Below, Michelle Gielan shares five key insights from her new book, Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times.

Michelle is a positive psychology researcher and former national CBS News anchor. She was the executive producer of The Happiness Advantage on PBS and a featured professor on Oprah Winfrey’s Happiness course.

It’s easy to be optimistic at the beginning. At the start of a new job, a new relationship, or a new project, we’re energized, hopeful, and ready to go. But what happens when the first plan fails? When the challenge lasts longer than expected, or you’re simply exhausted? To sustain optimism when it’s tested, we need to understand it as a behavior.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Michelle herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

One of the biggest misconceptions about optimism is that you either feel it or you don’t. But the days we need optimism most are often the exact days when we cannot summon the feeling.

I saw this with a leader named Mark, who was overseeing a massive renewable-energy launch when everything started falling apart. A safety test failed. Investors were furious. A competitor moved ahead. His team started blaming one another. He was sleeping less, working more, and slowly losing the optimism he’d always considered part of who he was.

We didn’t try to give Mark a pep talk. We built routines. m. Before bed, he wrote down three small, good things from the day.

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