A Pessimist's Trick to Increase Your Optimism

The benefits of "meh-mindfulness" for getting you through the hard parts of life

Welcome! I’m Dr. Jillian, a physician leader, mom, and coach who is on a mission to help other high achieving professionals and recovering perfectionists reduce overwhelm and learn to live the lives they truly want to be living. I’m still working on this in my own life, and I share what I’m learning along the way. Humans Leading is a way for you pause for reflection amidst the hustle of your life and an invitation for you to consider how you might change up what you’re doing in order to find more joy and ease. Subscribe here to get this newsletter straight in your inbox:

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For the first three decades of my life, I would have told you that I was a pessimist. I thought I was forever a glass-half-empty person, and I judged people who identified as optimists as “out of touch” (or worse).

However, when I found myself experiencing depression and burnout in my early 30’s, I found that my pessimism wasn’t doing me any favors. When I was feeling at my lowest, I needed to find a way to believe that I would recover. I wanted to find some optimism.

This is not an easy task when you are experiencing depression because your brain has a really hard time experiencing any positive emotions like hope, joy, etc. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of what you are experiencing.

So, my therapist encouraged me to find a way to think about what was going fine or not wrong as a first step.

I think of this as “Meh-mindfulness.”

In other words, when you are feeling “meh” (read: indifferent) about life via depression, grief, burnout, overwhelm, etc. your brain might not be able to see what is going well.

It might only be able to see what does not completely suck right now.

For me, this meant noticing that:

• coffee and food brought comfort

• the flowers started to bloom in the Spring

• a lot of people showed up to care for me

• I could still get out of bed to go to work

• I could still positively impact patients and their families even while I was not feeling my best

Over time, I noticed that I was starting to be able to identify things that were more than just fine… things that were actually going well. I was starting to feel positive emotions again.

I began to feel optimistic that I could recover. And I did.

It was around that time that I first heard about Shawn Achor’s book “The Happiness Advantage.” The central argument of the book is that happiness is a trainable skill.

One of the ways that we can train of brains to be happier (and, by extension, more optimistic) is through a gratitude practice.

I wrote about the benefits of these practices last year.

And, you can learn to start your own gratitude practice, too.

This week, Jane Galloway from

The Buzz from Quiet the Hive

and I teamed up for a podcast swap. I was on her podcast on 7/17, and my podcast is out with her today!

As you can hear in the preview above, Jane (an optimist) understands that optimism and gratitude are not about ignoring the bad stuff. Rather, gratitude trains your brain to more easily identify the things that are going well (or… at least fine as in meh-mindfulness) as a way of getting through the hard times.

As Jane talks about in the episode, her gratitude practice got her through a really difficult time in her life as my own practice did for me.

If you’d like to learn how to do this for yourself, I highly recommend listening to the episode to get the full benefit of Jane’s wisdom and learn how to operationalize the Three Good Things practice in your own life. You will not only get an immediate benefit, but the research shows that gratitude can have lasting benefits for months.

You can find the episode on all major podcast platforms or here on the website.

“When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—”
― Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work