Who Says Quitters Never Win?

Sept. 20, 2007 - America has been imbued since its founding with a
persevering spirit. From Ben Franklin to Horatio Alger to Rocky Balboa,
the culture bombards us—children especially—with messages about the
value of determination and grit in the face of adversity. This ethos is
perhaps best captured in the enduring 19th-century maxim, “If at first
you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
t’s hard to argue with such an affirmative
sentiment. And no wonder this never-say-die attitude has made such an
appealing plot line for dime novels and Hollywood. But is it really
good psychology? Or might there be times when it’s better to simply
give up?

Psychologists
have been exploring this question, and more specifically a possible
link between tenacity and both physical and mental health. It would
seem on the face of it that persistence would be tonic over the long
haul; hanging tough should increase the odds that you’ll succeed, and
personal success is closely linked to well-being. But what if the goal
is extremely unlikely? Like an infertile couple conceiving a child? Or
an average high-school sprinter becoming an Olympic gold-medalist? Is
there a point of diminishing returns beyond which one failure after
another takes a health toll? When does an admirable trait like
perseverance start to look more like beating your head against the wall?
To
test this in the laboratory, psychologists Gregory Miller and Carsten
Wrosch developed a psychological instrument that can reliably
distinguish between people who are relentless by nature and those who
are much more accepting of life’s curveballs. For simplicity, let’s
call them the Bulldogs and the Quitters. In a series of experiments the
psychologists have exhaustively studied these two personality types to
see how healthy and well adjusted they are.

And the answer is plain: Quitters are healthier than Bulldogs by almost
every measure. For example, in one study the psychologists looked at
everything from indigestion and diarrhea to skin disorders, poor sleep
and headaches. Quitters suffered less than Bulldogs across the full
range of maladies. Further, the Bulldogs’ stress hormones were much
more likely to be out of whack, indicating that they are in a state of
chronic stress. And in a new study, published in the September issue of
Psychological Science, the psychologists followed teenagers for a full
year. Over that time the Quitters had much lower levels of a protein
called CRP, an indicator of bodily inflammation. Inflammation has
recently been linked to several serious diseases, including diabetes
and heart disease, suggesting that healthy but tenacious teens may
already be on the road toward chronic illness later in life.
But knowing when to throw in the towel is only
half the story. The psychologists also sorted both the Bulldogs and the
Quitters by their willingness to re-engage and set new goals after they
gave up on something important. While they did not find a direct link
between re-engagement and physical health, they did find that people
who readily jumped back into life had a greater sense of purpose and
mastery and were less likely to ruminate about the past. Setting new
goals appears to buffer the emotional consequences of failure,
especially for those, like the Bulldogs, who have the hardest time
admitting defeat.

So
what is it that makes the most tenacious Bulldogs finally say, OK, I’ve
had it? Paradoxically, it appears that the pathway to health may be
through melancholy. Think of it this way: People who simply will not or
cannot give up an impossible dream eventually get emotionally defeated
by their Sisyphean task. Some get clinically depressed, but many others
just shut down; they become pessimistic, passive, physically and
mentally depleted. This dysphoria is what allows them—forces them,
really—to stop and reassess. It’s said that depressed people have a
more realistic view of the world, and in fact some evolutionary
psychologists now believe that depression may have had survival value
when we were evolving on the savannahs. Depression is what told our
bodies to slow down and take stock of the situation, be cautious, don’t
dis the silverback. Today a little melancholy might help us give up on
that Olympic gold, and in the long run avoid killers like diabetes and
heart disease.
It’s
important to strive. For young people, setting lofty goals, and then
scaling them back, is the crux of forging an identity in the world. As
people age they are forced to make tradeoffs, to abandon dreams of an
illustrious career or the picture-perfect marriage. We all abandon life
goals. The only question is whether we make our life adjustments with
grace and good timing. The misanthropic comedian W.C. Fields
anticipated much of this science when he cleverly revised that
19th-century maxim about perseverance: “If at first you don’t succeed,
try, try again,” he said. “Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn
fool about it.”