22 Sep Is “positive thinking” overrated?
As someone with a background in clinical psychology, who’s spent most of the last few decades studying and learning Positive Psychology, you might think I’d be a fan of and someone who recommends “positive thinking”.
But you’d be mistaken, at least partially.
It’s true to say that I’d strongly recommend practising gratitude, and focusing on what’s going well, and creating active hope and optimism so as to foster and develop motivation and inspiration to strive towards desired goals.
All of that is wonderful. Let me be clear on that.
But so-called “positive thinking” very possibly doesn’t provide quite as much benefit as many of us think; at least not if we’re continuing to undermine it, and ourselves, with ongoing and excessive negative thinking.
Which is what too many of us do too often.
In fact, surprising as it might sound, positive thinking might not provide as much benefit as NOT negative thinking.
That is, stopping the catastrophising and unhelpful personalising, stopping or limiting dichotomous and black-and-white thinking, along with putting an end to overgeneralising and negative predicting, all of this, at least stopping or limiting all of this, would likely improve your mental health and happiness MORE than all the positivity we usually focus on.
Now obviously they’re not mutually exclusive, but too often we hear about the one without the other.
By all means, then, do what you can to think more positive thoughts; but don’t neglect putting at least as much, if not more effort into challenging and trying to limit, ideally stop, all that negativity constantly running around in your head.