Last Word Toxic Positivity You know the type. After venting to someone for 20
minutes about a hard day or an annoying coworker, the reply you hear is “Look on the bright side.” Or how about the endless social media posts on seizing the day. “The best is yet to be!” or “No bad days” writes the umpteenth person online under a smiling selfie. Ugh. Toxic positivity is the conviction that staying upbeat and positive all day, every day, is the best way to live your life. Get into a car accident? Everything happens for a reason. Lose your job? Everything will work out. Got COVID? Huzzah! Turns out, however, that this relentless and irritating attitude can actually be detrimental to your health. According to Psychology Today, when you deny or avoid unpleasant emotions, you actually make negative feelings stronger because you’ve failed to process them. “By avoiding difficult emotions, you lose valuable information,” writes Dr. Konstantin Lukin. “Emotions themselves are information; they give you a snapshot of what is going on at a given moment, but they don’t tell you exactly what to do or how to react. For example, if I am afraid of a dog and I see one up ahead on the sidewalk, that doesn’t mean I have to cross the street. It just means that I perceive the dog as a potential threat. Once a person identifies the emotion, he or she decides whether they want to avoid the dog or face the fear.” And processing emotions, both good and bad, can help you develop resilience. Getting things off your chest, sharing your emotions with friends or family, can feel good. “It’s like lifting a weight from your shoulders, even if it’s more difficult than pretending everything is fine,” writes Lukin.
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Dealing with and expressing emotions can also help you connect better with others. Toxic positivity can have a negative impact. Say your friend got a scary diagnosis at the doctor. Telling them they’ll be OK or it will all work out ignores their fears. So even though your intention is to comfort, your friend can perceive it as a lack of empathy. True happiness, says Dr. Tabitha Kirkland, a psychologist and associate teaching professor at the University of Washington, does not come from suppressing negative emotions and touting feel-good statements, but rather leaning into what we’re authentically feeling in the moment and accepting all of our emotions, both positive and negative. “Some people think being happy or being a happy person means you don’t feel bad, but that’s silly: We all have a full emotional life,” she says in an online article on toxic positivity. “There’s more to happiness than feeling good all the time.” So the next time you read or hear, “Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud,” tell the rainbow to go pound sand. It’s OK to have a cloudy day every once in a while.
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