Kate Emery: Can too much positivity actually be a negative?

It could be worse. Look on the bright side. Others have it so much harder than you. At least you’re not in Afghanistan. Or Gaza. Think positive. If anything bad has ever happened to you, you have likely been on the receiving end of one of these platitudes. Well-intentioned? Sure. Comforting? Maybe. Toxic? Sometimes. Toxic for the woman told after having a miscarriage that at least she knew she could get pregnant. Toxic for the struggling new parent told to cherish every precious moment. Toxic for the wife told she could choose to make the best of it in the face of her husband’s terminal illness. These cases, all related to The Sunday Times, are examples of what is known as “toxic positivity”. It is phenomenon Perth psychologist Marny Lishman describes as “the ongoing belief that everything should be happy, positive, optimistic all the time with no room for those very real emotions that are often perceived as negative”. “It can be quite dismissive in nature, particularly when you are on the receiving end of it,” she says. “When people feel dismissed, ignored, not heard, not supported, they feel that their emotions have been minimised — and as a result are unable to further talk about their experience and move to a place where they can get help for their situation. “That’s when positivity becomes unhelpful.” Just where the term toxic positivity originated is up for debate. The sentiment, however, has been recognised for a long time and written about at length, including in Oliver Burkeman’s 2013 book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, and in a 2014 New Yorker essay, The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking. Mary Trump, niece of former US president Donald Trump, describes toxic positivity as a family trait in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough. “Donald learnt that you can never admit you’re wrong,” she writes. “It’s a kind of toxic positivity, there was no admitting pain, there was no admitting weakness ... he has to pretend that he’s done everything right, and everything is going perfectly, and this will just disappear, and everything’s going to be fine.” The term toxic positivity predates Dr Trump’s book but its publication coincided with an explosion in its popular use. That has less to do with her and more to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, a seismic event that has delivered aftershocks of loss, long-term health repercussions, financial stress and grief. When Hollywood star Gal Gadot’s ill-advised star-studded Zoom singalong to John Lennon’s Imagine fell flat — New York Times writer Jon Caramanica described the song as having been “pummelled and stabbed, disaggregated, stripped for parts and left for trash collection” — it was critiqued not just for the tone-deaf nature of asking Hollywood celebrities to sing the line “imagine no possessions” but for the platitudes that accompanied it. “I gotta say that these past few days got me feeling a bit philosophical,” Gadot says in the video. “You know this virus had affected the entire world. Everyone. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from. We’re all in this together.” Suggesting COVID had solved inequality was not, going by how the video was received, what the world needed to hear at the time. Toxic positivity may be cringe-worthy but can it also be dangerous? Some mental health professionals say yes. “We need all the range of emotions, because it’s our brain interpreting what is going on in our external and internal environments,” Dr Lishman says. “Invalidating some emotions that we don’t perceive as positive can result in minimising or denying (them) and this is not giving us accurate information that we could possibly use to elicit change in our life.” SBS’ Insight host Kumi Taguchi wrote an essay for this month’s Marie Claire magazine, called We Need to Talk About Toxic Positivity, in which she articulates the problem. “I can’t think of one example to share with you, so I will share a few,” she writes. “Isolated, they might seem insignificant, but collectively they bruise. Take the time I told a close friend I was really struggling during a particularly lost period in life and he told me that ‘things could be worse’. “Or, the time — rather, times — I was told to go back to where I came from. Despite being born in Australia and not having anywhere to ‘go back to’. Whenever I have shared these moments with others, responses can range from telling me to laugh it off, to get a thicker skin, to that anyone who says that is just ignorant, so ignore them. In theory, all that advice makes sense. But it’s never helped. It’s only made me feel more isolated and alone.” If you think toxic positivity is more common than it used to be you are probably right. In the 21st-century, self-help books like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which posits that positive thoughts can manifest anything up to and including a good parking spot, have helped popularise the idea that positive thoughts are not just good for us but capable of creating real-world outcomes. However, the fundamental idea that thinking positively can elicit change is not cutting edge. Norman Vincent Peale’s classic of the genre, The Power of Positive Thinking, was written in 1952. The book, which among other things advises repeating the phrase “If God be for us, who can be against us?” 10 times a day, was not particularly well received by health experts but went down better with the public. Still, there are some modern-day factors that have helped a particular brand of toxic positivity to flourish. Partly it is the current culture of wellness, personal development and self-care that promotes a certain mindset, Dr Lishman says. “I think it is very common, particularly now that we are in a personal development and self-care-obsessed era,” she says. “Which is all well and good to develop yourself personally, but many people forget that we need to feel the full range of emotions, what we perceive as good and bad, to experience life to its fullest, and thereby personally grow as a result.” Social media has also played a role in fostering and offering a platform for toxic positivity, as anyone who has ever plugged #blessed into Instagram will know well enough. The hashtag currently has about 138 million mentions on Instagram, while #positivity is closer to 35 million. In an online world that sometimes prioritises curated images and positivity, engaging with social media can be overwhelming for someone who does not want to be told to #spreadpositivity (1.9m) or to #thinkpositive (4.3m). Natalie Hendry studies the relationship between mental health, learning and social media at RMIT University’s school of media and communications. She says determining what it is or isn’t toxic positivity is not as simple as it might sound. “Working out what is and isn’t toxic can be tough — it is subjective, there are many different perspectives on positive thinking or how we engage with challenging emotions,” she says. “It might depend on the mood we’re in too or what we’ve been struggling with through the day. If something feels toxic to you, trust that —it is OK to be irritated by someone smiling about their glorious life. “What is especially toxic though is when comments intensify behaviours or thoughts that might be problems for the person sharing their experiences. If someone is struggling with their body image and eating, as one example, comments from followers to just be positive or try a new diet or exercise can reinforce those problems or even validate serious mental and physical health issues. “In my current research work, exploring social media with people who have seen a therapist or psychologist, people have many different responses to happy or positive content. “Some find it a useful, quick reminder to check in on their feelings and thoughts, something they might be working on with a therapist, others can’t stand it and scroll away from anything too #blessed that oversimplifies life’s emotions. Others aren’t noticing it at all.” Not everyone finds relentless positivity toxic and there is plenty of research to suggest positive thinking can affect health and wellbeing. For example, some studies have suggested that optimistic people are more likely to live longer, have lower rates of depression and get less sick. One controversial 2005 American Psychologist research paper even claimed to have come up with a “positivity ratio” that pinpointed the ratio of positive to negative thoughts that would allow a person to flourish. That ratio, which has since been criticised and at least partly discredited, was 2.9013, suggesting a person should have three positive thoughts to every negative one if they want to “flourish” rather than “languish”. For some the power of positive thinking is key to the way they live their life. Alisa Pettit is the founder and chief executive of Insite Mind, a Perth company that runs corporate positivity workshops. She says positive thinking is “not about ignoring reality but about accepting it and seeing a positive path forward”. “We can cultivate positive thinking practice and a deliberate approach where we choose what we say to ourselves, rather than letting our mind run on autopilot,” she says. In her experience, positive thinking can help people persevere through tough times. “What you focus on you move towards,” Ms Pettit says. “If you look at the kerb, you go towards the kerb, if you keep your eye on the road ahead, you head in that direction. “Positive thinking can help you keep focused on what you want rather than what you don’t want and help you achieve your goals.” The impulse to respond to a friend’s bad news with a positivity blitz rarely comes from a bad place. Dr Lishman says people who dispense platitudes or feel compelled to react to someone's bad news or trauma with reassurances are simply trying to make them feel better. “We seek balance and if we see someone upset, we want to make them happy again,” she says. “Other times people can become uncomfortable because they think they have to be the problem-solver — this is difficult when you feel pressure to help the situation — so people avoid this instead. “Another thing that many people do is when they see other people being emotional, they often dismiss it because they themselves may have repressed emotions.” For those who find themselves inclined to dispense platitudes where they may not be welcome, Dr Hendry’s advice is to give people “space to express the challenges they face and the tough emotions”. “We can also find safe pockets of social media that best fit our values,” she says. “This can take time and, for many people in my research, they’ve chosen to communicate in the back channels — private messages or group chats — so that they’re with other people who get them and share a similar approach to life’s ups, or downs.” Cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman, proposes “tragic optimism” as the “antidote” to toxic positivity. That phrase was coined by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. “Tragic optimism involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during these trying times,” Kaufman wrote in a recent essay for The Atlantic. “Researchers who study ‘post-traumatic growth’ have found that people can grow in many ways from difficult times ... “Importantly, it’s not the traumatic event itself that leads to growth (no one is thankful for COVID-19), but rather how the event is processed, the changes in world view that result from the event, and the active search for meaning that people undertake during and after it.”

Kate Emery: Can too much positivity actually be a negative?

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