It may seem counter-intuitive to devote Psych Candy’s first post to how positivity can be toxic. After all, if Psych Candy’s mission is all about positive psychology, why would we be promoting something that we consider toxic?
Contrary to what the name might imply, there is a huge difference between positive psychology and toxic positivity.
Positive psychology is not a “let’s just think happy thoughts” fix. It’s not about promoting ‘happy-ology” or encouraging a “polly-anna” attitude that turns a blind eye to anything remotely negative. In fact, superficial, often cliche advice that promotes chanting affirmations, visualizing or assuming you can manifest result swithout action, or denying unpleasant feelings can do more harm than good.
A useful way to illustrate this is the beach ball analogy: Rejecting negative emotions is like trying to hold a gigantic beach ball filled with air underneath a body of water. It takes tremendous effort but eventually the ball has to pop up to the surface.
But all that effort leaves us exhausted. Holding emotions in versus taking the time to fully process and feel them is like that beach ball.
Toxic positivity takes this analogy one step further. Not only do we think we have to hold those emotions in, we also feel pressure to layer in a positive, happy, “No, everything’s great!” attitude on top of that. How often during the last few years since the pandemic did we hear that we needed to “find the silver linings” or “just be grateful” because so many people had it worse.
While all of that has its place (and in fact, part of our mission here will be dedicated to understanding the why and how of implementing tools like reframing and gratitude in a way that is practical and not toxic), the danger lies in overgeneralizing and skipping to the positive without fully acknowledging the other side of the emotional coin.
Made worse through social media, ‘happy-ology’ messaging can easily cause us to spiral to a place worse than where we started. First, we are encouraged to hide our negative emotions and act “as if.” But when we are unable to ignore what we are really feeling and the negative feelings return, we then can experience a second wave of unpleasant emotions where we judge ourselves and view our inability to be happy as a failure on our part. This can result in a cycle of shame and self-criticism.
Only by allowing our negative emotions to float to the surface can we fully work through them, find relief, and eventually thrive in way that is sustainable versus toxic.
So, yes, blind positivity can be toxic.
What’s not toxic is science-based research on what makes people ultimately thrive. And spoiler alert: it involves much more than thinking happy thoughts.
We can’t wait to share tools and resources on these topics in articles to come.