Pessimistic People Should Consider Looking At The Bright Side Of Things: Here Is Why

Pessimists are defined as the people who always see the glass half empty. According to a new study, researchers found that patients with heart disease, coronary heart disease (CHD), who were more pessimistic, have a higher chance of dying from their condition compared to those who are not overly pessimistic.

The latest study from Finland, published last week in BMC Public Health, found that pessimism was associated with an increased risk of death from coronary heart disease.

According to The Guardian, the study was participated by 2,267 Finnish men and women aging between 52 and 76 years at study baseline in 2002 and was followed up for an average of 11 years. These participants also admitted to being pessimistic before the study started. Among those, there were 121 men and women who had died from heart disease during the 11-year follow-up period of the study.

After the researchers compared the higher and lower quartiles (the top and bottom 25 percent), they found that people in the higher quartile for pessimism had a 2.2-fold higher risk of dying from heart disease than those in the lower quartile.

"High levels of pessimism have previously been linked to factors that affect cardiac health, such as inflammation, but data on the connection between risk of death from CHD and optimism and pessimism as personality traits are relatively scarce," Dr. Mikko Pänkäläinen of Päijät-Häme Central Hospital in Finland noted.

However, researchers of the study led by Dr. Pänkäläinen found that optimism did not protect against CHD death. There were no differences between low and high optimists with regard to CHD mortality during follow-up, reported Medical News Today.

It is also important to note that these findings are purely observational and cannot prove cause and effect, Dr. Pänkäläinen and team say the results indicate pessimism may be an indicator of CHD mortality.

"Levels of pessimism can be measured quite easily, and pessimism might be a very useful tool together with other known risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, or smoking to determine the risk of CHD-induced mortality," said Dr. Pänkäläinen.