Social:Toxic positivity

Short description: Construct in psychology

Toxic positivity involves a limited ability to acknowledge one's own anger or sadness.

Toxic positivity or positive toxicity is dysfunctional emotional management without the full acknowledgment of negative emotions, particularly anger and sadness.

Definition

Toxic positivity is a "pressure to stay upbeat no matter how dire one's circumstance is", which may prevent emotional coping by feeling otherwise natural emotions. Toxic positivity happens when people believe that negative thoughts about anything should be avoided. Even in response to events which normally would evoke sadness, such as loss or hardships, positivity is encouraged as a means to cope, but tends to overlook and dismiss true expression.

Psychology

In one sense, toxic positivity is a construct in psychology about how to handle emotions that is built upon the assumption that positive and negative emotions should match the appropriate situation. This is viewed as healthy psychologically. However, toxic positivity is criticized for its requirement to feel positive all the time, even when reality is negative. In her 2022 book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, author Susan Cain describes "tyranny of positivity" or "toxic positivity" as a cultural directive that says, "Whatever you do, don't tell the truth of what it's like to be alive".

Cain said that, historically and especially in the nineteenth century, boom-and-bust cycles led not only to reverence for successful businessmen, but also to attributing lack of success not to external circumstance but to a failure of character, a form of victim blaming. Cain documents this perceived failure of character as being reflected in the evolving definition of the term "loser". The result is a culture with a "positivity mandate"—an imperative to act "unfailingly cheerful and positive, ... like a winner".

Though the concept of unrealistic optimism had already been explored by psychologists at least as early as 1980, the term toxic positivity first appeared in J. Halberstam's 2011 The Queer Art of Failure ("...to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life."). Beginning in about 2019, the term toxic positivity became the subject of a greater number of Internet searches.

Positivity is generally seen as a good and helpful attitude for most situations, because it reflects optimism and gratitude and it can help lighten moods. Toxic positivity arises from an unrealistic expectation of having perfectly happy lives all the time. When this does not happen, people "can feel shame or guilt" by being unable to attain the perfection desired. Accordingly, positivity becomes toxic when a person rejects negative feelings even when they are appropriate.

People with a constant requirement for positive experiences may be inadvertently stigmatizing their own negative emotions, such as depression, or suppressing natural emotional responses, such as sadness, regret, or stress. Accepting negative emotions can make a person happier and healthier overall. Some authors, such as Kimberley Harrington, see toxic positivity as a form of personal emotional gaslighting. Harrington believes that it is fine to be "sad when you're sad and angry when you're angry" and to fully feel one's "rainbow of feelings".

Uncontrollable and controllable situations are important determinants of positivity. If the situation is controllable, artificially positive thinking can thwart a person's ability to fix the negative situation. Another determinant is the person's attitude toward happiness which may prevent an optimal response to the inevitable negative experiences that life brings. Positivity becomes toxic with the inability to examine and fix past mistakes. To gloss over inevitable mistakes with exaggerated confidence is unhelpful because it prevents learning from mistakes. Social media such as LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook may exacerbate the problem as it often emphasizes positive experiences and discourages coping with the inevitable downsides.

Toxic positivity can make one hang onto an unhappy marriage, but research shows that unhappily married couples are 3–25 times more at risk for developing clinical depression.

Critics of positive psychology have suggested that too much importance is placed on "upbeat thinking, while shunting challenging and difficult experiences to the side". Finally, by not allowing negative emotions, toxic positivity may result in physical consequences, such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease.

The concept of "tragic optimism", a phrase coined by the existential-humanistic psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, has been suggested as an antidote.

See also

• Cognitive dissonance
• Cycle of abuse
• Emotional exhaustion
• Emotional labor
• Emotion work
• Doublethink
• Hedonic treadmill
• List of cognitive biases
• Magical Thinking
• Optimism
• Optimism bias
• Rational expectations
• Rat race
• Self-deception
• Smiley