Toxic Positivity: Overview
It’s a common misperception that keeping a cheerful demeanor in any scenario is appropriate and will solve difficulties. Toxic positivity makes a person think that feeling bad is unacceptable, leading to camouflaging negative sentiments, such as despair and dissatisfaction.
While optimism is a healthy attribute, being overly optimistic in the face of adversity can be toxic and negatively influence your emotional wellness. Positive thinking improves life outcomes and reduces the likelihood of suicide ideation and behavior, but toxic positivity forces people to disregard negative emotions. Suppressing emotions can lead to emotional outbursts and contribute to irritability, anxiety, and depression.
Toxic positivity happens when positive reasoning turns into a fixation, constraining individuals to stay quiet about their sentiments. Toxic positivity causes avoidance and quells sentiments by preventing experiencing certain emotions.
Problems are tough to fix just by simply remaining positive and having an uplifting perspective. Rather than retreating from a situation, one should confront it and seek solutions.
Toxic Positivity: Indicators
You can identify a few toxic positivity indications, expressions, or events in your daily life. The following are a few instances.
- Hiding honest feelings regarding terrible circumstances
- By smothering sentiments, endeavoring to move on with the situation
- Feeling repentant for how you feel
- Rather than affirming someone’s feelings, attempt to convince them that the circumstance might be more dreadful
- Rather than paying attention to somebody, attempt to reassure them by showing idealistic viewpoints
- Shaming people for displaying emotions other than happiness
- Saying “This is how it is” to go away from or brush aside problems that are upsetting you
Examples Regarding Non-acceptable and Acceptable Remarks:
You can find toxic positivity and validating remarks in the following:
Why Is Toxic Positivity Problematic?
It’s not a terrible thing to adopt an optimistic outlook. Toxic positivity can be detrimental to those who are experiencing difficulties. A person who thinks that staying happy or choosing positive is the only option, on the other hand, may overlook significant challenges and avoid addressing underlying psychological issues.
It’s Embarrassing to Express Emotions:
When people are going through tough times, they want to hear from their loved ones that their feelings are genuine and appropriate. Individuals with toxic positivity might think that other people’s sentiments are unacceptably negative, and they should seek solace in optimism.
Disregarding a Setback:
It’s normal to be sad and depressed after a loss. Individuals with toxic positivity in this circumstance, rather than consoling or validating someone’s sorrow, try to cover up the loss by saying things like “keep positive,” “everything occurs for a reason,” and “everything happens for a purpose.” Toxic positivity will show to the bereaved that their loss is meaningless to anyone.
It Stifles Progress:
Toxic positivity urges individuals to subdue their sentiments over the long haul, which can be pernicious. Toxic positivity likewise makes an individual overlook reality, keeping them from defying their true feelings or situations. As a result, the person’s progress will be smothered, and they will remain traumatized.
Solitude and Stigmatization:
Toxic positivity makes a person believe that communicating or feeling unpleasant emotions is shameful. This aspect discourages them from seeking social support or assistance to recover from their trauma. According to the American Psychiatric Association, stigmatization is also a justification for discussing mental health difficulties with professionals or experts.
Toxic Positivity and Mental Health
Toxic positivity pushes individuals to get away from the real world, deny their sentiments, and feel humiliated while communicating them to other people. Toxic positivity causes the person to keep quiet about their feelings, influenced by a fear of being condemned for having unacceptably powerful feelings.
It triggers awful apprehensions, including melancholy, distress, dread, and even fierceness. Toxic positivity causes individuals to accept there is some serious problem with them since they don’t see things positively.
How to Cope With Toxic Positivity
The following are some techniques for minimizing self-inflicted toxic positivity:
- Consider your unpleasant mood to be natural, and see it as a typical element of being mortal to express particular emotions in certain situations.
- Rather than avoiding your feelings, acknowledge them.
- Conveying and expressing your views to individuals who are willing to listen without passing judgment.
- To discover mental health difficulties, seek help as soon as possible by chatting with a therapist.
To prevent putting toxic positivity on others, one should:
- Encourage others so that they can honestly express their emotions in front of you without worrying about what you think.
- Instead of focusing on the positive, learn to recognize and understand negative emotions.
- Avoid the temptation to respond positively to whatever a person says
Allowing somebody to solely share good considerations may restrict correspondence and cause them to feel repulsive about themselves for having negative thoughts. Instead, aid those persons in listening to them so that they can expose their traumas or mental health issue and get therapy assistance.
