There are good, neurological reasons why we all need confidence to counteract anxiety about the uncertainties life throws up. Yet, conversely, anxiety corrodes confidence.
This was a conundrum that neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Prof Ian Robertson outlined in the keynote address at a positive health summit hosted by the RCSI Centre for Positive Health Sciences.
Confidence is not to be confused with optimism, which is the sunny belief that things will turn out okay. Nor is it self-esteem, which is self-evaluation.
“It’s a belief that you can do something and that if you do that thing, there’s a chance of the outcome you want happening. And the critical thing, its secret sauce, is its links to action,” said Robertson, emeritus professor at Trinity College Dublin and founding director of Trinity’s Institute of Neuroscience and of the Global Brain Health Institute. Confidence acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy because the brain functions as a prediction machine.
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“So when you say, ‘I can do that’ ... then your brain treats that as a positive prediction. It treats it like an outcome.”
This belief increases dopamine activity in the reward-processing part of the brain, the ventral striatum, which has five effects, including counteracting depression and anxiety. It is also a motivator, making it more likely that a person will take action.
“The terrible thing about anxiety,” he said, referring to a global study over 40 countries, “is anxious people do less of everything. They take less action.”
When the brain is in avoidance mode, it is anticipating punishment rather than reward. By not taking a step forward, “your chances of discovering new reinforcers, new ideas, new people, new experiences are all diminished”.
Confidence is also a cognitive enhancer because increased dopamine activity in the ventral striatum causes more dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex. It makes you a little mentally sharper. “Fifthly, and this is possibly the most important of all, confident people are perceived to have higher status by other people. Therefore, they listen to them more. They’re more likely to be persuaded by them” – whether they are right or not. A finding to which many quiet observers of confident colleagues performing at meetings will relate.
“Research shows that the status that’s accorded to a confident person remains, even if you reveal that the basis of that person’s response was wrong. That’s the ghastly truth of many of the authoritarian systems that we’re encountering in the world just now.
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“Confidence is so powerful that it can be powerfully bad as well as powerfully good,” said Robertson, author of How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief. With very high levels of confidence, the brain can generate too much dopamine activity.
“Chronic high levels of success create high levels of power and status and influence and it can go to people’s heads.”
He outlined eight negative effects of excessive confidence.
- Tunnel vision
- Greed
- Narcissism
- Hypocrisy
- Loss of empathy
- Becoming risk-blind
- Loss of self-awareness
- Poor judgment
Not hard to think of individuals, rarely out of the news headlines, who tick all those boxes. But let’s dwell on the positives of living with healthy levels of confidence.
It is “to a great extent learnable”, he stressed and as it increases exponentially, “like compound interest”, should be nurtured from an early age. “Unfortunately, there’s a huge gender gap in confidence that starts for multiple reasons about the age of five or six. It means that men, on average, have this enormous advantage over women in this domain.”
He questioned the trend of over-protection, particularly among younger people. This can lead to consistently viewing stress and conflict as harmful, rather than as a challenge. Whereas “taking action, in spite of adversity and stress, is one of the greatest sources of confidence”.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, likened minds to immune systems – they get stronger through exposure, not avoidance. The risk of “always trust your feelings” approach to everything, Robertson suggested, is elevating emotions over reasoning and treating subjective distress as if it is an objective danger.
“If we repeatedly confuse discomfort with harm,” he said, “we can create psychological fragility, which is the very opposite of what you need if you’re going to harness confidence.”
Roberston was addressing the entire 150-plus summit attendance, who had been divided into two groups earlier in the day for parallel presentations and workshops. Founded more than 240 years ago, the RCSI has been educating doctors from behind the distinctive facade of its St Stephen’s Green building since 1810. The opening of the Centre for Positive Health Sciences there in 2019 reflects a relatively modern realisation – from a position of privilege – that good health is more than the absence of illness. What’s more, people can be empowered to reduce their risk of lifestyle-related diseases.
The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) has predicted that the world’s wellness economy, which has surged since the Covid-19 pandemic, will be worth €7.6 trillion in 2028 (nearly double its 2019 size). By 2024 this sector was roughly four times larger than the global pharmaceutical industry, according to GWI, a non-profit organisation.
The “wellness economy” spans a multitude, from complementary medicine, public health initiatives and wellness tourism to nutrition, physical activity and personal care and beauty. In such a rapidly evolving, and potentially financially rewarding, sector, it can sometimes be hard to tell the meaningful from the fluff, or at worst, exploitative.
Positive health scientists are intent on exploring how certain approaches and interventions could be linked to improved wellbeing. They work on producing evidence that will drive funding by governments and other interested parties. The RSCI centre offers academic courses and evidence-based resources for optimising health and wellbeing.
There is plenty of evidence of how positive psychology interventions have a beneficial impact. However, positive psychologist Jolanta Burke, associate professor at the RCSI centre, told the summit about research that had led her to question their real-life application for lasting effect. She also referred to one study of 200 companies that found wellbeing programmes in the workplace had “zero impact, on average”. Maybe that lunchtime yoga session squeezed into an over-demanding work schedule is not the answer after all.
“There’s something seriously wrong with how we encourage people to enhance their wellbeing,” she said. Research is showing that pursuing wellbeing “reduces our wellbeing”.
Instead, she introduced the novel concept of a meliotropic wellbeing mindset: a long-term strategy for a good life. The idea arose from research among fellow experts in positive psychology. Having realised that many of them, like her, had grown weary of practising various recommended interventions, she gathered 170 from across the world to assess their wellbeing.
“Every single one of them was doing well.” Having used the same assessment on more than 10,000 people in various pieces of research, Burke had never encountered a group where nobody was “languishing”, ie just getting by.
“Then I asked them about their practice of positive psychology interventions. And they said exactly what I expected. We don’t do them. We only do them when life gets tough and we need a quick boost.”
In follow-up qualitative research with a subgroup, it emerged how their mindset had changed. They no longer pursued happiness but had orientated themselves towards a better life by aligning behaviours, attitudes and choices with what mattered to them.
Burke likened it to the heliotropic characteristic of plants looking to the sun. In discussing the findings with RSCI colleagues, the term “meliotropism” emerged – “melio” from the Latin word melior, meaning “better” and tropism is a movement towards something. The research was published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal last November.
One feature of this meliotropic mindset was intentional living, “searching for opportunities in your daily life to use your knowledge of wellbeing sciences”. For example, rather than using the commonly recommended tool of writing a gratitude journal, “the gratitude is so ingrained inside your mind that you spot opportunities to be grateful”.
A second feature was wellbeing hygiene. Again, this was not about interventions but rather rituals. Simply activities that made people happy, be it, for instance, playing the piano, taking photos, cooking or sketching, with no thought about how well, or not, the activity was being done.
Connecting with others and having a network of people was also seen as a scaffolding for wellbeing; self-acceptance too. Positive psychologists are sometimes accused of having their heads in the cloud and in denial, she said, about their feelings and the state of the world around them. But the ones she interviewed “accept themselves fully, regardless of what state of mind they’re in”, rather than striving for constant positivity.
As one said: “Sometimes you cope pretty and sometimes you cope ugly and coping ugly might be crying and eating a bag of cookies.”
“That self-acceptance also extended to not giving a damn about what other people think,” Burke continued. “It’s about being authentic. They didn’t want to harm others, but they did not want to live their life through other people’s values and expectations.”
While positive psychology can also be criticised for its focus on the mind, these people knew that “if you move, you feel more positive”. They were also aware of the impact of people and systems around them, choosing to step away from negative influences.
“This picture changes,” she concluded, “how we educate positive psychology and how we learn to improve our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.”
A safe place to explore identity
A project to develop and evaluate a role-playing board game, along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons, to improve the mental health of neurodiverse young people, was voted best presentation by a PhD student at the positive health summit.
Angel Harper explained how Dungeons and Dragons is a storytelling game in which players are challenged with puzzles, conflict resolution or battle strategy. Typically played by a group of four to six, it is facilitated by a dungeon master who is the narrator of the story. Participants choose what characters to play within that fantasy world. It offers a safe space to make friends and to explore identity.
By incorporating the recognised 24 character strengths into the game (find yours at viacharacter.org), the focus would be on an individual’s interests and skills, rather than looking at what they struggle with, said Harper.
She will be working with the youth organisation Foróige on the project, which is cofunded by Research Ireland.
