Physical Health in Optimism: A Narrative Review Study

In recent years, the relationships that personality-related factors have shown in the context of physical health have been attracting increasing attention from researchers and increasing volume in the literature. Optimism, which refers to having positive expectations against many possibilities in life, is one of these factors, and optimists are generally in a more advantageous situation in terms of physical health. Although physical health in terms of optimism has been the subject of a great deal of international research, no study has been conducted in this context in the Turkish literature. The aim of this study is to compile studies examining physical health in the context of optimism and present them to the Turkish literature. For this purpose, optimism and physical health studies examining optimism are presented. When physical health indicators are expressed, optimism is associated with physical health and also seems to provide an advantage in terms of physical health indicators. Moreover, this advantage is also confirmed in the immune and other biological-physiological indicators. Finally, optimism was associated with healthy lifestyle choices, pain, and sleep-related factors. In the conclusion section, the studies discussed in this review are evaluated and suggestions for future studies are presented based on these studies.