Optimism not only improves our mood, it also shapes the brain and strengthens the way we think and feel.

Adopting a positive mindset brings significant benefits to mental, emotional and physical health, and becomes a protective factor against life’s challenges. Every optimistic thought, in addition to providing immediate well-being, helps train the brain to process future events with greater clarity and resilience.

‘It is important that each of us work on and cultivate a positive mindset, as positive thoughts have a significant impact on our quality of life. Not only do they have the power to influence our mood and how we view life, but they can also have a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health in both the short and long term,’ says Mónica Messa, director of the Psychology programme at Franz Tamayo University, Unifranz.

For Messa, optimism is not limited to ‘thinking positively’ or ignoring difficulties, but is a tool for resilience that allows us to face everyday adversities with greater strength. A person with a positive mindset is more likely to pursue their goals with determination, maintain healthy interpersonal relationships and enjoy lasting emotional balance.

‘These emotions are essential for maintaining a healthy emotional balance. They also strengthen our interpersonal relationships, reduce stress, increase our motivation and energy, and improve our physical health,’ adds the academic.

The psychologist also emphasises that happiness is not a permanent state, but a balance between our expectations and how we manage them. It does not depend exclusively on material achievements or external circumstances, but on each person’s ability to find meaning and satisfaction in their daily life.

‘It is not a state of constant fulfilment, as we all have battles to fight, but we depend individually on how we define living in this world, on the meaning we give to our lives without conditioning happiness. We create the illusion of life,’ she emphasises.

Optimism, in this sense, is a construct that feeds on the present: treasuring happy memories, living moments to the fullest and reinterpreting difficulties with hope. Even in adverse contexts, thinking positively generates a neurobiological impact that helps reduce stress and provides clarity for better decision-making.

The brain of the optimist versus the pessimist

The benefits of optimism are not only emotional; they also have a measurable correlation in the brain. A study conducted by researchers at the universities of Tokyo, Kobe and Kindai, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), explored how optimistic and pessimistic attitudes manifest themselves in brain activity.

The team invited 87 participants to imagine and evaluate future scenarios, both positive and negative, while their brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results were revealing: the brains of optimistic people showed common neural patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region linked to empathy, decision-making and emotional regulation.

Pessimists, on the other hand, exhibited diverse and disorganised patterns, without a shared neural structure. This suggests that optimism is not only a psychological attitude but also a phenomenon that has convergent neural representations, reinforcing the scientific hypothesis known as positivity convergence.

Another relevant finding was that optimists are able to distinguish positive events from negative ones more accurately. While positive people process adverse scenarios in an abstract and distant way, they imagine them as less vivid and less emotionally charged. In contrast, positive future events are represented with intensity and detail. At the same time, pessimists have this perception reversed, processing adverse scenarios more closely, while positive ones are more abstract. This difference would explain why optimists tend to prioritise hopeful futures and face difficulties with greater emotional balance.

The study concludes that people with high levels of optimism share both specific psychological and neural characteristics, while pessimists are more unpredictable in how they process the future.

‘By extending this hypothesis to the neural level, our findings demonstrate shared representations of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity among optimistic individuals, highlighting a neural convergence of optimism,’ the report notes.

Living with a positive mind

Scientific findings support what psychology already observes in clinical practice: training the mind to think positively is not naivety, but an exercise in neuroplasticity that strengthens well-being. Cultivating optimism is a long-term investment in mental, emotional and physical health.

For Messa, the message is clear: optimism is built daily; it does not depend on an unattainable state of fulfilment or perfect external conditions. It is a habit that protects, drives and transforms, capable of changing not only the way we see the world, but also the way our brain processes it.