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Everyone has heard “Just look on the bright side!” or “Happiness is a choice—so choose to be happy!” Countless self-help books on choosing happiness line the shelves of bookstores; You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 32 weeks; and The Power of Positive Thinking by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, published in 1952 and translated into 15 languages, is still popular today. The idea that you can be happy if you simply choose to be has been integrated into America’s military, classrooms and workplaces to improve coping skills, performance and mental health.
But as the movement’s popularity grew, it started being used to shame people with depression, anxiety or even occasional negative feelings. The August and October issues of Motivation and Emotion, the official journal of the Society for the Study of Motivation, have studies that prove the shaming is real. The study from the August issue, conducted by Karin Coifman and colleagues, concluded that when people acknowledge and address negative emotions toward their relationships or chronic illnesses, it helps them adjust their behavior and have more appropriate responses. Those negative emotions, in turn, benefit their overall psychological health. The October study, conducted by Elizabeth Kneeland and colleagues, concluded that people who think emotions are easily influenced and changeable are more likely to blame themselves for the negative emotions they feel than people who think emotions are fixed and out of their control.
While these studies are important, they aren’t the first to suggest positive psychology can be dangerous. For years, psychologists have been studying emotions and how they affect everyday life, success and self-esteem. These studies found that even though positive psychology can help some people achieve happiness, it can be harmful to others, leading to feelings of failure and depression.
Despite these recent findings and years of research pointing out the negatives of positive psychology, the infatuation lives on. Some experts believe bombarding people with these bromides and self-help books that implicitly say they are at fault for not being happy may be a factor in the rise of depression rates in the U.S.
– Morgan Mitchell
Read more: The ‘Tyranny’ Of Positive Thinking Can Threaten Your Health And Happiness
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I think Martin Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, would distance himself from the “power of positive thinking” movement. The two positives are different. Positive thinking is about convincing yourself that ‘every day in every way, life is getting better and better’. Seligman’s positive psychology is about the virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, humanity and some transcendent purpose. Once you move into the area of virtue it is about dispositions resulting from habits of behaviour, not about feelings or emotions. Who can doubt that sometimes whether you have good or bad habits will influence whether you have good or bad emotions? What is more, habits of thinking in certain ways can help to assume and deal with bad emotions. Cognitive behaviour therapy is based on this.
I have noticed that Seligman’s work has spawned a whole movement of positive psychology, some iterations of which he would distance himself from. Some of the iterations which are little more than repackaged positive thinking bear little resemblance to Seligman’s original ideas. Don’t throw the baby of genuine positive psychology out with the “power of positive thinking” bath water. The latter is sometimes nothing more than tepid bath water.