I don’t mind saying it: we’re obsessed with positive thinking.
A bird pooed on your head? It could be worse! Your husband left you for the nanny? Look on the bright side! You don’t have to wash his socks anymore!
I jest but you’ve probably heard variations of the above before. You just want a wee bit of company for your misery, just for a moment, but you feel pressured to be jovial asap.
I can’t say quite when it happened but at some point in the last five years I grew tired of Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Jay Shetty. I’m sure they’re great humans and all, but the life-hacking tips and self-help advice no longer felt helpful. My obsession with positive thinking became hollow, forced.
We understand our brains better today than ever before, so psychologists have been able to classify negative thoughts into different groups. One of which is called “Black-and-White Thinking” or “All-or-Nothing Thinking”. I find this group particularly interesting because it raises the question: if Black-and-White Thinking is bad, why have we adopted such a black-and-white approach to how we think?
Negative & Positive Thinking: Zeros & Ones
The image below shows two polarised perspectives. The first shows the despair of unrequited attention. Thee second shows the liberation of living life on your own terms.
This picture inspired me to write this post. Because, although both perspectives are valid, there are so many other viewpoints available to us between black-and-white. Binary doesn’t have to be the default.
Denial of What Is
What concerns me about the positive thinking craze is how easy it’s become to indirectly shun anyone who doesn’t conform. When somebody asks “what if I fail?”, our automatic response is “but what if you succeed?”. When somebody says “I’m not ready” we say “but you never will be”. When somebody’s close to tears, we say “don’t cry”. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with these responses, we are telling people that they should be thinking and feeling something else. We are telling them to deny their reality.
To Replace or To Re-frame?
We all know that reoccurring negative thoughts and feelings can have serious implications on our health and quality of life. But when we’re in a cycle of negative thinking, the distance between positive and negative becomes too great for us to move between. The negative is too negative. So rather than trying to eliminate the negative thoughts, how about we get curious about our relationship with them? Instead of trying to replace the thoughts, we can reframe them into a healthier context. Not only does the re-framing process allow us to fully accept and embrace our feelings, it also increases our self-awareness. If you want to try re-framing for yourself, this post on AgileLeanLife.com sums-up the process perfectly.
