“A Harvard psychologist explains why forcing positive thinking won’t make you happy”
“A lot of our cultural dialogue is fundamentally avoidant, so people will just say things like, “just be positive and things will be fine.” “The tyranny of positivity” was what a friend of mine called it. She recently died of cancer, and what she meant was if being in remission was just a matter of positive thinking, then all of her friends in her breast cancer support group would be alive today. By sending out the message that our thoughts are responsible for creating our health, well-being, and reality, we are overvaluing the power of our thoughts, while making people feel culpable when something bad happens to them. They feel it is because they weren’t positive enough…
The next point — and this is very important to me — emotions like sadness, guilt, grief and anger are beacons for our values. We don’t get angry about stuff we don’t care about. We don’t feel sad or guilty about stuff we don’t care about. If we push these emotions away, we are choosing not to learn about ourselves. We are choosing to ignore our values and what is important to us…
Happiness, we’ve found, is the byproduct of pursuing things that have intrinsic value to us. In other words, when you do something you love, that’s when you’ll feel happy. To set a goal around “happiness” is antithetical to finding it…
We are big enough to contain all of our emotions.”
Listen to your emotions. Respect yourself.
Related: “Why Smiling Too Much May Be Bad for You”
