There’s this new term that’s been running rampant throughout the internet. This team is known as toxic positivity. This term refers to the toxicity that comes from people who tell others to always think positive. This concept can refer to unhealthy positive thinking practices such as always focusing on the positive even when the situation calls for a more realistic approach.
While positive thinking can help you live a happier and healthier life, there’s certainly something to be said for toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is the dark side of positive thinking. This can impact a person’s life negatively because they’re always trying to find the positive even when there’s no positive to find.
Pushing the ideology that one can always find the positive even during the most difficult of situations may diminish the natural need to acknowledge the feelings, the situation, and then move forward in a positive direction. With most positive thinking strategies you must first recognize how you feel right now and what’s going on before you can move towards positive thinking to help you find a solution.
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As with most mental health issues, overgeneralizing a technique can lead to negative results. Each person is different in what they’re experiencing, how they feel about something, and what they should do amidst the chaos. This is why we wanted to take a moment to share some of the dark side of positive thinking.
Hiding or Masking Real Feelings
We all have that one person who is constantly looking happy, sharing positive things, and rarely seems to have a bad day. This is rather unrealistic and could be the result of your positive thinking friend hiding or masking their real feelings. Hiding feelings isn’t going to help resolve any problems. It will only push those feelings down to allow them to blow up at a later date.
Feeling Guilty About Your Feelings
Another dark side of positive thinking is that positive thinkers may have trained themselves to always see the positive. They won’t ever allow themselves to express a “bad” thought or complain about a situation because they’re full of shame for these real feelings. Positive thinking isn’t about feeling shame, you should never feel guilty about sharing negative feelings because even the most optimistic of people have negative feelings sometimes.
Living an Inauthentic Life
Many people who’ve started to live the positive thinking lifestyle get into this toxic positivity mindset that drives them to live an inauthentic life. They are masking and hiding their negative thoughts or feelings so that the outside world never sees their true self. This is part of the dark side of positive thinking because it can lead you to wake up years down the road in a life that doesn’t feel right for you.
This information will help you see how positive thinking can become addictive to the point that you’re no longer living in reality. It’s always best to be realistic and logical all the while using positive thinking to focus on solutions rather than problems. We hope this article has helped lend some insight about positive thinking so that you can steer clear of the dark side of this survival strategy.