we’ll survive it.”
Dio is now a happy and healthy five-year-old but Chopra notes: “I am aware that that could change: things will happen again and maybe they will break me in the same way this broke me, but what I learnt from it, and can truly say, is ‘I can do hard things’. And my family can do hard things.”
How to be optimistic when the news is so dark
Over-consuming negative news won’t help as when we’re exposed to chronic uncertainty the brain (protectively) fills in gaps with worst-case scenarios. “This is largely driven by the amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for scanning danger,” Chopra says. “It becomes overactive, making everything feel more urgent and more personal.” We become overwhelmed, and less able to access our prefrontal cortex and think clearly with reason, make decisions and be creative or solution-minded.
A helpful shift is to go from ruminating to finding agency. “Instead of asking, ‘What if this keeps getting worse?’ ask, ‘What is within my control right now? What is the very next step I can take in this moment?’ Even deciding how and when you will engage with the news can help restore this sense of agency.
“I don’t believe that ignoring and avoiding is the right thing to do,” Chopra continues, adding that being numb or apathetic is a consequence of living in survival mode. “We need to know what’s going on and to be engaged. But we need the tools that help us carry that.” So to create a sustainable relationship with your news feed she suggests asking yourself: “How much can I take in and still remain steady and responsive?”
She also suggests creating a “buffer” or brief ritual before and after news exposure (which could be as simple as a few short deep breaths). “Set specific limits on your consumption — maybe a morning briefing and mid-afternoon check-in, preventing the brain from constant emergency. Try not to consume news when you are in an emotionally vulnerable state, when you are going through a personal struggle or even right before bed or first thing upon waking. Your brain is susceptible to threat during those moments.”
Reframe a difficult situation as a challenge
Many of us wrongly believe that optimists are relentlessly positive idealists. “Based on the research, an optimist is actually someone who is grounded in reality and keenly, mindfully aware of the less-than-ideal situations,” Chopra says. “But the caveat is, they see these setbacks as something temporary that they have the ability to overcome, even if they don’t know how or when.”
When you reframe your situation as a challenge you can handle instead of a threat, you become more critical, creative and capable of good decisions, she says. Scientists call it “the broaden-and-build theory of emotions”, Chopra says, adding that studies show even people with low resilience improved their ability to regulate their emotions and physiological responses when an anxiety-inducing task was framed as manageable.
Draw strength from your past — you’ve dealt with setbacks before
Optimists know they’ve endured adversity and can again. “It’s based on persevering through every single hard day or setback that they’ve already endured,” Chopra says. Before her first child, Jag, was born, she got pregnant but discovered in her second trimester that the baby wasn’t viable. It was devastating.
But after Dio’s diagnosis, she drew strength from knowing she’d got through that traumatic experience. She says that whether talking to a friend, or yourself, in adversity, you can say: “This isn’t an easy place to be. But I also know you’ve been through really hard times before and I’ve seen you work through those.”
She says: “It’s a small reminder of someone’s resiliency.” Naming the emotion — “It sounds like you feel sad” — is helpful too. “It removes a lot of the threat response in the brain.”
In chronic uncertainty, it’s not naive to feel open to hope
“When our brain is full of uncertainty, it naturally fills in the gap with worst-case scenarios,” Chopra says. “That’s not a flaw, it’s a protective mechanism. But if we stay in uncertainty for a chronic amount of time and it’s pervasive, and we’re in that ‘worst-case scenario predicting’, it actually narrows our thinking and impacts our ability to respond.”
What helps is introducing curiosity — “The curiosity of ‘I wonder how this will change’,” Chopra says. “It’s really about this idea of living in the ‘and’.” It means being open to hope or possibility. “It doesn’t mean we have to already get to a point of ‘and it’s going to be better’.” Just being curious cultivates what she calls “a beneficial neutrality”.
“One myth about optimism is it feels good all the time, or there’s a sense of certainty,” she says. “That’s more ‘blind positivity’.” Real optimists are fully aware of what’s difficult or uncertain but trust their ability to navigate it. For Chopra, this meant deciding to live fully after her son’s treatment ended — even though she felt more scared and anxious. “I had already lived a year and a half with my son in a completely standstill, paralysed type of life where we did nothing. We didn’t celebrate anything. We put all joy and activity off to the side.” Now she makes sure to celebrate everything.
Don’t ignore or avoid your negative emotions
Positive emotions encourage behaviour that promotes wellbeing, Chopra says. And “negative” emotions such as anger, fear or anxiety, if unchecked, make us miserable. But when appropriate, these protect and guide us. So forcing yourself to think only positively isn’t helpful — and doesn’t lead to optimism. In fact, Chopra says, the brain cannot suppress thoughts and research shows that “people who try to control their thoughts are at an increased risk of depression”. We are supposed to feel all of our emotions to equip us to deal with our reality.
More effective than trying to stop unwanted thoughts or behaviours is to reinforce a new neurological pattern with a subtle mental shift. “Focus instead on replacing those thoughts and behaviours with the ones you want to practise,” Chopra says. For example, she advises that instead of saying, “I want to quit smoking,” you should say, “I want healthy lungs.”
Tell yourself ‘the future is none of your business’
Just before Dio’s final treatment, Chopra unwound by watching a silly film on Netflix, A Family Affair. A line in it, “The end is none of your business” — said to someone worrying that a relationship is doomed — resonated powerfully. “It really was this unlocking moment to me,” she says. “It was so important to hear at that time and to integrate it because I was coming out of a year and a half of nonstop worrying about the future. ‘I don’t know — I really don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring.’” Now, she thought, “I know that whatever it does bring, I will meet it.”
Yet to be open to such a way of thinking, it’s necessary to feel emotionally grounded, she says. “It’s very difficult to access optimistic thinking when you’re in a state of high stress or panic. If your nervous system doesn’t feel regulated or safe, it’s much harder for the brain to access the parts responsible for perspective, planning and growth. Research shows that our brains prioritise safety over growth.” So first “focus on small, repeatable practices you can use daily to help regulate your system. You’ll still have worries but when you’re regulated you can relate to them differently — with more perspective, flexibility and a greater sense of agency.”
How to limit your worry time
Chopra advises setting aside designated “worry time” each day — which ultimately limits it. Her worry time is 15 minutes, after school drop-off. At first you might need several daily episodes of worry time — which should be 30 minutes at most and well before bedtime. If worries occur and can wait (a huge gas bill, an upsetting news story), jot them down to think about later. Then, Chopra says, in your fixed worry time ask: “Can I do anything to control or change this thing I’m worried about?” If yes, make a plan. If not, try to let it go. Studies show that setting boundaries around worry — rather than dwelling and fretting all day — can help people to tolerate uncertainty and more productively address concerns they can control.
The Power of Real Optimism by Dr Deepika Chopra (Bonnier £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
