This post originally appeared on Care2.com. 

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According to a new study on dehydration and mood, the optimist may view her glass as half full because she drank that water already. While mild dehydration didn’t appear to affect cognitive function in the young women who participated in the study, it did dampen their moods and caused them to perceive tasks as much harder than when well-hydrated.

For the study, which appears in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Nutrition, researchers induced mild dehydration among 25 subjects and measured their performance on tests of memory, concentration, and mood. When dehydrated, the women were more negative, had trouble concentrating and were “more fatigued, and this was true during mild exercise and when sitting at a computer,” explained University of Connecticut professor and lead researcher Lawrence E. Armstrong, PhD in a WebMD story.

Dr. Robert Glatter of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City told WebMD that the study should serve as a reminder to stay hydrated. “Just a small change in state of hydration was enough to affect mood, ability to concentrate, and lead to development of headaches,” he said. Dr. Glatter recommends consuming moderate quantities of water, both during and after exercise.

It turns out that, as actress Jennifer Aniston famously warned last year, not drinking enough water can make you “cranky.” While Jen’s right that regularly filling your water glass could improve your mood, if you want to be really smart, you’ll get that water from the tap.

Source: Care2 

Image by Harald Groven, licensed under Creative Commons.

As a rule of thumb, it’s generally easier to sound smart when criticizing something than it is when supporting it. It’s safer to stand on the sidelines and insult than it is to offer your own ideas. This immutable rule of human interaction has given rise to “professional pessimists,” a class of pundits and professionals who, according to Arthur Herman in the Wilson Quarterly, have been around since at least 2,000 BC. 

Modern pessimists have a lot to criticize. The economy is tanking, bestial influenzas threaten the world’s population, global warming is on the rise, and governments seem impotent to do anything about it. Herman counts Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, and conservative pundit Peggy Noonan among the ranks of the professional pessimists for their collective belief that the “American Century is finally, definitively over.”

The professional pessimist is able to “not only make past successes look like failure, but can present catastrophe as condign punishment for past sins.” Unfortunately for their home countries, these pessimists can convince other people to panic, or to blithely accept a bleak future, making the decline of their civilization unavoidable.

Source: Wilson Quarterly

The modern person is a bit confused. We look at a world on the brink of oblivion, suffering from political crises and environmental doom, and yet we attend charming dinner parties and munch on lovely marinated olives while chatting with wonderful, witty friends. We suffer from a “perception gap,” as Matthew Taylor terms it in the New Statesman: We tend to think that things in our own lives are going well, while society at large is “going to the dogs.” 

Here’s just one example: Ninety-three percent of people surveyed in a recent BBC poll said that they were “optimistic about their own family life,” according to Taylor. But 70 percent believe that families are getting less successful overall, compared to nostalgic perceptions of days of old. Maybe we can blame this on a quirk of cognition that makes us zone in on bad news and filter out the good. (It’s the bad news that will kill us after all.) But Taylor sees the problem as something particular to our time.

With the rise of consumer culture, people have become more individualistic. Piled onto that is the decline of community endeavors of all kinds, from bowling leagues to churches, which has led people to see themselves as cut off from the rest of society. Finally, we now face threats of monumental proportion—terrorism, global warming, the caprice of international finance—all of which seem so big that we doubt anybody or anything can surmount them. So the lonesome modern person looks out the window of her bungalow, sees the gathering storm, and doubts anybody’s ability to halt our ineluctable slide into barbarism. 

But there is cause for optimism. Taylor rattles off some of the joys of the modern era—less racism, a growing equality of the sexes, better education—and wants these developments to put our social ills in perspective. We’re actually doing pretty well, we moderns. 

Taylor’s Panglossian optimism might seem unrealistic, but given the choice between self-satisfied optimism and dour pessimism, I think that the former will be a more effective outlook, if not a more realistic one. When we’re too bleak about things, problems we’re confronted with seem impossible to solve. So I choose optimism: Even if we’re wrong and the world really is going to end in the next decade, we have a better chance of changing society if we believe such a thing is possible. 

—Brendan Mackie