The goal was to leave La Gomera and row to Barbados. They had enough food for a hundred days. By Alan’s calculations, if the ocean cooperated, they’d be there in fewer than seventy—a good thing, because they were racing hurricane season. Many had attempted, unsuccessfully, to row this route, including Alan’s navigator, Matt. More people had traveled to outer space than paddled across the Atlantic. It was a dangerous course to take with no motor, no sail, just five-by-seven feet of maneuvering space, a compass, a GPS, and gas-powered cooking supplies, and one significant disadvantage that no one in recorded history had dealt with during such a journey: Alan Lock was attempting to become the first registered blind person ever to row one of the world’s oceans.
If you listened to Alan’s fans, you’d think he did it all with the power of positive thinking. It’s the kind of story often burnished with terms such as bravery and inspiration. The New York Times called him “remarkable.” The Faster Times and the BBC alluded to his extraordinary optimism. In most versions of the story, Alan’s loss of vision in 2003 served only to strengthen his resolve and multiply his natural athletic gifts. Alan’s story seems like a perfect example of what positive thinking in the face of tragedy can help a person achieve.
But Alan has a secret. Spend a few minutes with him and you’ll hear him say things like “I always expect the worst” and “I knew I was doomed.” No matter how many people attest to Alan’s remarkable attitude in the face of great adversity, he’ll tell you he’s a pessimist. “I’m just not a silver-lining kind of person,” he insists.
Conventional wisdom says that positive thinking after a tragedy leads to better outcomes. When the bottom drops out, having a rosy attitude is better than thinking the worst, right? Yet for more than half a century psychologists have debated this facile version of “the power of positive thinking.”
Those arguing for this perspective assert that positive thinking is nothing less than an antidote to threatening illness and the secret to achieving success in life. Thank mid-twentieth-century Protestant preacher Norman Vincent Peale for this view. His book The Power of Positive Thinking offered a doctrine gilded by an appealing promise: positive thinking can bring about positive realities. This assertion has been a jumping-off point for scores of self-help books extolling positive thinking as the secret to fortune. Some have even asserted that it is the key to cheating death. Self-help books and inspirational leaders have made many claims, including “Thoughts equal creation: If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad), that speeds the creation”; “You attract your dominant thoughts. Those who speak most of illness have illness, those who speak most of prosperity have it”; and “Positive attitude can even overcome serious diseases like diabetes, arthritis, and heart conditions.”
In 2006, David Schweingruber of Iowa State University’s Department of Sociology provided some evidence in support of this theory by following employees of the Enterprise Company, a pseudonym for one of the oldest door-to-door sales outfits in the United States. The Enterprise Company was especially perfect for this task for one reason: for years it made use of something the company called “emotional training.” Among other practices, the company encouraged its employees to read self-help books, repeat scripted positive phrases, and commit their goals to paper.
Guess what happened? Enterprise employees sold more than thirty million dollars’ worth of products to nearly three hundred thousand customers over the course of a summer—an unbelievably impressive total. The study suggested that a positive attitude works.
But could success really be that simple? These salespeople were a special group of highly motivated achievers who knew what they were getting into when they joined the Enterprise Company. They were naturally drawn to a firm steeped in positive thinking and were prodded by the desire to make money. Perhaps it wasn’t the strategies they employed that led these salespeople to success; perhaps it was just who they were. If positive thinking is really such an easy recipe for success, why do so many businesses fail?
When he joined the Royal Navy, Alan Lock told his recruitment officer, “My worst fear in life is being stuck behind a desk.” Alan knew as a kid he was going to be a career military man. Starting with the final two years of his secondary education, the Royal Air Force sponsored him to be a navigation officer.
Night watch on the destroyer HMS York failed to employ his extensive training in navigation, but as a junior officer he took these assignments seriously. His shifts were long, and by the end, his body felt heavy. On one such night, he could barely read the print on his navigation charts. He wondered if it was fatigue that made the text blur across the page. Oddly, come morning, he still couldn’t read the charts, and now his eyes ached. As the weeks passed, phantom shadows spirited behind objects. Gaps blinked in and out of his field of vision. He was swimming in panic.
Alan went in for eye testing, and the results that came back were startling. He had been born with a genetic abnormality, a chromosomal mutation that affects a part of the eye related to fine detail, the macula. Over time, macular degeneration gradually drowns the life of cells in the tissue of the retina, the part of the eye that detects luminosity and color. People in their sixties and seventies ordinarily get the disease. Alan was twenty-three.
When he asked his physician about treatment, he received yet another blow. There was none. Moments passed in silence. He would never fully see again, never drive again, never read again.
Alan tried to keep his mind on the positive. He pored through the medical research, and nowhere did it say he was doomed to go completely blind. The rate of degeneration had slowed. His vision loss might stabilize. As far as his future with the Royal Navy was concerned, there might be positions that didn’t require perfect vision. He’d request a transfer. Yes, he tried to tell himself, everything would be fine.
Two months after his diagnosis, however, Alan followed the sound of a clerical officer’s footsteps into a small room bathed in thin wintery light. At a tiny desk, he was handed a hefty stack of pages. The type was too small to read, just a sea of gray smudge. But he didn’t need to make out any words of this letter of liability to know what it said. He was losing his military career.
This wasn’t just a rejection of his skills or a repudiation of his dreams and hard work. “The worst part is that I didn’t have a heroic story to tell,” he says. “It’s such an ignoramus end!” Not that he’d anticipated a brutal, bloody finale, but at that moment, this felt worse.
People tried to encourage him. So, he tried hard to remain positive, to project a brave and hopeful image. He searched hard for reasons to be optimistic. Despite his best efforts, however, he could not find a silver lining. What he felt wasn’t optimism. It was anger and immense frustration, both focused on the inevitable imperfection—smaller than a bullet—that had taken him out of the game before the game had even gotten started. “I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel a sense of despair,” he says. “Try to compete on a level playing field, and anyway you cut it, being blind isn’t an advantage. I thought maybe I’d get vision back and my old job, but life just kind of kept letting me down. I felt helpless.”
The world was slipping into a blurry pageant. Alan had now lost the majority of his useful vision. The periphery of his visual field remained fine—such is the nature of the disease—while his center vision was like looking through milky frosted glass. As his eyesight declined, so did his independence.
This was where Alan found himself when positive thinking most failed him. “No matter what people say, there were no positives in losing my sight,” he says. “You might stretch it and say you appreciate your hearing; you might say, ‘Keep your head up, and think about what all these other blind people do to get by.’ But I’d have given anything to change this.”
But Alan is obviously much more than simply a pessimist, especially given what he would accomplish. He may not believe in the simplistic kind of positive thinking so often advocated in popular culture, but he isn’t
exactly promoting negative thinking, either. “Thinking realistically,” he says, “it was the only way to move forward.”
Alan’s claim mirrors the research. Telling yourself, “Everything will be fine” or “It will all be okay” if it probably won’t may undermine your ability to take action to make your situation better. For decades, psychologists and public health researchers have been interested in what makes people take steps to head off disasters. Why, for instance, do some people go in for colonoscopies or mammograms while others don’t? After all, these relatively simple procedures could help prevent horrible tragedies. Perhaps the most prominent perspective on this issue is called the health belief model. According to the health belief model, a number of factors predict whether someone will take a risk, but two of the most important are perceived susceptibility and perceived severity. In short, if we believe that a particular action will put us at risk of harm, and that the harm is severe enough, we probably won’t take that action. Likewise, if we think a particular action is likely to protect us from harm, we’ll probably take that action. These two factors have found support in dozens of studies. The health belief model has been shown to predict health-promoting behaviors such as seeking out cancer screening, engaging in safer sex, eating a heart-healthy diet, and getting the flu vaccination; it has even been shown to predict lower levels of criminal behavior.
Not surprisingly, one of the major criticisms of this theory is that it’s common sense—and it is.
But what does this mean for positive thinking? In short, people who pay attention to the positives at the expense of noticing the potential for negatives, who believe that everything is (or will be) fine despite their being at real risk, may not take appropriate action to protect themselves. Their lack of belief in their own susceptibility may be dangerous.
Back in 2008 an intriguing war of philosophies brought this issue some prominence. It started with Dutch marathon swimmer Maarten van der Weijden. By age nineteen, Maarten was already a regional swimming champion. Nonetheless, when recalling that time in his life, he is filled with intense ambivalence.
“When young people are good at sports, others encourage them to pursue it. The child is not making that choice. Others get the ball rolling for the child, and the easiest thing for that child to do is just keep doing it. And if you’re really good, they tell you, you can win the Olympics someday,” he explains from his home in Rotterdam. And Maarten believed them. “But now I see I hadn’t been a realistic person. The odds of me competing and winning in something like the Olympics someday was just pie-in-the-sky thinking and based entirely on false hope.” The fact is, as young Maarten looked around, he noticed that other athletes were naturally more gifted than he. The overly positive statements of his family and friends seemed to ignore this obvious fact, leading Maarten to feel alienated from his biggest supporters.
His early swimming career would be abruptly halted, however, by acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a potentially fatal illness.
In sports, Maarten didn’t meet a lot of realistic people, and he didn’t meet a lot of realistic people in the hospital, either. As in swimming, in the cancer ward many believed that positive thinking would give one patient an edge over another, but Maarten felt they were all too ready to provide false hope. Although he recognized that his odds of surviving were about 30 percent, friends would tell him not to think about his low chances and to keep his mind only on the positive. “There was a big gap between my idea of hope and their ideas of hope,” Maarten notes. “For me, hope was chemotherapy. It was science. When you think of it this way, it’s really weird to say positive thinking helps you.”
“When I was young, my father tried to teach me everything was possible if I worked hard and thought about it right,” he continues. “For a long time I believed him. But when I got sick, it was the first time in my life I didn’t.”
Maarten simply couldn’t tell himself that everything would be okay. He felt strongly that he must admit to himself the reality of what was happening. Only then could he begin taking steps to deal with it.
Although Maarten’s family and friends were deeply concerned by his peculiarly un-positive attitude, it hardly destroyed him. Based on his realistic, if not very rosy, understanding of the situation, he began to set small goals for himself, goals to get through the week alive, to get through the day with minimal pain, to survive the next round of chemotherapy, to make it through the stem cell transplant that ultimately saved his life. Three years later and cancer-free, he slipped back into a swimming pool.
This time, however, he decided to run his swimming career using the same brand of realistic yet forward-looking thinking that had gotten him through his leukemia. “I knew the odds of success were very small,” he says. “I knew that I was not the fastest swimmer. I would have to train extra hard to get back to the level I was at before my illness, and even harder just to overcome my own natural shortfalls. Instead of gunning for an international championship, as I had as a youth, I set out simply to swim my best in small competitions.”
Over the next five years, he qualified for the World Open Water Swimming Championships in Barcelona, winning three Dutch titles in the 800-meter and 1500-meter freestyle competitions. Following World Cup wins in Ismaila, Pakistan; Al Fujairah and Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Argentina, and a World Championship title in Seville, he qualified to compete in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Knowing that he wasn’t the quickest or strongest athlete present, he swam at the back of the pack, avoiding the slipstream, and at the last moment pulled ahead, clinching the gold.
To outside observers, Maarten’s comeback seemed amazing. Among his biggest supporters was none other than the prime minister of the Netherlands, Jan Pieter Balkenende. “He called me an inspiration,” Maarten says. But Maarten believed he was not a hero; he’d simply survived a trauma. And as for getting cancer, in his mind it had nothing to do with his winning the gold. However, the media continued to compare Maarten to another famous cancer survivor.
“Don’t call me Lance Armstrong!” Maarten insists.
Maarten had nothing personal against Armstrong, who was at the peak of his fame and respect at the time. What he took offense to was a string of statements the world-renowned cyclist and cancer survivor had made over the years about positive attitude, survival, and victory. “Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France,” Armstrong wrote. In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, the cyclist added, “You can’t deny the fact that a person with a positive and optimistic attitude does a lot better.”
In a widely circulated 2008 interview with London’s The Daily Telegraph, Maarten very publically denied this. “Armstrong says that positive thinking and doing a lot of sports can save you. I don’t agree.”
He then added, “I even think it’s dangerous.”
Maarten felt the public’s backlash immediately.
Detractors relied on empirical evidence that seemed to support the idea that positive thinking was a key to successfully surviving serious illness. Studies show links between positive psychological well-being and reduced death by heart attack as well as reduced death rates in patients with various life-threatening illnesses.
People often take news like this to mean that positive thinking has been explicitly proven to be good for your health. If it sounds too good to be true, it might be. The truth, much like Alan’s and Maarten’s stories imply, appears to be more complicated.
University of Pennsylvania psychologist James Coyne wondered how firm such conclusions were, particularly as they related to patients with cancer. In the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Coyne writes, “Are we prepared to accept that the effects of any one or more psychosocial ‘protective factors’ will overwhelm risks of poor outcome attributable to disease severity variables?” So, he and his team undertook a careful examination of the previous research. This wasn’t a cursory look at the results, but rather a critical evaluation of the methodology that produced those results. They wanted to know whether t
hese astounding findings were based on sound research techniques.
It turns out that Coyne arrived at conclusions very similar to Maarten’s. In articles published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine and Psychological Bulletin, Coyne and his team reported finding major flaws in much of the research. Technically speaking, many of the studies made use of small samples, lacked clearly specified hypotheses, or used inappropriate methods to analyze the data and interpret the results. Put in plain English, the conclusion that positive thinking affects survival, Coyne suggested, was based on biased or at least flawed research.
To be fair, almost all studies have flaws. That doesn’t mean anybody has done anything wrong. But if a great deal of the research has major methodological flaws, as Coyne proposes, it’s possible that positive thinking isn’t as powerful as a lot of people think. That’s not to say that positive thinking is never helpful under any circumstances. Everyone knows that you can find exceptions to any rule if you look in the right places. But what’s the rule? What works for most people?
Coyne alluded to one more thing in his Annals of Behavioral Medicine article: there may be an inherent danger in elevating positive thinking to too powerful a position, a danger that Maarten spent quite some time considering while battling his cancer. “I think we believe a cancer patient has a lot of influence himself because we want to believe that,” Maarten said in his TEDx speech in 2010. “It’s a nice thought for the patient, for people who love that patient, and for healthy people because they think that, in the worst-case scenario, ‘I will think tough, I will think positive, I will fight my way through.’ And what about the people who don’t make it? My friends in the hospital were doing weird fitness sequences and riding the stationary bike to stay fit to fight cancer. They were the people who did not make it. It feels [like] saying they did not work hard enough.”
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