My father used to say that worrying was just praying for things you didn’t want. He said it in Telugu, and it sounded better in Telugu, the way most wisdom does in the language it was born in. I didn’t understand it fully when I was young. I thought optimism was a personality trait, something you either had or didn’t, like being good at cricket or bad at math. It took me decades, and a newspaper on a Monday morning, to start thinking of it differently.
The Washington Post is running a piece today about optimism and heart health. Not the greeting-card kind of optimism, but the studied, measured, clinically interesting kind. Researchers have been looking at how people with a sunnier outlook on life tend to have healthier cardiovascular outcomes. Lower risk of heart disease. Lower risk of dying from it. A 35 percent lower risk of a cardiovascular event among the most optimistic, compared to the least. That number stopped me mid-coffee.
I’ve spent most of my career in technology, which runs on a particular flavor of optimism. Every product launch, every startup pitch, every roadmap begins with a belief that things can be built, that problems can be solved, that the future will be better than the present. I used to think of that as professional necessity. A useful cognitive bias. Now I wonder if it was also, quietly, medicine.
The research distinguishes between toxic positivity and genuine optimism. One is about ignoring stress. The other is about believing you have the capacity to handle it. That distinction matters to me. Growing up in India and then building a life in the United States, I’ve met a great many people who survived serious hardship without becoming brittle. They moved through difficulty with a forward-facing posture I can only describe, looking back, as biological. It was in how they held themselves. It was, maybe, in how their hearts kept beating.
The article talks about practices: mindfulness, reframing negative thoughts, taking short walks in nature, writing down three good things that happened in your day. Simple things. Almost embarrassingly simple, the way good advice usually is. I’ve tried some of these. I’ve been inconsistent about most of them. But reading about the heart-mind connection laid out in careful scientific language makes me want to be less inconsistent.
There is something in my Indian inheritance that already knew this, even if it didn’t have the clinical vocabulary. Ayurveda has always treated the mind and body as continuous. The Bhagavad Gita, which my father read every evening, is in large part a philosophical argument for acting without anxious attachment to outcomes. That is optimism of a specific and rigorous kind. Not naivete. Not denial. A disciplined orientation toward the possible.
I don’t know if I’m an optimist by nature. Some days I’m not sure. But I think I come from optimists, people who crossed oceans and rebuilt lives and cooked large meals for neighbors they’d known for two weeks. People whose hearts, perhaps, were healthier for it.
That seems worth holding onto on a Monday morning in May.
Via: People who are optimistic tend to have healthier hearts, study finds
