Everyone has that friend who’s so cheerful it’s almost annoying. But while some people just happen to be more positive than others, optimism isn’t strictly a personality trait–it’s a learnable skill.
The positive psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term “learned optimism” in the ’90s; it’s the idea that with a little conscious practice, we can strategically tamp down our brains’ “negativity bias,” the tendency some people have toward seeing the downside of things. We call those folks pessimists.
