It’s not that I’m against any of these things or that I’m against spending money. Instead I’ve been investing my money in different ways.

If you’ve ever read anyone’s success story, then you have undoubtedly found out that their victories weren’t absent from previous failures and struggles.

In many ways, those past failures are what make successful people who they are today.

According to Chi-Yue Chiu, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore:

“Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement.”

Researchers discovered this effect in students from both the U.S. and Hong Kong, suggesting that it may be cross-cultural. However, they found that students from Hong Kong tended to be more humble in their self evaluations overall, which was consistent with previous research supporting the trend of Asian cultures being more modest than Western cultures.

This finding shouldn’t be that shocking to readers of The Emotion Machine. I have long advocated that we take an honest and reasonable approach to how we view ourselves.

I like positive psychology and I think it offers many useful theories and practices for how we can benefit our lives. But this shouldn’t be confused with the “positive thinking movement.” The former is a scientific discipline, while the latter is a heavily commercialized and distorted industry with little scientific backing.

I’ve experienced the heartache of believing things like The Law of Attraction and The Secret first hand, and I’ve later warned about these dangerous trends in personal development – which often emphasize the importance of excessive self-praise and over-confidence, even when it is irrational and potentially very harmful.

When the self-help “guru” James Arthur Ray had participants go on a physically demanding “Spiritual Warrior” retreat that consisted of several days of fasting, and then spending hours locked in a sweat lodge, several people needed to be hospitalized after – and some even died. Ray believed that through excessive confidence and self-belief, they could overcome any physical limitations. His excessive confidence was wrong, and it had dire consequences for those who fell prey to it.

Of course, some level of self-praise and confidence is essential to our evolution. Because without any confidence, we can never be motivated to take the risks required to successfully adapt to our environment.

If a fish gets thrown into a new pond, but it is too fearful and avoiding of it’s surroundings, it will have greater difficulty finding food to survive. But if it has the confidence to explore its new territory and take calculated risks, it will often have a greater probability of discovering new means of survival, without being crippled by fear.

Self-praise is one of the biggest ways humans can build a more confident demeanor and be more motivated to take action, but it needs to be balanced.

Sports psychologists have demonstrated how athletes can use positive self-talk to improve their performance. But clearly overestimating our abilities can at times lead to some destructive outcomes.

Another study showed how overly optimistic people are susceptible to underestimating the risks that bad things will happen to them, such as getting cancer or getting into a bad car accident. This optimistic attitude can motivate people toward more reckless behaviors because they mis-attribute the risks of their actions.

Again, it’s about balance. Self-praise and confidence are good, but only when they are deserved and when they are grounded in reality. Trying to fool ourselves into thinking we are more than we are can only backfire in the end.

An optimist often tries to find the good in everything. This perspective can cause less stress, less anxiety, and a more empowering and motivating attitude.

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term learned optimism to explain that people can cultivate more optimism by challenging their negative self-talk. Seligman believes that learning an optimistic attitude is crucial to finding happiness and living healthier.

However, despite these benefits, some research is showing that too much optimism in certain situations can actually be harmful.

According to some psychologists, excessive optimism can cause us to ignore information that goes against our rose-tinted perspective (a kind of “confirmation bias“). This leads some optimistic people to only focus on benefits, but at the same time ignore risks and costs.

In one study, experimenters had participants estimate the risk of a negative event happening to them in the future, such as car theft or getting cancer. After the participant predicted a probability, they were told the actual statistical likelihood it would happen to them.

After a short break, participants were then asked again what the probability of a certain negative event was. What researchers found was that optimistic people only changed their estimates when the information they were given was better than expected, but tended to ignore information that went against their optimism:

“For example if they had predicted that their likelihood of suffering from cancer was 40%, but the average likelihood was 30%, they might adjust their estimate to 32%. If the information was worse than expected – for example, if they had estimated 10% – then they tended to adjust their estimate much less, as if ignoring the data.”

These findings were consistent with some brain research that was also conducted. Researchers found that when people were presented information better than expected, there was high activity in the frontal lobes (suggesting that the participant was re-calculating their estimate). But when the information was worse than expected, there was much less activity in the frontal lobes, almost as if participants were disregarding the new information.

Dr. Sharot who led the study added:

“Our study suggests that we pick and choose the information that we listen to. The more optimistic we are, the less likely we are to be influenced by negative information about the future. This can have benefits for our mental health, but there are obvious downsides. Many experts believe the financial crisis in 2008 was precipitated by analysts overestimating the performance of their assets even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.”

The study was published in the journal Current Directions of Psychological Science.

When participants were asked to think of a moral wrong-doing of their own, they felt less guilty after using an antiseptic hand wipe. They were also less likely to volunteer to do a good act to make up for their wrong-doing. This suggests that cleaning our hands may actually rid ourselves of some of the blame we feel after doing something wrong.

Even when participants were asked only to imagine themselves as “clean and fresh,” they tended to judge themselves as more moral than others.

This literal “mental cleansing” has been found to alleviate other mental discomfort as well:

“Cleansing works for other mental discomforts, such as post-decision doubt. To resolve this doubt, people who opted for one of two similar jams felt better about their choice after making the decision, a well-known tendency called choice justification. But if people were given a hand wipe to use, they no longer justified their choice: They had wiped off their doubt. Using soap showed similar results after a bad luck streak in gambling: After washing, participants started to bet higher stakes, suggesting they had ‘washed away’ their bad luck.”

It may sound a little ridiculous, but our minds can work in really mysterious ways sometimes. These examples of “mental cleansing” eerily parallel the common notion of baptism being able to wash away “original sin.” So perhaps this metaphor of “washing away” sins, guilt, and bad luck is somehow wired into our collective unconscious? Just a thought…I’m not sure what practical value this study has, but it’s something I found too fascinating not to share.