The Danger of Positive Thinking
Positive thinking has become so deeply embedded in self-help culture that questioning it can feel almost contrarian.
Think positive. Good vibes only. Your thoughts create your reality. The message is everywhere — in books, on social media, in well-meaning advice from people who care about us. And underneath it all is a compelling promise: that if you can just shift your mindset, the difficult feelings will go away.
The problem is that for many people, it doesn’t work. And for some, it actively makes things worse.
What positive thinking actually asks us to do
When we’re feeling anxious, sad, scared, or overwhelmed and we reach for positive thinking as the solution, we’re essentially telling ourselves: this feeling is wrong and needs to be replaced.
That might seem helpful. In practice it often deepens the problem.
The more we override difficult emotions with more acceptable ones, the more disconnected we become from our actual experience. We lose touch with what we’re really feeling. We stop trusting our own internal signals. And the emotions we’ve been suppressing don’t disappear — they just go somewhere less accessible, where they tend to show up in other ways.
A 2009 study from the University of Waterloo found that for people experiencing depression, positive self-affirmations actually made many participants feel worse — not better. The gap between what they were telling themselves and what they were actually experiencing increased their distress rather than reducing it.
The middle ground nobody talks about
The alternative to positive thinking isn’t dwelling in negativity or becoming overwhelmed by difficult emotions. There’s a middle path that tends to be much more effective — and much less discussed.
It involves learning to be with uncomfortable feelings rather than either pushing them away or being swamped by them.
This is harder than it sounds. Difficult emotions are uncomfortable by nature. The impulse to make them stop is completely understandable. But the capacity to stay with an uncomfortable feeling — with some curiosity rather than judgment — is one of the most useful things you can develop, both for your own wellbeing and for your relationships.
Judgement versus curiosity
One of the simplest ways to practise this is to notice how you’re relating to your own emotional experience.
Compare these two responses to the same situation:
Judgemental: “I shouldn’t be this upset about what she said. I’m so oversensitive. What’s wrong with me?”
Curious: “I’m feeling really hurt by that. I wonder what it touched in me — why that landed the way it did.”
Same situation. Very different internal experience.
The judgemental response adds a layer of self-criticism on top of the original feeling — now you’re dealing with the hurt and the shame about the hurt. The curious response treats the feeling as information worth understanding rather than a problem to eliminate.
That shift — from I shouldn’t feel this to I wonder why I feel this — is small in words and significant in practice.
Ways to build this capacity
This isn’t something that happens through willpower or deciding to be less reactive. It’s a skill, and like most skills it develops through practice.
Some approaches that tend to help:
Mindfulness and breathwork — practices that train the attention to stay present with experience without immediately needing to change it. The UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center offers free guided meditations as a starting point.
Somatic practices — yoga, tai chi, and other body-based practices build the capacity to notice and stay with physical sensation, which is closely related to the capacity to stay with emotional experience.
Nonviolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication offers a framework for identifying and working with emotions more accurately — particularly useful for people who find it hard to distinguish what they’re actually feeling from what they think they should be feeling.
A small experiment
The next time you notice a difficult emotion arising, try pausing before doing anything with it.
Don’t push it away. Don’t amplify it. Just notice it. Where do you feel it in your body? What does it actually feel like — not what you think about it, but the physical sensation of it?
Then get a little curious. Not in a therapeutic, analysing way — just genuinely interested. What is this? What might it be about?
You don’t have to resolve anything. You’re just practising being present with your own experience rather than immediately trying to fix or escape it.
That capacity — to be with what’s actually happening in you — tends to grow the more you turn toward it rather than away.
If you find that difficult emotions feel consistently overwhelming, or that you have a pattern of pushing away experiences that don’t feel okay to have, this is often worth exploring in counselling. Anxiety counselling and individual counselling are both available in Squamish and online across BC.
