Realistic Or Pessimistic? Find Out What Kind Of Person You Are!
Have you ever been told you are pessimistic? If the answer is yes, but you don’t agree and want to know if your arguments are valid, then this article was written for you. Very often, we confuse the fact of being realistic with the fact of being pessimistic ; however, these are two very different personality types that give rise to misunderstandings. And you, what type of person are you?
Above all, it is important that you know that it is normal to see the bad sides of a situation, and that this tendency is explained by an evolutionary and adaptive reason: it protects us from what can potentially harm us. . In other words, for our psychological protection system, it is more interesting to know what is going wrong and what can harm us, than to identify the aspects which are going well and which can bring us something positive. However, when a person sees only the negative part of what is happening to them, they become pessimistic and the adaptive function of detecting the “negative” becomes a problem, a burden on their mood.
Thus, we must detect that there is a midpoint between being pessimistic and being optimistic (seeing everything in a positive light), and this midpoint is realism. To help you understand the differences between realism and pessimism, and find out what kind of person you are, in the rest of this article we will introduce you to each of these concepts.
When a person is pessimistic, they exhibit a cognitive-emotional bias (error) that psychologist Aaron Beck has called “selective abstraction”. In other words, through this bias, pessimistic people are interested in and retain only a certain type of information: negative information. Thus, a pessimistic person is only interested in and remembers information of a negative type. Often, without realizing it, she filters information and only specifically appreciates the negative.
On the other hand, if this sounds like this description and think you frequently make this cognitive mistake, don’t worry! It is possible to correct this error. There are scientifically tested psychological techniques such as cognitive restructuring or cognitive fusion that help people move away from their thoughts and become aware of them in order to modify these psychological automatisms and negative thoughts.
To find out what type of person you are, you must take into account that pessimistic people, when faced with a difficulty, anticipate the worst outcome, but not necessarily the most likely.
In this sense, being pessimistic is (in part) due to having an anxious personality type at the core. We are talking to you here about very anxious people, who for this reason see life in a negative light. When a person is pessimistic, they subconsciously tend to set limits, to think of the worst and to be more sensitive in the face of uncertainty. She tells herself that she has to prepare for the worst to be ready.
More so, there is a key aspect that you need to consider if you want to know what type of person you are: if you are pessimistic, you automatically tend to see the negative aspects, even in positive events and situations. of your life. In other words, even in times when they have gone to great lengths to complete a project or achieve a goal, and are successfully achieving it, pessimistic people continue to see it as something that did not go well. . If you are pessimistic then you are a person for whom it is difficult to profit from their successes because you get lost in giving too much importance to the aspects that could have been improved.
First, the most distinctive characteristic of realistic people is that they generally do not anticipate value judgments. In other words, they wait to see how things unfold to say what they think about it, what they expect. It is only when they have all the real information about the situations that they make a judgment (for example: “this is great” or “this is very bad”). Thus, realistic people maintain a more neutral position in the moments leading up to the outcome of events and are able to adjust their expectations.
Thus, realistic people mentally prepare themselves not only to face what might go wrong (while taking objective facts into account), but also to take advantage of what might well go. In other words, they are able to prepare for almost any type of outcome; they know how to profit from their successes and are prepared for their failures: the latter do not prevent them from continuing to try to achieve their goals or to follow their path.
Realistic people are therefore characterized by the fact of not being catastrophic, but also by the fact of valuing in a more adjusted way the positive and negative aspects of the situations and problems that arise in their life. This ability to value situations is one of the most distinctive characteristics of realistic people.
Finally, if in trying to find out what type of person you are, you realize that you are pessimistic, we want to remind you that a psychologist can help you change those aspects of your personality that prevent you from valuing the facts. of your life without catastrophisms or selective abstractions of the information you receive. In addition, making sure to be more realistic can be a very good resolution to take at the start of the year, right?
Our thoughts See the world in black. Thinking that those around us are conspiring against us. Pay more attention to our negative emotions. Finding Diffi …
