This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Telomere Effect" by Elissa Epel and Elizabeth Blackburn. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How does optimism act as a telomerase booster? How can you develop optimism through radical acceptance?
Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel urge you to work toward a more optimistic mindset, especially when it comes to facing life’s challenges. Instead of dwelling on problems or treating them as insurmountable, optimists view difficulties as temporary hurdles on the path to their goals.
Find out how to be more optimistic to boost telomeres.
Optimism as a Telomerase Booster
To learn how to be more optimistic, you need to perceive challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than as threats. For instance, if you lose your job, it would be natural to fall into a pessimistic mindset of thinking that you’ll never find another job that good, never make as much money as you were making, or that you’ll lose your home before finding another job. However, an optimist would instead see this challenge as a chance to find an even better job and progress their career with a new employer.
(Shortform note: Seeing challenges as chances to improve yourself comes directly from what psychologist Carol Dweck (Mindset) calls a growth mindset. A growth mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and hard work; for someone with such a mindset, a difficult problem is both opportunity and motivation to improve. Conversely, a fixed mindset assumes that talents and aptitudes are static traits that you can’t significantly improve upon—therefore, someone with a fixed mindset is likely to give up when faced with a challenge, because they don’t think it’s possible to improve themselves enough to overcome that challenge.)
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- Why people suffer the effects of old age
- How negative thinking and social isolation speed up the aging process
- Specific habits you can adopt to stay young longer
