Being Optimistic Can Help Change Your Life

Tips to being more optimistic

I used to be a lot smarter than I am now.

That sounds like a cliche, right? Some sort of over-the-top influencer talk? But it’s true.

My IQ has dropped a few points.

And I know exactly when all that cognitive degeneration happened: my first year of college. I had mono, and the Epstein-Barr virus that causes mono went after my brain. I had target rashes, Jacksonian seizures, would lose hours of time. Every time I had a seizure, I lost what I’d just studied. And for the first couple of months, I had seizures a lot. I dropped two courses (philosophy and Russian) and went down to just four. The school’s health center moved me out of my quad and into a single. It was weird and lonely and frustrating.

It wasn’t the best way to start college. Even my Pollyanna knew that.

When my neurologist told me that I’d lost quite a few IQ points, he quipped, “But, at least you had a lot to lose.”

He was also a Pollyanna.

I was always a person who had such a bias toward optimism that it was . . . Well, it was kind of annoying.

Have seizures? I’d think, “At least I have the kind of seizures that I have a warning about before they happen.”