Positive Psychology Founder: How To Stop Your Negative Thoughts - Martin Seligman

Seligman frames more than six decades of work around a question: how do people gain a sense of mastery and influence over their future? He recalls that psychology once had three blind spots: it largely ignored happiness, excluded thinking from its explanations, and treated the future as determined by the past and present. That framework could explain distress, but left little room to ask how people flourish or choose a different path.

Research on learned helplessness began with people and animals exposed to events they could not control. Afterward, some became passive and failed to notice that a later action could stop the noise. A comparison group experienced the same noise but could turn it off with a button; that prior experience of control appeared to protect them, and in some measures they did better than controls. Seligman says this shifted his attention from the causes of helplessness toward mastery and efficacy.