How to Be More Optimistic: Real Optimism Without Toxic Positivity, with Dr. Deepika Chopra
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Dr. Deepika Chopra
The Permission You Didn’t Know You Needed
Optimism isn’t a personality trait. It’s a learnable skill — and the version of “positivity” most of the internet is selling you is exhausting because it’s a performance, not a practice.
You’ve tried to be more optimistic. You’ve tried the gratitude journal, the affirmations, the breath work, the meditation app. And somehow, at the end of all that effort, you don’t feel more optimistic. You feel like someone who is failing at being okay. If that lands, the problem isn’t your motivation. The problem is the method. The version of optimism most of the internet is selling you isn’t real optimism — it’s a performance, and performance is exhausting when you actually need to feel different on the inside.
My guest is Dr. Deepika Chopra, the clinical health psychologist known as The Optimism Doctor and the author of the new book The Power of Real Optimism (Simon Element, 2026). She holds a doctorate in clinical health psychology and completed a double postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai. Her work has been featured on the TODAY Show, in Forbes, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, and her consulting work has taken her into Google, Amazon, and Amex.
We sat down to talk through what real optimism actually is, why forced positivity makes anxiety worse, why generic affirmations can deepen self-doubt, and the mental shift that changed everything for Dr. Chopra herself — from rumination to agency — during the hardest season of her own life, when she was writing this book while her toddler was in intensive medical treatment.
“An optimist is actually quite grounded in reality.” — Dr. Deepika Chopra, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Dr. Lisa: We all know that there’s a lot of power in positive thinking, and that what we’re telling ourselves has a significant impact on the way we feel. But it’s not always easy to do that, and sometimes feeling like you’re being pessimistic or focused on the negative can feel like its own failure. The reality is that feeling like you should be more positive or optimistic than you actually feel can lead to its own stress and anxiety, and this “good vibes only” culture is masking what healthy and enduring optimism really is.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: An optimist is actually quite grounded in reality. They are keenly and mindfully aware of the roadblocks and the setbacks, the less-than-ideal situations. The caveat is that they see those setbacks as something that is temporary, and something that they have the ability to overcome, even if they don’t know how or when.
Dr. Lisa: So on today’s episode of Love, Happiness, and Success, we are talking about what the science actually says about how to be an authentically optimistic, hopeful person who still has their whole range of dark emotions — and why those are positive. We’re talking about how to start to rewire your brain toward hope by learning how to build yourself up in a reality-based way. By the end of today’s show, you will have actionable advice for how to start wiring your brain toward hope without bypassing any of the hard stuff, and what it looks like to practice real optimism when life is objectively difficult.
Dr. Lisa: My guest today is Dr. Deepika Chopra. She’s a clinical health psychologist, founder of the organization Things Are Looking Up. She is regularly on the TODAY Show, and she’s the author of a brand-new book, The Power of Real Optimism. She is the real deal optimism doctor, and she’s here today to share her wisdom and strategies with you.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I’ve gotten to what I’m doing now in probably the most nonlinear fashion possible. I’ve always been someone deeply drawn to other people and their storytelling and emotions. When I first saw Titanic, I couldn’t get out of bed or go to school for two weeks. I was so wrecked by it and almost paralyzed. My parents really shielded me from highly emotional content after that. And I just remember even in high school, counselors saying, “I think psychology would be a great space for you.” But remembering that experience and dealing with my empathy in life, I was like, “Oh no, this does not seem like the right path for me. I don’t think I’d be able to manage it.” So it was always something I was interested in, but I held myself back.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I started my career at a punk independent music label. Then I actually went into investment banking and the public health space. I found it interesting, but it wasn’t tapping into things that lit me up. I had amazing mentorship through every step. One person, when I was working in M&A and public health, was at an off-site meeting where they brought in an organizational psychologist. He took me aside on the bus ride back and said, “You really lit up when we were doing these exercises. Have you ever thought about organizational psychology?” I literally quit my job almost immediately and went back to my alma mater at UCLA. I knocked on every single door at the Neuropsychiatric Institute and said, “Can I volunteer for you?” That’s how I got back into psychology.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I ended up getting my master’s and then the doctorate in clinical health psychology, and I fell in love with it. I’ve always been drawn to data and science, and I love questioning. I remember reading a very significant piece of research explaining how the brain is an anticipatory organ — it is constantly working in future tense, whether a couple minutes from now or six months from now. Something about that really struck a chord. So many therapy modalities I was learning were driven from the past. I wasn’t hearing a lot of: if the brain is this future-tense organ, why are we not talking to people about what they’re expecting to happen? And so it became a question I was really passionate to answer. In a nutshell, that is the work of optimism.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: At the time, what I was studying was a little too woo-woo for the science community, and I felt like I was way too science-based for the self-help community. Years went by, I kept following my curiosity, and the world also caught up. People were interested in that bridge, and optimism and hope became something people wanted.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you so much for sharing your story and highlighting this observation that we are hardwired to go off into the future, but so much of conventional mental health treatment is focused on exploration of the past. I’ve sort of been occupying some of that space in my own work too. I’m a psychologist and certainly a therapist, but over the last number of years I’ve become so excited about coaching psychology and all of the opportunities available for growth and forward momentum. The past is always important to understanding who we are, but that’s not enough to move you forward or create different outcomes in the future, particularly for things that aren’t necessarily clinical mental health issues but rather a desire for change.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I felt really constricted by the bounds of traditional psychology. I would never trade up any of the foundation — I don’t think a lot of people understand the amount of clinical training you get when you pursue a master’s or doctorate, and how valuable it is. But I had requests from someone on a different continent, and you couldn’t do that under traditional licensure. So I took a leap of faith and stepped away from all of that clinically. I’m going to utilize what I know and the foundation I created, but I’m going to keep following that thread of curiosity. I see this profession as a creative one. Coming to each person uniquely where they’re at — it is not the same journey.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: Coming from mainstream world, everything I knew about optimism and hope was not really in congruence with the research. I, like so many people, thought being optimistic meant being positive and experiencing joy and bliss 24/7, living a worry-free life, always finding silver linings, looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. And this idea that if you experience struggle, you’re not an optimist. People who love me, anytime I had a personal struggle, would say, “You got this, because this is what you study. Why would you be stuck on this? You are the optimism doctor.” Even I could get back into that path and think, “I guess I’m just not really good at what I do.”
Dr. Deepika Chopra: That is the perfect example of how we all have a big misconception of what optimism is. One of the most common things I hear is “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.” But everything I’ve researched shows that an optimist is actually quite grounded in reality. They are keenly and mindfully aware of the roadblocks and setbacks. The caveat is they see those setbacks as something temporary that they have the ability to overcome, even if they don’t know how or when — because it’s based on their personal historical resiliency. Every one of their hardest days thus far that they have overcome is where we cultivate future optimism. I don’t see optimism so connected to positivity as much as I see it connected to resiliency and curiosity. It’s deeply rooted in: this is temporary, and having the curiosity of “I wonder how this will change,” while being authentic to how you feel in the real moment. Optimism is not about shoving the bad-feeling emotions under the rug. It’s actually about sitting with them and validating them.
Dr. Lisa: Wow. This is very interesting. It almost sounds similar to what I think self-esteem really is — a growing confidence in yourself and your ability to solve problems, figure things out. The core of this definition of optimism isn’t that you feel great all the time, but a deep confidence in the fact that you have control over what you do next, that you can figure it out, that you can design a brighter future based on your confidence in yourself.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: You’re absolutely right. There is such a big piece of self-mastery in it. It’s saying, “This is really hard right now,” and accepting at the same time, “And this is not the whole story.” What we call in psychology explanatory style: this is not permanent. This feels awful. I’m not shoving it under the rug. I have a real reason for feeling the way I do, and I wonder how it’s going to change. I’ve been through really hard stuff before. It’s not changing the circumstances, but it is being more grounded in the reality of the situation. The brain is very focused on what needs to be fixed, what is unfinished. We have to intentionally remind ourselves of the hard times we’ve been through and how we persevered. That is where optimism really grows from. While I was writing this book, probably the darkest time in my life, what I have come out with is the statement, “I can do hard things.”
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I really understand this. I was writing this book on optimism, and a couple months in, we were given a very horrible, scary medical diagnosis for our very small child. It shattered us and leveled me in a way I will never be able to unlearn or unsee. It was by far the darkest season of our lives. The part that is really scary is there are no answers. It was something very rare, two-in-a-million cases, just chalked to bad luck. That is a really tough pill to swallow as a parent. Most of us want to search for some control when something horrible happens. There was nothing. We had a year and a half of pretty severe treatment, and even now, in terms of what the future looks like, we have no data.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: For about two months I was emotionally paralyzed. I had all the tools, I knew them, I was writing about them, but I had no thread to go by. I even thought, “I don’t think I could write this book.” When our brain has prolonged uncertainty, it starts to fill in the gaps with worst-case scenario planning. The amygdala — our threat response — is very turned on. Thinking becomes narrowed, decision-making narrowed, creativity narrowed, perspective narrowed. We are tunnel-visioned into survival mode. I was ruminating, playing on loop, “Why is this happening to us?”
Dr. Deepika Chopra: Then one day I had a shift. It wasn’t fast, and it was so subtle. It was not changing our circumstances, and it was not anything that would make someone feel positive. It was a subtle shift from “Why is this happening to us? We are good people. Why us?” to “Why anyone? Why not us?” That little shift, I wouldn’t say made me feel better. But what it did was it removed a lot of the anger. It was almost like a radical acceptance moment. That small shift allowed my brain to expand a little, and I was able to move from rumination to agency. For me, agency looked like: “What is my next step?” Less ruminating over why this is happening, more “What can I do next?” It became focused on what can I pack in the hospital bag? We need to buy a shirt with a zipper on the side where his port is so we don’t have to take the shirt off every time. Nothing I would want, but focused on agency and the next move.
Dr. Lisa: Prior to that, you’d been having arguments with reality in your head, being mad about the circumstances. That took all the energy. When you were able to let that go, it was one step at a time, even if it was just packing a bag. But it put you in the present, and in the future again. I could see how that is part of reclaiming optimism and hope, because you’re doing something.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: Agency doesn’t mean you’re doing something you want to do. In my situation, every bit of my agency was not what I wanted to do. I hated the treatments. I hated talking to insurance. But that agency let me focus on the little, tiny places where I had control. That in itself made me feel like there was self-efficacy, and I was mastering something. The radical acceptance is you may never know why you have to go through it. Optimism doesn’t always feel good. That’s a myth. And optimism doesn’t mean you understand with certainty how something’s going to unfold. Also a myth.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: People who think that optimism is a personality trait — it’s actually a psychological learned skill. There are so many ways to increase this skill. I look at it like a muscle. I created the Things Are Looking Up deck of cards. They’re not affirmations. They’re actionable prompts you can do, and most of them are less than 30 seconds. In the book, there’s a 33-day challenge drawn from the deck. The number one thing for everyone to start on: the brain does not prioritize growth — the brain prioritizes safety. First, come up with your own unique, tangible tools to feel safe and regulated. Being able to feel regulated in your parasympathetic nervous system even for 20 seconds is very powerful, and you can still worry and be ruminating during this time. For me, the 4-7-8 breathing technique helps a lot — breathe in for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: Two tools have stood out to readers. The first is the ta-da list. Most people are familiar with a to-do list, which is fine in the first part of the day. Not great at the end of the day. At the end of the day, before sleep, I recommend making a ta-da list — literally writing down five things you have handled or accomplished that day. They can be very small. It’s a practice that takes us back to how we increase self-mastery, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. It’s also a reminder that you are doing so much more than you think you’re doing. When you feel like, “Oh my gosh, I’m failing at this,” the to-do list trains your brain to scan for what is incomplete. The ta-da list trains your brain to scan for what you actually handled.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: What we’ve taken from the idea of being positive all the time — it has become performative. Negative emotions, to most people, feel unwelcomed. The truth is, as humans, we were built to experience the full range of human emotion. That includes worry, stress, rage, grief, as well as joyfulness, elation, excitement, curiosity. They are not abnormal, but we are made to either numb out or avoid. So getting more comfortable experiencing emotions that don’t feel good is part of the work.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: The second tool is something I prescribe to my clients: schedule worry time. Instead of saying, “Oh, yes, we can create this life without worry” — that is not reality — what we can do is contain our worry. Build a container for it so it’s not free and wild, what we’re experiencing 24 hours a day. Many of us are because the world we live in is set up that way. We have 24/7 news cycles. We are exposed to every pain and suffering of every place. As empathic social creatures, we were not meant to experience this level of stimulation.
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I am a big believer of containment. We should still know what’s going on, our eyes should be open, but we need tools to hold all that is going on. When I say “schedule worry time,” people look at me and say, “You want me to worry?” Well, I don’t have to tell you to worry, but I want you to be more strategic about how you worry and when you worry. There’s a whole chapter on how to develop this practice. A woman interviewing me for public radio told me, “There’s all these tools, but there’s one in particular I’ve been doing for two weeks, and this is the first time I’ve slept through the night in two and a half years.” It sounds simple, but it’s a really powerful tool.
Dr. Lisa: I love it. Are any of the tools, the book, or the card decks appropriate for kids?
Dr. Deepika Chopra: Yes. There is a Things Are Looking Up kids version. My two older boys illustrated the deck. There are 52 different cards, and each has a prompt or suggestion that actually increases their resiliency, optimism, and mindset. People ask me all the time, “How can we raise more optimistic children, especially in this world?”
Dr. Deepika Chopra: This was relieving to me. There’s a lot of parenting advice out there, and honestly it can be noisy. I had to turn it all off because it was making me feel worse than it was making me feel empowered. But one thing I’m sure you know from the work is that kids don’t learn from you having the perfectly packaged statement and response when they’re going through something. They learn through modeling. When you are practicing these tools and you are committing to what I call self-worth work and increasing your optimism, they’re watching and they see you. When you’re going through a struggle or setback and they see how you interpret it — and I’m not talking about saying, “Well, things are going to get better,” that is not practicing real optimism — they learn from that. Once you read something and your brain metabolizes it, you can’t unsee it. It’ll be programmed in you and you might use a word, some language, or try a tool and not even know it, and your kids are watching. That was very comforting to me.
Dr. Lisa: Such good advice. Dr. Deepika Chopra, it has been such a genuine pleasure to visit with you today. Where would people go to learn more about you and stay in touch?
Dr. Deepika Chopra: I know this sounds mind-boggling, but I’m not on all the social medias. I choose one — I am on Instagram, @drdeepikachopra. I love DM-ing with people about this. So if you started reading the book and it is resonating with you or you have questions, reach out to me. My website is the same, drdeepikachopra.com. You can buy The Power of Real Optimism everywhere you buy books, including audio. And the Things Are Looking Up cards are available in select stores and online at thingsarelookingup.co.
Dr. Lisa: Such a fun and honestly very powerful conversation with Dr. Deepika Chopra. I really appreciated her authenticity, and talking about how the lived reality we all go through sometimes feels very challenging, especially when you are dealing with legitimately, objectively hard things — and that we need to resist these cultural messages that we need to feel okay all the time, or that there’s something deeply wrong and broken in us if we don’t feel okay.
Dr. Lisa: If nothing else, I hope today’s episode helps you legitimize and validate your own feelings when you are going through hard things, and not feel like you need to rush into positivity or optimism as a way of shifting out of the challenges that are simply a part of life. Instead, think about how your resilience is grown and cultivated — not despite your going through hard things, but actually because of them.
Dr. Lisa: By learning how to make even the smallest shifts in your mindset, not telling yourself that everything’s going to be okay because sometimes it isn’t, but coming back into the present moment and looking for very small ways to feel a tiny bit more empowered, like reconnecting with your personal agency — making your bed, doing the dishes, listening to music that helps you feel how you want to feel, resisting pressures from outside about needing to feel anything that isn’t true for you. As we observe ourselves managing our moods, doing deep breathing exercises, experimenting with a tiny reframe, every time we do one of those things, we start building our trust in ourself.
Dr. Lisa: When you take positive action, it teaches you, in a very deeply felt way, that you can take care of you. You can be counted on and trusted to take effective action. Over time, things do change as you hang in there and make one small choice after another that leads you out of that tunnel into a better place. It doesn’t happen fast sometimes. But putting one foot in front of the other, if you keep going, you will always end up in a different place. It is through the observation of yourself doing that that you cultivate resilience. Optimism and real hope that you can hold onto isn’t just about what you are thinking or telling yourself or trying to put a positive spin on. It is about this deep work that is grounded in resilience and self-trust and the kind of self-confidence that no one can ever take from you, because you’ve earned it.
What to take with you
Real optimism is grounded in reality, not denial of it.
Optimists are not people who feel good all the time. They are people who trust their own ability to face what comes, even when they don’t yet know how.
Forced positivity makes anxiety worse.
Suppressing negative emotion is well-documented in psychology as a rebound trigger. The pressure to “stay positive” is part of why you feel worse, not part of the solution.
Generic affirmations can deepen self-doubt.
The brain detects what it does not believe. “I am confident” reinforces the doubt. Try “I am learning to” or “What if I could” instead.
The shift from rumination to agency is the most important mental move in a hard season.
Not “why is this happening” but “what is my next step.” One question keeps you stuck. The other moves you.
Scheduled worry time actually reduces anxiety.
Containing worry in a specific time slot prevents it from saturating the rest of your day. Backed by CBT research.
The people watching you learn from how you handle struggle.
Not from what you tell them. The work of building real optimism in yourself is also the work of modeling it for the people who love you.
How to Be More Optimistic: Real Optimism Without Toxic Positivity, with Dr. Deepika Chopra
You’ve tried to be more optimistic. You’ve tried the gratitude journal, the affirmations, the breath work, the meditation app, the books, the podcasts, all of it. And somehow, at the end of all that effort, you don’t feel more optimistic. You feel like someone who is failing at being okay. If you’ve been wondering how to be more optimistic and nothing has actually worked, you are not the problem.
Here is what I want you to know before we go any further. That is not a motivation problem on your end. That is a method problem in the tools you’ve been handed. The version of optimism most of the internet is selling you is not real optimism. It is a performance. And performance is exhausting when you actually need to feel different on the inside.
Most of the people who come to coaching at our life coaching practice at Growing Self have already done some version of the inner work. They’ve read the books. They’ve journaled. They understand themselves better than most people they know. What they can’t figure out is why understanding hasn’t translated into actually feeling different. That gap, the one between knowing what you should do and being able to do it in the actual moment your nervous system needs you to, is exactly the gap our coaches work in every day with real people. What I’m going to share with you in this article will give you the language and the science to understand what’s happening. The next move, the part where you actually do it differently next Tuesday at 9pm with the situation you’re in, that’s the work my team does.
On this episode of the Love, Happiness and Success podcast, I sit down with Dr. Deepika Chopra, the clinical health psychologist known as The Optimism Doctor and the author of the new book The Power of Real Optimism. Deepika has spent over a decade studying why optimism is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. She joined me to explain what real optimism actually is, why forced positivity makes anxiety worse, and what changes for you when you stop performing optimism and start practicing it.
What is the difference between real optimism and toxic positivity?
Real optimism is the belief that the hard thing you are in right now is temporary and that you have the ability to handle it, even when you don’t yet know how. Toxic positivity is the demand that you feel good about the hard thing right now, before you have done any of the work of facing it. These are not similar concepts that look different from a distance. They are opposites.
Toxic positivity sounds like “good vibes only.” It sounds like “everything happens for a reason.” It sounds like “look on the bright side.” It demands that you skip the part where you actually feel what is happening and arrive at the silver lining as quickly as possible. The problem with this is that the brain does not work that way. Suppressing a difficult emotion makes that emotion stronger, not weaker. The research on this is decades old and remarkably consistent (Wegner, 1994; Wang et al., 2020).
Real optimism does not skip the hard feeling. It names it accurately. Then it asks a different question. Not “how do I make this feel okay,” but “what is true about my history, my skills, and my support that suggests I can handle this even though it doesn’t feel handle-able right now.” One question creates pressure. The other creates ground.
Dr. Chopra puts it cleanly in our conversation. An optimist is grounded in reality. They are not pretending the setback is not happening. They are aware of it, and they are also aware that setbacks are temporary, and that they have a track record of getting through hard things. Real optimism is built on resilience, not on denial.
This distinction matters because most people I work with at Growing Self have been told they are “not naturally optimistic” or that they “need to think more positively.” Almost none of them have been told the actual research. Naming what real optimism is, and what it is not, is often the first move that changes how someone relates to their own mind. That kind of reframing is small in the article and significant in the actual practice of someone’s life. It is the kind of work coaching with our team does week after week.
How do I become more optimistic if I’m naturally a pessimist?
You become more optimistic the same way you build any psychological skill. You learn the structure of optimistic thinking, you practice the pieces deliberately, and you give your brain time to consolidate the new pattern. The fact that you have been a pessimist for thirty years is not evidence that you can’t change. It is evidence of how strong a pattern your brain can hold. That same capacity can hold a different pattern.
The most well-validated framework for this is Dr. Martin Seligman’s work on learned optimism. Seligman identified three dimensions of explanatory style that distinguish optimists from pessimists, the three Ps: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization (Seligman, 2006). Pessimists explain bad events as permanent (this will always be bad), pervasive (this ruins everything), and personal (this is my fault). Optimists explain the same events as temporary, specific, and not entirely about them. The difference is not what happens. It is the sentence you say to yourself about what happens.
This sounds abstract until you watch it play out in real life. Two people get the same difficult feedback at work. Person one tells themselves they are bad at their job and have always been bad and will always be bad. Person two tells themselves the feedback is about a specific project, on a specific day, that they will figure out. Person one goes home and ruminates. Person two goes home, opens a notebook, and writes down what they would do differently. A year later, these two people have very different careers. The starting feedback was identical.
Changing your explanatory style is genuinely doable. It starts with catching the sentence you say to yourself in the moment, writing it down, and asking whether it is permanent, pervasive, and personal. If it is, you write a different sentence. You do this enough times and the new pattern starts running automatically.
This is exactly the kind of work that benefits enormously from having a coach. The version of you reading this article and the version of you in the middle of a hard week are two different people. The version in the hard week does not usually catch the sentence. A coach catches it for you, names it, and helps you write the new one. Then they hold you accountable for practicing it. That accountability is the difference between knowing about explanatory style and actually changing yours.
Why don’t positive affirmations work for everyone?
Positive affirmations don’t work for many people because the brain registers them as lies. When you stand in front of a mirror and say “I am confident” to a brain that does not currently believe you are confident, the brain notices the mismatch. Instead of installing the new belief, it produces evidence for the old belief to resolve the mismatch. You end up more uncertain about your confidence, not less.
This is a real, documented effect. Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that people with low self-esteem felt worse, not better, after repeating positive self-statements (Wood et al., 2009). The affirmation was supposed to lift them. It pressed them down.
Dr. Chopra reframes this in a way that actually solves the problem. The brain is not a magic mirror that absorbs whatever you tell it. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine that compares new information to existing belief and looks for fit. If the new information does not fit, the brain rejects it. So the affirmation has to fit.
Three reframes that work. Phrase it as process, not as identity. “I am learning to trust myself” fits a brain that does not yet fully trust itself. “I am trustworthy” does not. Phrase it as a question, not a statement. “What if I could handle this?” invites the brain to look for evidence. “I can handle this” invites the brain to argue. Phrase it with specificity. “I have figured out hard things before, like that time I navigated my last job change” fits. “I am unstoppable” does not.
The pattern across all three is the same. You give the brain something it can actually accept, and you build the new belief on top of an accurate reading of where you actually are right now. If you’ve been doing affirmations for years and quietly given up on them, that’s not a failure on your part. That’s the affirmation industry handing you tools that don’t fit how your brain works. The reframing in this section is the version that actually does. The next-level move, learning to catch the unhelpful sentence in real time and write a better one in the moment, is where coaching genuinely accelerates the work.
Our free What’s Holding You Back quiz gives you a personalized read on the dimensions where you’re stuck — thinking, emotions, behaviors, relationships, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be — plus action steps to start moving forward.
Take the Free Quiz →How can I train my brain to be more optimistic?
You train your brain to be more optimistic by working with the way it already operates instead of fighting it. The brain has a built-in negativity bias. Bad events register more strongly than good ones, threats are processed faster than rewards, and the mind defaults to scanning for what’s wrong before noticing what’s right (Baumeister et al., 2001). This is not a personal flaw. This is a survival adaptation that kept our ancestors alive.
The bias is real, and you cannot delete it. What you can do is build a deliberate practice that gives your brain better material to work with. Three practices that work, drawn from Dr. Chopra’s conversation and the broader research.
The ta-da list. At the end of the day, write down five things you accomplished. Small things count. “Got out of bed” counts on a hard day. “Answered the email I’d been avoiding” counts. The to-do list trains your brain to scan for what is incomplete. The ta-da list trains your brain to scan for what you actually handled. Over weeks, this shifts the ratio.
Scheduled worry time. Pick a 15-minute window in your day, the same time every day. That is when you worry. The rest of the day, when a worry comes up, you say to yourself “not now, 3pm.” At 3pm, you sit down and let yourself worry on purpose. Most worries lose their grip when given a container. The ones that don’t, you bring to coaching or to a journal entry. This technique is well-documented in CBT for generalized anxiety.
The 4-7-8 breath. Breathe in for 4 counts. Hold for 7. Breathe out for 8. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system and resets the threat response. Twenty seconds of regulated breathing does not solve the problem you are worrying about. It does change the brain you are worrying about it with.
None of these are revolutionary on their own. The change comes from doing them consistently. Most people read about practices like this and try them for two days and then stop. The version of you that actually does these consistently is a different version of you, and you will not get to that version by reading another article. You get there by having structure and accountability that holds you in the practice long enough for the practice to do its work.
How do I stay positive when things are genuinely hard?
You don’t stay positive when things are genuinely hard. You stay grounded. The goal in a real crisis is not to feel good. The goal is to find one specific thing you can do next, and then do it. That is the shift from rumination to agency, and it is one of the most powerful mental moves in the entire framework Dr. Chopra teaches.
Dr. Chopra describes living through this herself. While she was writing the book on real optimism, her two-year-old son was diagnosed with a rare medical condition that required over a year of intensive treatment. She had every tool in the book. For the first two months, she could not access any of them. She was paralyzed.
What eventually shifted was small. She stopped asking the question “why is this happening to us” because that question had no answer. She started asking “what is my next step.” Sometimes the next step was packing a hospital bag. Sometimes it was buying a shirt with a side zipper so a port could be accessed without removing it. Sometimes it was calling an insurance company. None of these were things she wanted to be doing. All of them were things she could do. The agency was not in choosing the situation. The agency was in choosing the next move inside the situation.
This is the heart of real optimism. It is not the belief that things will be fine. It is the belief that you can do the next thing, whatever the next thing turns out to be.
If you are in a hard season right now, this is the moment to find a real person to be in your corner. Not because you are broken, and not because you can’t handle this on your own. But because the kind of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other work that builds real optimism is genuinely faster, and genuinely less lonely, with someone paying attention to your specific life. Our team does free first conversations, no commitment, no pressure. Just a real conversation about what’s actually going on for you and whether what we do here might help.
Why reading this article probably isn’t enough
I want to be honest with you about something before we close this article out. The frameworks I just walked you through are real. They work. People build different lives because of them. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article thinking that reading it was the work.
Here is what almost always happens. You read an article like this one. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful. You make a mental note to start the ta-da list tonight or to try the new affirmation phrasing tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes, and your nervous system does what it has done for twenty years, and you find yourself in the same self-talk spiral you’ve been in for a decade, wondering why nothing changed.
The reason is simple. You are not unmotivated, and you are not broken. You are trying to override a pattern, by yourself, in the exact moment that pattern is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do new behavior. It is almost impossible to do alone.
What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can text after a hard moment, who can help you debrief and recalibrate before the next one. That is what coaching with our team actually is. Not lectures. Not generic advice. A real ongoing relationship with someone who is paying attention to your life. We have therapists and coaches who specialize in exactly this kind of personal growth work, and we have options at a range of price points, including our practicum program if you want to try the work at a lower investment level.
If something in this article landed somewhere specific, that’s the signal to talk to someone. We do free first conversations. No pressure, no commitment. Just a real conversation with someone who has heard a lot of stories and isn’t going to flinch at yours.
What real optimism actually builds
The thing I keep coming back to from my conversation with Dr. Chopra is this. Real optimism is not a mood. It is not a personality trait. It is not a state you have to maintain through sheer force of will. It is a relationship with yourself. It is the trust, slowly earned through one small choice after another, that you can be counted on to take care of you.
Every time you take a small action when you don’t feel like it, you build that trust. Every time you make your bed in a hard week. Every time you breathe through a panic moment instead of running from it. Every time you write down the five things you handled today even though you don’t feel like you handled anything. Every time you choose the next step over the rumination. You are not just doing the action. You are teaching yourself that you are someone who can be counted on.
And that is something nobody can take from you. Because you earned it.
If you want a real person walking alongside you while you do this work, that is what Growing Self is for. Visit growingself.com, hit the button that says “Get Connected,” and we’ll set you up with a free consultation with someone on our team. You’ll know in 30 minutes whether it’s a fit. And if it is, you’ll be on your way.
XO,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Dr. Deepika Chopra
Dr. Deepika Chopra is the clinical health psychologist known as The Optimism Doctor and the founder of Things Are Looking Up, a consultancy at the intersection of evidence-based science and emotional wellness. She holds a doctorate in clinical health psychology and completed a double postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Variety, E!, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance. She is a recurring guest on the TODAY Show and has delivered keynotes at the Aspen Ideas Festival and The Atlantic’s In Pursuit of Happiness. Her corporate consulting work has taken her into Google, Amazon, and Amex. She is the creator of the Things Are Looking Up card decks for adults and kids, and the author of the new book The Power of Real Optimism (Simon Element, 2026), which she wrote during a period of intensive medical treatment for her own toddler — making every framework in it stress-tested under pressure that breaks most tools.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
- Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life (Reissue ed.). Vintage Books. Originally published 1990.
- Wang, D. (A.), Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2020). Ironic effects of thought suppression: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 778–793.
- Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52.
- Wood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q. E., & Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860–866.
