The Mask of Positivity
Volume 1, Issue 15: The Mask of Positivity
(Originally Published May 12, 2019)
What’s New This Week
Welcome back and thanks for joining us again in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, gleaning useful and practical insights to become more socially and emotionally powerful.
Today is Mother’s Day! I want to take a moment to celebrate all of the mothers all over the world (especially those who keep up with the Epic Life Playbook!) and to thank you for your love and for the sacrifices you’ve made to support us all. I would also like to give a special shout-out to my mom and grandma, who support me every day in these wild adventures I find myself on (and who read all of these weekly emails). I love you both dearly :)
This week is all about addressing the mindset of “positive-thinking”. Being positive is great when it’s genuine, but it comes at a mental and emotional cost when this positivity is forced or fake. Instructing others to “just think about the good things” and to avoid addressing the negative experiences inherent to the human experience can actually do more harm to their mental and emotional health than good. Society has been operating this way for decades, if not centuries or millennia, but recent research and insights from psychologist Susan David are leading the charge in changing how we think about positive-thinking.
As always, there’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.
Listen
This week’s Listen section is a TED Talk from psychologist Susan David, founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital of Harvard University Medical School, an instructor in psychology at Harvard, and author of Emotional Agility.
The foundation of David’s talk is the notion that putting on a mask and pretending to be positive can actually do more harm than good. One of the most interesting points she raised in the talk is the idea of suppressed amplification, where human emotions generally intensify and become much stronger over time if they are not dealt with in a timely manner. This is likely the cause of emotional breakdowns or “meltdowns” we see in society when someone has simply “put up with things for too long”.
To liken this idea to commonly-used idioms, the idea leads us to believe that there would never be a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” if we routinely dealt with the straws that had already been loaded, and there wouldn’t be a “tipping point” if we were to straighten out the cup before it is about to fall over and spill out. Her talk doesn’t say necessarily that being positive is a bad thing, but it does, however, show us that it is healthier to allow yourself to express whichever emotions you are actually feeling, rather than to put on the “I’m fine” mask and the “Everything is great” shades and keep it moving, so as not to have to deal with reality.
This was such a great talk, and Susan David’s work on “emotional agility” is really fascinating and worth checking out. You can begin by watching this powerful talk.
Learn
In this week’s Learn section, we continue in the same body of work of Susan David with an article entitled “Why we should say no to positivity — and yes to our negative emotions ”. The article covers a more-action oriented approach to the video from the Listen section, and we’ll take a look at each of those action steps more closely in the Level Up section.
The basic idea, as we have seen in the Listen section, is that being positive for the sake of being positive is not exactly healthy, because covering up negative emotions causes them to become stronger and more potent, whereas safely managing and expressing emotions as they occur is a much less-often-used and much more valuable alternative. See the full article by clicking the button below, and find out how you can make the changes you need in the Level Up section.
Level Up
We’ll get straight into the action steps here, as briefly alluded to above in this week’s playbook edition (here’s another relevant article containing an interview with David, published in the Washington Post):
- Label your emotions accurately. This is something that I noted in my Medium article on empathy (Tip #5 in the article), where the idea is that if you don’t have the emotional vocabulary to accurately describe the feeling, you may mislabel it (i.e. when people call most negative emotions ‘sad’, ‘upset’, ‘stressed’, etc.), and this leads to greater confusion in trying to understand what you are feeling.
- Have compassion on yourself when you notice emotions. It’s very common for people to beat themselves up for feeling certain emotions, seeing themselves as weak or inferior. The thing about that notion is that the human experience is not one of only positive emotions and experiences, but it also comes with a full range of negative emotions and experiences. Without having both, life wouldn’t seem quite as beautiful, and the positivity that everyone seeks wouldn’t be quite as valuable as it is today. Have compassion on yourself when you experience negative emotions, but the key is to address the problem and move forward, and not to dwell in the state for too long.
- Trace the emotion’s lifespan to its source. Taking the time to understand not only what you are feeling but also why you are feeling it gives you power and advantage over that emotion. Once you realize the cause of the pain, you can treat it. Once you find the hole in the boat, you can patch it up and stop it from sinking (provided you have the right tools, which we have been building up throughout Volume 1!). In the same way, once you find the source of your pain, do not put on the mask of positivity and hide from it, but instead do what you can to address it and fix it, so you can push yourself toward true, genuine positivity.
- Watch your language. There was a brilliant point raised in David’s talk — namely the one where she noted that something as simple as the language we use has a profound effect on how we perceive emotions. She instructs us to use more accurate language like “I am feeling sad”, rather than something like “I am sad”, because this small nuance can actually trick our minds into believing that we embody that emotion, rather than seeing the emotion as being something that we experience and can move past.
- Don’t allow others to force the mask of positivity upon you. Positivity, in its true form, cannot be forced, nor can it be faked. Allowing others to tell you how you should feel hinders your ability to process an emotion or experience and actually reach genuine positivity on your own. As we’ve noted in other sections of this edition, putting the mask on yourself is just as detrimental.
Fireside Spotlight
This week I have exciting news for Winter Hearth Studios! At the outset of starting this creative studio, I envisioned creating a video game studio that makes games which teach social and emotional intelligence, and this week I officially launched the production of WHS’s first game. The Phantom Farmer Project is going to be a mobile game for iOS and Android that I recently began developing, and I’ve also started a YouTube channel where I document the magic and behind-the-scenes process of what goes into creating a video game.
Check out the first video here and subscribe to the new channel to stay up-to-date!
Walk It, Talk it
Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.
This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)
Your Greatest Chapter Awaits
Until next time,
Elgin
Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.
I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.
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