Optimistic People Better At Handling Stress, Study Finds

By Sam Goodwin | Jul 24, 2013 02:36 AM EDT

A new study by researchers from Concordia University's Department of Psychology has found that optimistic people are better at handling stress and have lower cortisol levels.

In difficult situations, you may have heard people advising you time and again to see a glass as half full rather than half empty. This not only gives you a positive outlook in a difficult situation but can also help you handle stress better, found a team of researchers from  Concordia University's Department of Psychology.

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They conducted a study on 135 older adults and tracked them over a period of six years during which they took saliva samples five times a day to monitor cortisol levels. Cortisol is a "stress hormone" in the body that is secreted mostly when a person undergoes stress. It is known to reduce bone formation, increase blood sugar levels and suppress a person's immune system.

They were also asked to report levels of stress they perceived in their day-to-day lives and self-identify if they were pessimists or optimists. At the end of the study, each person's stress levels were measured against their own average to get a real-world picture of how each individual handled stress.

Researchers found that pessimists had a higher stress baseline than optimists and also had trouble regulating their body during stressful situations.

"On days where they experience higher than average stress, that's when we see that the pessimists' stress response is much elevated, and they have trouble bringing their cortisol levels back down. Optimists, by contrast, were protected in these circumstances," Joelle Jobin, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology who co-authored the study, said in a press release.

Cortisol levels are the highest when one wakes up in the morning and lowest just before going to sleep. Along with determining a link between optimism and stress, researchers also found that optimistic people who led stressful lives showed higher cortisol levels than expected shortly after they woke up in the mornings. While there may be many explanations for this, Jobin reveals that the difficulty lies in categorizing these hormones as good or bad.

"The problem with cortisol is that we call it "the stress hormone", but it's also our 'get up and do things' hormone, so we may secrete more if engaged and focused on what's happening," she concluded.