If you're a pessimist, blame your brain

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Book review

Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain

How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook

• By Elaine Fox
• HarperCollins, 255 pages, $23

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IF you're a pessimist, you have only yourself to blame.

More precisely, you have only your brain to blame. That's among the theories presented in Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, a complex and sometimes fascinating study of why some of us are optimists and others are pessimists and how we can cope.

Our brains, and the chemicals they produce in response to our actions and society's stimuli, decide whether we have the blues or a rosy outlook, writes Oxford experimental psychologist Elaine Fox.

Optimists are left-brained and have better connections to the mind's pleasure centre. Among this lucky group is Canadian actor Michael J. Fox (no relation), who despite his diagnosis for Parkinson's disease, remains "an incurable optimist" and tells the author he's certain he can deal with whatever difficulties lie ahead.

Elaine Fox presents no celebrity pessimist, possibly because she lumps the affliction in with mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression. Pessimists are right-brained and have better connections to the brain's fear centre, which, with the right treatment, can be put in its place.

But pessimism always lurks nearby because fearful feelings emanate from our brain's core, its panic button called the amygdala. Our fascination with fear is reason why newspaper readers are attracted to negative stories like murders, she writes.

Book reviews? She provides no data, sorry.

Give Fox credit, though; she's no Pollyanna who thinks happy thoughts will cure cancer. Her idea of optimism is leavened with scientific research that tells us optimism "often has more to do with what people do and how their brain responds, rather than what people think at a superficial level."

Pessimism needs to be treated, Fox postulates, because the afflicted feed off its fear to prevent themselves from living their lives to the fullest.

Optimists worry less about embarrassment, humiliation and danger and, because of this trait, are able to accept those risks that lead to life's rewards.

Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain suffers because of its subject matter. There's a reason we ask ourselves "What was I thinking?" all the time because we don't know much about the brain. We might use only 10 per cent of it, but do we know 10 per cent of our brains?

A pessimist would say no, but Fox appears to know more about grey matter than most and she makes a reasonable attempt at providing a layman's description of humanity's most mysterious organ. She even includes a few questionnaires so readers can determine where they fall on the rainy-to-sunny scale. But there's still plenty of biological bafflegab that soars overhead.

The material that does stick in your brain is valuable, though. The sun shines on everyone once in a while, and Fox suggests that both pessimists and optimists identify the factors that make us flourish because a positive state of mind is just as important to our well-being as eating well and exercising regularly.

Hard to be pessimistic about that.

Alan Small is a Free Press assistant city editor who, like many newsmen, skews rainy brain.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 28, 2012 J9