Why Your Positive Statements Have Very Little Positive Impact
If only it was that easy, huh?
What does positivity look like to you? Because we all accept it in our own little ways. A kind word here and there is quick and easy, and we can repeat in our head for the rest of the day. A hug or a pat on the back from someone we love can make us feel physically supported, a little like we’re being held up by the people around us. Having someone just listen to you when you’ve got a problem, when you can barely get the words out, and they still sit and wait for you to speak can mean the world to all of us.
That’s what we usually recognise as positivity in our lives: just little words and actions that brighten the day and make us feel better. We can all agree it’s quite nice, from friends and strangers alike, and we’d rather these people spoke up with bits of pieces of encouragement instead of staying quiet!
And yet, there’s often another side to moments like these. A side that has little impact, and can actually make us feel worse.
We all like to give out positivity, and to make our environment a little bit brighter with it. We want to live in a world where we can smile and get a smile back, and lift each other up with warm statements every now and then. Whether it’s your mother in law, who has started a new knitting project and wants a bit of feedback, or it’s your sister, who is doing a 10 mile run for charity and is starting to feel like she isn’t capable of reaching the finishing line; we want them to know we support them! For the most part, what we say is appreciated, and returned in kind.
But when you’re having a bad day at work, and it finally all gets to you about an hour before the end of your shift, those little positive statements have much less of a compassionate and caring impact. If you’ve been crying your eyes out for the past 5 minutes in the toilet, and your colleague notices your red eyes when you come out of a cubicle, a phrase like, ‘Don’t worry yourself too much!’ isn’t really going to help. Especially when all they have is a smile of their own to back it up with, before they go back to their day and don’t spare you much of another thought.
It’s something a lot of people have come to call ‘toxic positivity’, and it’s something quite a few more of us will recognise when we understand what that is.
Having a bad day is perfectly normal. Having quite a few bad days in a row is something to worry about, but toxic positivity stops you from doing that. When you’re just having one bad day out of 100, someone coming along to say, ‘You’ll get through this!’ isn’t a problem. But when you have something like depression plaguing your mind, or your anxiety is acting up particularly bad this week, what they have to say is nothing we haven’t heard before.
It not only does nothing for us and our moods, but it helps to invalidate what we’re feeling, and tampers down the chances we have of reaching out for help with it. We start taking those little phrases to heart, despite how useless they are in reality, and start thinking little of the struggles we don’t actually have to struggle with. And it’s not just those of us who hear quite a few people telling us to ‘think positive’ that see the harmful nature behind this kind of forced positivity — medical professionals like Dr Allison agree.
As human beings, we have emotions. And we need to be able to talk about those emotions. We need to be able to express them to stay as happy and healthy as we can; to learn how to deal with what can easily overwhelm us if we keep it all locked up inside. I read a very interesting piece about normalising sadness in our culture the other day, right here on Medium, and I suppose the sentiment stuck with me for this post of my own.
It seems when someone else, someone who seems to be a lot calmer and more in control tells us, ‘It’s all just in your head!’, we start to agree. We start to doubt our own emotions, and we doubt our trust in the way we perceive the world. After all, if that’s all we’re hearing from the significant and insignificant people in our lives alike, is there something wrong with the way we think? Is there something wrong with what’s going on in our heads?
But when you think about it, where else would our emotions be? Where else would all of those overwhelming and hurtful thoughts come from? When you let yourself turn it around like that, it just seems like a useless statement, doesn’t it?
In truth, it says a lot more about the person who wants you to constantly be positive than it does about your ability to handle what life throws at you. You’re doing just fine, despite how often you berate yourself for breaking down a little bit! But when someone in your life is always throwing a statement like any of those I’ve mentioned above at you, it reflects just how uncomfortable they are with their own emotions. It’s a hypothesis a lot of psychologists are working on at the moment, but it is one I find fits 90% of the people who force themselves to stay upbeat.
So, what’s the goal here? To be honest, it’s just to be a bit more aware of those various moments when positivity can do more harm than it does good — it happens, despite the very nature of thinking positively and having an optimistic outlook on life!
And when you realise just how much words can hurt, even when they’re meant well, you can start to change the way you use them yourself. For example, instead of telling someone to just be a bit happier, you can use your words to validate the way they feel. You can remind them you see them, you see what they’re going through, and you can see it’s hard for them. You can turn the forced positivity that helps no one into an understanding positivity. I’m no psychologist myself, but I can definitely tell you that would mean a lot more to someone like me.
