In this paper, a stability-driven optimal disturbance observer (DO) is proposed. The proposed method does not require any plant inverse dynamics to detect introduced disturbances or a stabilizing Q filter. It does not require additional compensators to resolve causality problems, due to the relative degree, or filters to solve instability problems of non-minimum phase plants. Using this method enables wideband and narrowband disturbances to be attenuated by simply multiplying the corresponding peak filters by the baseline weight function. Furthermore, the proposed DO guarantees the stability of closed-loop systems because the already designed outer-loop systems are considered as a target plant to be stabilized and because of the Lyapunov stability-based H∞ control. In the application example, it was confirmed that the proposed method is effective, and the position error signals were improved by 20.9% in commercial hard disk drives and 36.6% in optical image stabilization systems.