Is Your Attributional Style Holding You Back From Happiness?

Hello and welcome to episode 315 of The Mindful Kind podcast all about attributional styles and how they can impact your happiness.

Let me ask you a question. Do you like to know why things happen in your life?

I’m guessing that you do because you’re a human being and we like it when things that happen in our lives make sense! We search for meaning, answers and greater understanding, sometimes without even realising it.

And so, we often make attributions about the events in our lives.

When I failed my driving licence when I was 18 years old, I attributed that to being a terrible driver and letting my nerves get the better of me. However, I also could’ve attributed that event to having a particularly strict assessor, or driving in a car that wasn’t familiar to me.

A few weeks ago, my skin broke out again with painful acne and I attributed that to my hormones. But it also could’ve been for a different reason, like eating a lot more sugar than usual over Christmas or the hot weather making my skin sweat.

It’s normal to make attributions, or in other words, we explain the causes of different events that happen in our lives. When something happens, we like to think we know why.

A psychologist called Martin Seligman has spent a lot of time researching what he calls attributional styles. Someone can have a negative attributional style, which means they generally attribute negative events to reasons that are internal, stable, and global.

So, going back to my earlier example of failing my driving licence, I remember feeling a real sense of hopelessness. I told myself I’d failed because I was a bad driver and that it was my fault. That’s the internal part of the attribution.

I also thought I’d never get my driving licence because I’d never improve or manage my nerves. That’s the stable part, in other words, I thought things would never change.

And I thought that any future exams that I might do in any other area of my life would make me crumble under pressure and that I’d fail those, too. That’s the global part, which basically means that if one event goes wrong, all similar future events will go wrong too.

I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but that was the way my mind worked at the time! I tended to have a negative attributional style. Which means I attributed negative events to reasons that were internal, stable, and global.

Now, let’s take a look at an optimistic attributional style, which is something I’ve been working on for the last few years. Someone with an optimistic attributional style will attribute negative events, like failure, to reasons that are external, unstable, and specific.

For example, I remember reading a negative review of my podcast a year or so ago and I really did my best to tap into the optimistic attributional style. I didn’t blame myself for the review and instead, tried to accept that maybe the reviewer just didn’t resonate with my work, maybe they were feeling triggered, or maybe they were just having a bad day.

It was also really important for me to focus on the unstable and specific aspects, like it was just one person and it didn’t mean every future review would be negative. Basically, I didn’t blame myself, at least not too harshly, and I didn’t start worrying that every review I’d receive from then on would be negative!

You might be wondering why this is important. Why put in the time and effort to cultivate a more optimistic attributional style?

Well, there’s lots of research to suggest that having an optimistic attributional style can potentially be a powerfully good thing. For example, some studies found that people with an optimistic attributional style was associated with having a higher quality of life, less likely to experience symptoms of depression, and felt higher levels of motivation, achievement, and physical wellbeing. And if you have an optimistic attributional style at work, you’re more likely to be productive and to assume that things will work out for the best.

So I’d love for you to think about your own attributional style. When something goes wrong or you face a setback of some kind, what do you attribute it to?

Do you assume that the event went wrong because you were completely at fault? Do you think that the problem will keep going wrong and it won’t improve? Do you apply the one failure to other areas of your life that don’t really have anything to do with it?

For example, imagine you’re trying to save money for something important to you - like maybe you want to take a few weeks off work and go travelling.

So your goal is to save money, but sometimes, you overspend on unnecessary things and get a bit carried away when you’re online shopping.

• Maybe, you think, “there’s something wrong with me because I can’t stop myself from overspending and I hate that I can’t control my spending very well.”

• You might also think, “I’m never going to be able to save up enough money to take time off work and travel because I can’t change my spending habits. It’s hopeless.”

• And you might think, “Well, if I can’t even stick to my budget, what else can’t I do? Stick to my health goals or stick to my productivity goals? If I fail at this, then I’ll probably fail at other things, too.”

All of those thoughts could be signs of a negative attributional style.

Another little sign of a negative attributional style is that when good things happen, you attribute them to luck. So, let’s say you achieve your budget goal for the week. Rather than congratulating yourself and attributing this good thing to your efforts, you might think, “Well it was just lucky because there weren’t any good sales on this week.”

Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying you’re doing the wrong thing if you tend to have a negative attributional style. I often had one myself, and sometimes, I still do. Practicing optimism can be a challenging thing and it can take a lot of time and effort. But I do also think it’s worth trying!

Let’s take a look at the same situation of going over your budget but with a more optimistic attributional style.

• If you buy some unnecessary items and get carried away with online shopping, you might think “Well, I haven’t had enough time to build good spending habits yet. I was influenced by some great marketing and got a little bit carried away. However, I learned some helpful lessons that I can implement next time so it hopefully won’t happen again. Sure, I might struggle to stay within my budget but I achieve plenty of other things.”

Notice the difference between the optimistic versus the negative attributional styles. In the optimistic example, you didn’t solely blame yourself but also acknowledged other factors that might have been involved. You had hope for the future that you could implement some changes and avoid making the same mistakes in the future. And you didn’t apply your one struggle to other areas of your life and convince yourself that just because you had some setbacks with one goal, that didn’t mean you’d struggle with your other goals.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about attributional styles and why it can be important to cultivate a more optimistic attributional style (if you’d like to!).

The next time you experience a setback or challenging event, try to notice your thoughts and which attributional style you lean towards. Do you blame yourself or look for other factors that might have been involved? Do you worry that your situation will never improve or do you feel hopeful that you’ll be able to make changes and grow? Do you apply the one setback to other areas of your life or do you focus on that challenge specifically?

If you’re looking for more optimistic thoughts you can focus on, then scroll down a little further and enter your email address to receive a free copy of my favourite affirmations! The more you focus on affirmations and practice them, the more natural and effortless they’ll feel to implement, so feel free to print them out and keep them somewhere you’ll see them often!

Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have a wonderful week, Mindful Kind.

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