當樂觀遇到健康
Optimism and Health

Local people have shown their resilience from the typhoon last week, and repaired their houses within a month.
當地居民在經歷上週颱風侵襲後展現出其韌性，並在一個月內復原家園。

David thinks pessimistically about his future while he’s waiting for the MRI results.
David 在等待核磁共振的報告時，悲觀地想著他的未來會如何。

After the plummeting of the stock market, Barry has lost almost all of his saving.
經過股市暴跌後，Barry幾乎損失了他所有的積蓄。

When we are in a desert for a long time without water, our vision might be deluded by the mirage.
當我們長時間身處沙漠中缺乏水分時，我們的視覺可能會被蜃景所欺騙。

It's a curious paradox that drinking a lot of water can often make you feel thirsty.
大量喝水時常會讓人感覺口渴，這是看似矛盾而又正確的悖論。

It is quite unrealistic now to ignore these facts.
忽視眼前這些事實是有點不切實際的。

It's a process, and sometimes you will have a setback before growing up.
挫敗是成長必經的過程。

Habitual crime is thus to be treated as a disease.
習慣性的犯罪已被視為是一種疾病。

Winning the grand prize of the lottery has made him a lot of money at his disposal.
因為中樂透頭獎，讓他手上有很多錢可以花用。

He was not handsome, but of a robust and well-proportioned frame.
他長得不是很帥，但有強壯、健美的外型。

Optimism and Health

Mindset is all. How you start the year will set the template for the rest, and two scientifically- backed character traits hold the key: optimism and resilience (if the prospect leaves you feeling pessimistically spineless, the good news is that you can significantly boost both of these qualities).

Faced with 12 months of plummeting economics and rising human distress, staunchly maintaining a rosy view might seem deludedly Pollyannaish, but here we encounter the optimism paradox. As Brice Pitt, an emeritus professor of Psychiatry of Old Age at Imperial College, London, told me: “Optimists are unrealistic. Depressive people see things as they really are, but that is a disadvantage from an evolutionary point of view. Optimism is a piece of evolutionary equipment that carried us through millennia of setbacks.”

Optimists have plenty to be happy about. In other words, if you can convince yourself that things will get better, the odds of it happening will improve—because you keep on playing the game. In this light, optimism “is a habitual way of explaining your setbacks to yourself”, reports Martin Seligman, the psychology professor and author of Learned Optimism. The research shows that when times get tough, optimists do better than pessimists—they succeed better at work, respond better to stress, suffer fewer depressive episodes, and achieve more personal goals.

Studies also show that belief can help with the financial pinch. Chad Wallens, a social forecaster at the Henley Centre who surveyed middle-class Britons’ beliefs about income, has found that “the people who feel wealthiest, and those who feel poorest, actually have almost the same amount of money at their disposal. Their attitudes and behaviour patterns, however, are different from one another.”

Optimists have something else to be cheerful about—in general, they are more robust. For example, a study of 660 volunteers by the Yale University psychologist Dr. Becca Levy, found that thinking positively adds an average of 7 years to your life. Other American research claims to have identified a physical mechanism behind this. A Harvard Medical School study of 670 men found that the optimists have significantly better lung function. The lead author, Dr. Rosalind Wright, believes that attitude somehow strengthens the immune system. “Preliminary studies on heart patients suggest that, by changing a person’s outlook, you can improve their mortality risk,” she says.