Don’t Believe Everything You Think

How do you see the world? Through rose colored glasses? A glass half full? Or do you consider yourself a realist? Most of us just want to see the world accurately—we want to see the truth. But how confident are you that what you perceive is the truth? Here’s a fun fact: speaking visually, humans see close to zero percent (.0035%) of the electromagnetic spectrum. Spiders can see ultraviolet light, snakes can see infrared. Human vision caputes laughably little of what’s out there. And even what we do see, we perceive differently from one another. According to research, our mood, emotions, and memories can influence our perception of colors, meaning two people can look at the same object, but see it differently (Wonderoplis, 2014). In terms of our perceptions, we are all alone in our heads.  

And this concept doesn’t just apply to what we see visually. Our thoughts and feelings come to us shaped through our built-in brain chemistry, childhood experiences, the movie we watched last night, and even the taco we ate for lunch. What we interpret as “reality” is filtered through a multitude of unique lenses of genetics, biology, and experience. By the time the outside world reaches our inner world, countless distortions have occurred. Even within our own heads our own reality shifts depending on our emotional state.  According to Abel et al. (2025), our emotions can significantly influence our assumptions about risk and probabilities, highlighting just how our environments can distort our views of the world.  A fender bender on the way to a funeral feels very different from one on the way to a party. So, what is reality? The wisest people admit we don’t really know. We all perceive life very limitedly and uniquely through our own individual filters. So when a pessimist insists they are a realist...where’s the truth in that? 

From a certain angle, isn’t it the truth that nearly every moment we experience can be good, or at least neutral? Take a moment to check in with your experience right now. At this moment you are probably basically okay. There’s air to breathe. The walls around you are holding up. You’re likely not in imminent danger. As psychologist Barbara Fredrickson (2009) puts it, “No one is sticking pins in your eyes.” 

This brings us to the heart of our message: Optimism is not denying the negative or pretending everything is great. May we suggest that optimism is the ability and willingness to observe the entire inner landscape of thoughts, feelings and perceptions (whether judged as positive or negative), and choosing the perspective and subsequent action that maximizes one’s well-being. This includes recognizing that our thoughts and interpretations of experiences come to us through filters and are not necessarily absolute truth. And even if we could be absolutely sure that a thought or perception was the absolute truth, operating from an optimistic perspective may just be the best way to get what we want out of life. 

Think of your mind as a stage. Countless thoughts walk across it, like actors competing for your attention. Try as you might, you often can’t control what wanders out there, but as the Director, you can control where you shine the spotlight of your attention. And, interestingly, the thoughts that get more of the spotlight grow, and start to crowd out the thoughts that you don’t feed with your attention. Your life performance ends up being the story you tell by where you’ve chosen to shine the spotlight of your attention. As a result, optimism is learning to skillfully direct the spotlight of attention to those thoughts and feelings that maximize your well-being. In the sections that follow, we’ll show you how.