New Harvard Study: Optimism Helps Your Brain Stay Healthy

A few years ago, when I was feeling a bit downI started an experiment that turned into a weekly newsletter feature that I now call Big Optimism.

The premise is simple: I look back in history and find days that seemed ordinary at the time — or even bad — that turned out to be the quiet starting point for remarkable things.

• July 6, 1957, for instance — the afternoon a 16-year-old John Lennon performed at a church garden fete in Liverpool and met a 15-year-old named Paul McCartney for the first time.
• Or September 3, 1928, when Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find a contaminated petri dish he’d left on the bench before he left — and noticed, instead of tossing it, that the mold growing on it had somehow killed the bacteria around it. He named what he found penicillin.
• Or perhaps a bit more obscurely, February 4, 1960the day Herb Brooks was cut from the U.S. Olympic hockey team — which motivated him for two decades, until he coached the 1980 U.S. team to beat the Soviets in the Olympics and go on to win the gold medal.

At this point I have a years-long archive, where I can point to any date on the calendar and tell you two or three amazing things that happened on that day in history that nobody recognized as important at the time.

I had no doubt this would be good for my attitude. What I had no idea about was that I might have been doing exactly the kind of thing that Harvard University researchers say can make your brain a lot healthier as you get older.

15% lower risk of developing dementia

A new paper from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published April 8 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Societytracked more than 9,000 cognitively healthy older adults for up to 14 years using data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.

Every four years, participants completed a validated assessment of their dispositional optimism — essentially, the general expectation that things will go reasonably well.