We pessimists are often bombarded with suggestions to "think more positively" and "just do it -- what's the worst that can happen?" as if that's it's the first time we've heard such inspiring advice. Unfortunately, pessimists like myself may hear those words but fail to internalize them, continuing to focus on the worst possible outcome and fear it. But as we shall see, that mode of thinking can be sustainable while positive thinking sometimes fails to provide us the tools to grip the reality of our situations.

First of all, sometimes the act of trying to force positive thoughts into your brain to counter negative and pessimistic thoughts turns out a facade that leaves no lasting impact. During the holidays, we think about what we're thankful for how good we have it and make new goals that we underestimate how to achieve. That gratefulness and wishful thinking is auspicious to our mental health and fuels us in the moment to bring either a new change or a new outlook to our lives, but afterward, many of us regress towards the mean. We think about the usual self-doubt and obstacles that hinder us from our goals and the people we want to be and sometimes obsess about those doubts, especially now after we've made New Year's resolutions.

The latter mode of thinking, in my opinion, is fine at times. A flaw in positive thinking, as detailed in the 2012 New York Times article, "The Problem with Positive Thinking" by Gabrielle Oettingen, is that positive thinking lulls us into thinking we've already achieved our goals and prevents us from achieving as much as we can. Oettingen performed a study where a sample of women in a weight loss program were separated into two groups: one that was told to imagine they'd achieved their goals in weight loss, and one that was told to imagine possible setbacks in which the women were tempted to cheat on their diets. The latter group of women had lost more weight.

Negative thinking is a tool for us to grip reality and acknowledge the various setbacks, obstacles, and failures that we may encounter on our path to success and achieving our goals. Unfortunately, few large-scale tasks can be accomplished without an occasional failure, and the difference is that often, positive thinking fails to mentally prepare us for that failure while negative thinking does.

Of course, it's always possible to be too negative. No one wants to be always negative, always thinking about the risks and setbacks he or she might face in the face of challenges or that person won't have the impetus to embark on that path in the first place. We need occasions like Thanksgiving and the holidays to be grateful. We need to fantasize about our goals a little bit to realize how much we want them before we start thinking about obstacles and setbacks. We need some time to celebrate doing well on an exam or a paper before getting back on the grind. Negative thinking is useful, but in excess, it is damaging to our health and unsustainable to our long-term vision. But ultimately, no person is completely a "glass-half-full" or "glass-half-empty" kind of person. We shouldn't dismiss either positive or negative thinking as they are both important in our lives, and we as humans we have the capacity to do both. The optimal way to proceed in life is with a balance between both modes of thinking.