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To understand why someone becomes an optimist or a pessimist, it helps to understand what distinguishes them. Say you crash your car. Do you expect good things to happen after the accidentan easy recuperation , a fat check from your insurer? Or do you worry that your neck will hurt forever? Optimistic people tend to feel that bad things wont last long and wont affect other parts of life, .Seligman says. Pessimists tend to believe one negative incident will last and undermine everything else in their lives. Also important, researchers say, is the story you construct about why things happenyour explanatory style. Optimists believe that bad events have temporary causesThe boss is in a bad mood.Pessimists believe the cause is permanentThe boss is a jerk. This sense of control distinguishes one type from the other. Positive thinkers feel powerful. Negative thinkers, Seligman says, feel helpless because they have learned to believe theyre doomed, no matter what. A young wife whos told shes incapable of handling household finances might later become a divorce woman who cant balance a checkbook. Such learned helplessness causes much harm on health. Studies show that optimists are better at coping with the distress associated with everything from sore throat to heart surgery. Furthermore, scientists at U. C. L. A. discovered that optimists have more disease-fighting T cells. | 
