ANN ARBOR (WKZO AM/FM) — New Research done at the University of Michigan suggests that soldiers who have a positive attitude are better able to cope with the pain that often results from a deployment, even when they suffer mental or physical trauma.
Lead researcher Afton Hassett says they studied the attitudes nearly 21,000 soldiers before and after their deployments and found a definite correlation between having a positive attitude and reports of chronic back and joint pain and headaches.
Conversely, those with a negative attitude were 35% more likely to complain about pain on their return.
They recommend therapy and counseling for soldiers who are about to be deployed to make them more optimistic, and they say if it works for soldiers, it should work for everyone else too.
More research is needed. Measuring optimism isn’t an exact science and neither is gauging pain.
It could be that optimists experience the same amount of pain, they just aren’t complainers.
