The Pitfalls of Positive Thinking

The advice shows up everywhere: stay positive, keep your chin up, happiness is just a matter of attitude. Being mostly positive does matter. But living in a permanent state of cheerfulness carries real costs, and once you can name them, you can shift toward thinking that lines up with what is actually happening around you. Realistic thinkers tend to make better decisions and solve problems more effectively, which spills over into things like career moves and the relationships that mean something.

Consider the optimism bias. People expect bad outcomes to land on them less often than on everyone else, while simultaneously assuming the good outcomes will come their way more than they do for others. That skews how we treat risk. Risk is unavoidable if you want to grow, yet fear of a bad ending will keep you from the opportunities that require it. The flip side is just as limiting: believe good things simply arrive on their own, and you stop taking the action those things actually depend on. Healthy risk-taking lives somewhere between the two. You have to recognize when a risk is worth it and when it can be passed over. Lean too far into positivity, or too far into fear, and you stall; life moves slower than you wanted it to.

There is also the matter of attention. Most people default to positive thinking anyway, so hammering yourself to think positively is largely wasted effort, and it pulls your focus away from what is really going on. Push your brain to stay upbeat around the clock and it starts reaching for the negative, almost as if it needs a break from the forced cheer. When something genuinely bad happens, losing a job or the end of a relationship, you owe yourself the processing. Let the anger come. Let the sadness come. Sitting with those feelings is how you face the thing squarely and pull a lesson out of it. Paper over it with a smile and the suppressed emotion keeps building with nowhere to go, and it comes back around.

Forced positivity also sells you an illusion of control, as though keeping your thoughts upbeat means you have a hand on every lever. You don't. Plenty of life sits outside your control, and accepting that is what lets you see events plainly, the good ones and the bad ones alike.

Rose-colored glasses carry one more cost: they blur the lessons. Difficult experiences arrive partly to test your emotions and partly to teach you something, and you cannot take apart a situation you refuse to see clearly. Learning to sit with disappointment and unhappiness is part of the work of becoming genuinely content across the different parts of your life.

So managing your thoughts well means not overdoing the positive. We are built to feel a full spread of emotions, and trying to mute some of them in the name of staying upbeat just lets the discarded feelings pile up. That buildup turns into stress and anxiety, which tend to seed bigger problems. Meet life with a positive attitude by all means, but keep room for the rest of what you feel. That balance is better for your mental health and for your growth.

Rosemary Kitchen. Source: Katsnelson, A. (2011). The Pitfalls of Positive Thinking. Retrieved February 25, 2015, from Scientific American.