Toxic Positivity, A Thought That Has Become Popular

Toxic Positivity, A Thought That Has Become Popular

Pretending that we are well all the time and that nothing in the world affects us also has consequences for our physical and mental health.

Playing with the mind can be counterproductive, and positivity is not necessarily a good thing. Toxic positivity comes from making us believe that we should always have a positive attitude towards life regardless of what we are going through, be it marital, economic, work problems, etc. Unfortunately this thinking has become very popular.

Wanting to impose on ourselves a falsely positive attitude to everything that happens to us only makes us stifle our negative emotions; but we did not come to pretend perfect lives because life was never like this and it never will be, this bad habit only separates us from ourselves and takes us away from our own emotions, and being such a popular thought, we can easily spread it before life of others.

In an effort to avoid sadness, we repress our feelings and pretend that everything is fine, that nothing happens, that time will heal the wounds and a thousand other things; But this is just a very damaging optimism that can be even worse than the sadness itself. To avoid falling into the clutches of toxic positive thinking again and curbing its popularity, pay attention to the following and take note.

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Accepting our emotions will allow us to be more resilient, says therapist Sally Baker. But what is resilience? Resilience is nothing more than the ability of a person to overcome difficulties or strong, traumatic circumstances, such as the death of a loved one, an accident, etc.

The emotional color palette encompasses unregulated emotions, such as sadness, frustration, anger, anxiety, or envy. We cannot ignore that, as human beings, we have that range of emotions that have a utility and that give us information about what happens in our environment and in our body. We cannot ignore them, explains health psychologist Antonio Rodellar, specialist in anxiety disorders and clinical hypnosis to BBC Mundo.

Sally Baker, therapist, psychologist and author of The getting of resilience from the inside out ("Resilience from the inside out", 2019) comments as follows:

The problem with toxic positivity is that it is a denial of all the emotional aspects that we feel in any situation that presents us with a challenge.

Obviously we can change our mentality, and a good first step would be accepting all your emotions in order to be more resilient; The vine is like that, there are good and bad things and we have to be very intelligent to learn to deal with everything that happens to us.

Extreme positivity is harmful. Photo: Pixabay

"It is dishonest towards who we are to allow ourselves only positive expressions," says Baker. "Constantly denying everything ‘negative’ we feel in difficult situations is exhausting and does not allow us to create resilience (the ability to adapt to adverse situations).

It isolates us from ourselves, from our true emotions. We hide behind positivity to keep other people away from an image that shows us imperfect.

Curiously, the human being learns to be pessimistic about everything that happens in life, however, and as we have already mentioned before, it is something that can be transformed, our mentality can adapt and evolve to start with more positive thoughts.

Perhaps the above could seem contradictory but it is not, simply the key is not to take positive thinking to extreme levels, nor is it that after a difficult situation you focus on forgetting it and being happy because then you can fall back into toxic positivity; We repeat, the key is not to take positivism to extreme levels; what we want is to find the balance.

Denying situations that cause us harm or pain does not solve absolutely anything, it is like playing at saying: "I cover one eye, I cover the other, and nothing to see" If it happens, if it affects and if it is real; That is why we will give you 7 signs so that you learn to detect toxic positivity.

– Hide your true feelings and pretend that everything is fine
– Losing the meaning of life; that is, carry on with all the mental weight that you are carrying
– Guilty feeling
– Change focus "could be worse"
– Suppress others when they try to take out their frustration
-Evading everything that bothers you instead of facing it

All of this affects us in a thousand ways, and not only in our mental health, as it also affects our physical health; It is also a hereditary problem, we can say, since many children, if not all, learn by imitating our actions, so this is like a chain that we pass from generation to generation in order to mold the mentality of the masses in a way inconvenient or inappropriate.