It’s everywhere, isn’t it? The power of positive thinking.
It is a magic pill that will solve all our problems, it seems to say, from mental health, through money problems, physical health and lifestyle. We are told: “Look on the bright side”, “Think positively”, “Cultivate gratitude”,…
While these can be helpful in helping us correct major negativity imbalances, it’s not really the complete answer to a life well lived.
Do not misunderstand. I had jumped on the “positive thinking” bandwagon, the law of attraction lifestyle theory, along with everyone else. I was concerned that dwelling on things that bothered me or engaging in a conversation where we only expressed negative experiences and feelings was a transgression. I felt guilty.
A Danish psychology professor at Aalborg University named Svend Brinkmann once spoke about this topic in an article on QZ.com about the new cultural stigma of “being negative.”
Basically, we are human, Brinkmann said. As such, we experience a wide range of emotions on a day-to-day basis. What leads to stress is when we experience a natural reaction of sadness, frustration or anger and then censor ourselves and convince ourselves that we should only think or be “positive”.
We have come to equate “positive thinking” with emotional health. If we think more positively, we think we will avoid depression or never get angry or do things we later regret. Or that we will simply never feel or think “negatively.” We all want to avoid the sharp sting of unhappiness.
But we’re so uncomfortable around people experiencing fear, loss, loneliness, etc., that our job becomes helping “turn that smile around,” even if that person is ourselves. Because no one wants to be around someone like that, right? We don’t want to “knock everyone else down.”
And therein lies the seed of our unhappiness.
Emotions are essentially natural energetic reflexes, like a knee reflex, that occur in our bodies in response to how our brains perceive what’s going on outside (and inside) of us. We don’t really have much control over them. Thoughts, on the other hand, we have complete control over.
The paradox is that in our struggle to “think positive,” we have begun to talk or think negatively about our own natural human responses to life experience. In truth, we have resorted to weakening our intuition and putting ourselves down for “feeling”; well, anything but total joy and happiness day after day.
The burden we carry is the equation we believe exists between “thinking” positively and “feeling” happy. We’ve come to believe that if we’re a little tougher on ourselves by thinking “positive,” we can end feelings of sadness or loneliness, overwhelm, or shame.
If that hasn’t worked too well for you, you’re not alone. So think of it this way:
Life is a spectrum of emotions, and there is no such thing as a positive emotion or a negative or “bad” emotion, unless we tell ourselves it is and suffer for it. And don’t worry, you’re not the first person to fall into that trap. He seems exceptionally human.
Buddhist philosophy has long studied and philosophized about the difference between pain and suffering. The pain, they explain, is usually a physical or emotional sting. We all have them from time to time. Suffering, on the other hand, is the attitude towards or in how you interpret pain. To drive home the point, as the famous quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” illustrates, “… “because there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
Feeling bad is not a sign that we are mismanaging our lives: it simply means that we are actually experiencing life. On the contrary, we could be more aware of how we react to it.
So next time you’re not feeling so positive, pat yourself on the back, get a foot massage, tell the positive people to take a hike and ride the wave. Because you probably have a very good reason for feeling this way today. Showing yourself compassion in those difficult times is the fastest way to a positive, happy and balanced life.
