"The Positive Power Of Negative Thinking"
By Julie Norem

The title of this book is "The positive power of negative thinking" , but there is not so much of negative thinking in it rather than a way for pessimists to deal with anxiety.

Julie Norem explains that there is a strategy called "defensive pessimism", that seems like negative thinking to optimists. The author says: "Defensive pessimism is more than just pessimism".

Deffensive pessimists tend to run over all possible things that could go wrong on a specific task or project. Then, they work to make sure that if things did go wrong, they would have everything into place to cope with events.

Running over negative and improbable events could seem like a negative thing to do, at first sight. However, Julie Norem run experiments that demonstrated that strategic optimism does not help negative thinkers.

In ensuring that everything is in place to cope with negative events should they ever happen, defensive pessimists build their way to deal with anxiety.

Julie Norem says: "Defensive pessimism involves learning to tolerate negative emotions in order to get things done". In the end, "defensive pessimists, in contrast to other pessimists, have hope".

The wrapping of the content

It is well written, but it is also slow. Its weakest point, to me, is that it has an academic tone to it, that made it boring for me at times.

I recommend this book to you if you are interested in defensive pessimism, perhaps because it could help you, if you tend to think about what could go wrong in certain scenarios.

However, if you are a natural optimist, I don't find that "The positive power of negative thinking" would be very useful to you. That's my honest opinion.

Julie Norem quotes Bob Dylan:

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