Why positive thinking matters

Yes, we’ve all met them: the person who has some shit hit the fan, like perhaps losing a job, but instead of trying to find a new job, she wants to rub some crystals together, recite some affirmations, and “Think positive.”

Yes, we’ve all seen them: the websites that try to commodify happiness, selling it to you like it’s a “secret formula,” maybe even using words like “the secret formula for happiness.”

Yes, we’ve all heard of them: the people who would take this positive thinking thing so far that they’d look a person of color in the face and tell them not to worry about institutionalized racism; who would tell someone who’s been walking through terrible poverty to “keep their chin up.”

These are all things that happen around the conversation of positive thinking, so it’s no wonder people have gotten a bit salty about it.

But I’m talking to you, the person who reads this with hopefully an ounce of common sense.


From the perspective of common sense, let’s get a few things out of the way:

Of course if you lose your job, you’ll need to take action and look for a new one—do not simply rely on positive thinking.

Of course selling happiness as a secret formula is hogwash and not very useful to anyone—positive thinking is not a secret formula.

And of course if you tell people who are suffering around social justice issues that they just need to “think positive” to see social change, you’re contributing to the problems they face by displaying such an incredible lack of empathy.

Now that we’ve applied some common sense, hopefully you won’t misunderstand me as I talk about why positive thinking matters.

The Timing Matters

Something shitty just happened. You feel like shit.

Right now? Not the time to “think positive.” It’s not the time to ignore the pain, nor is it time to rush to figure out how this will be a life lesson.

Positive thinking is only powerful when it’s used at the right time.

Your anger has its place.
Your sadness has its place.
Your overwhelm, distraction, frustration, rage, grief, insecurity, fear, isolation, loneliness, or whatever feeling seems to wash over you whenever things are shitty? These feelings all have their place.

If you try not to feel them, you drive them underground, and that is not just some throwback to Freud. Not only does Dr. Brene Brown point out that people who try not to feel their so-called “negative” emotions also cut themselves off from their joy, I can speak from personal experience that trying not to feel the bad stuff, just leads to feeling stuck.

When shitty things happen, you find the people who will let you feel the feelings, preferably in real-time and not via a Facebook post. The timing of positive thinking matters in its efficacy as a tool.

Ready to Shift

At a certain point, you decide that you’re ready to shift and use positive thinking. It’s time to think positive, for no other reason than because continually recycling the negative just feels crappy, and defining yourself and your life by the difficulties is powerless.

It will not do you any good to try to “think positive” until you’ve felt the feelings. You can’t force your way there. You’ll know you’re ready for a shift when two things happen.

One, in your body, you’ll feel like the feelings have moved from being a direct experience in your body, to being something you’re carrying around on your back, like baggage. This is hard to explain in words, but anyone who has gone through a breakup can tell you that there’s a point where all of the sadness and confusion is very “alive” and direct in their body, and then at some imperceptible moment, you’re basically functioning in your life again but the feelings feel like something you’re carrying around, weighing you down.

Two, you’ll have the thought, “Something needs to change,” or some variation on those words. You’ll desire the shift.

Why Positive Thinking Matters

Positive thinking matters because at a certain point in processing your pain about what has happened to you, you need a tool for how to move past the pain so that it does not come to define your life.

When someone dies, when a job is lost and there are few job options available, when you’re presented with a health crisis and the road to recovery will be long, when a relationship falls apart despite your own best efforts, you need to process your pain.

You also, at some point, need to reach for something positive for your own mental health and well-being. Not happy-happy-joy-joy inauthenticity that’s all fakey-fake, but literally, focusing on the positive can be something that pulls you out of forever existing in the old pain.

Deciding to adopt some positive thinking opens doors. What else is possible? What am I grateful for? What might I have learned? What might these challenges motivate me to do differently, moving forward? These are questions to ask to move in a slightly more positive direction. Notice that none of them are pushes to try to pretend that things didn’t hurt. They are simply an attempt to find some kind of good, somewhere, that can help you to cope and then move forward in your life.

Rejecting positive thinking outright, closes those doors. Refusing to ask what else is possible, to find anything to be grateful for, to deny the possibility of learning or changing keep people stuck.

There are a lot of people who bash positive thinking as being naive. Some have gone so far as to call it gas lighting. Yes, positive thinking can present that way—usually when it’s a denial of processing any pain—to totally throw it out as a viable option does not make sense to me. Staying forever in the pain, refusing to see anything that you could learn from it or to look for hope of recovery, is not naive optimism. It’s a pro-social, mentally healthy thing to strive for.

After all, I hope that those same people criticizing positive thinking would ever say the following to someone:

Your husband is dead, and you’ll probably never feel happiness, again.
You lost your job and there aren’t many other options out there and capitalism is evil and works against you, so I hope you don’t lose your house as well and die under a bridge.
You’re sick, and it’s going to be really hard and difficult and you might not get better, so don’t go getting hopeful about treatment options.

These are statements that lack empathy. In fact, I would argue that bashing positive thinking without a true understanding of the multiple psychological studies that have found that positive thinking tools such as cognitive reframing have been found to be effective, FREE, non-capitalist, non-drug forms of helping people to alleviate depression and anxiety, are doing a huge disservice to those who suffer.

Positive Thinking + Empathy

Empathy is the critical factor, whether it’s empathy for your own feelings or having empathy for someone else’s.

Positive thinking without empathy, is where the tool is ineffective.

Rushing to say the positive statement “There’s a lesson in all of this,” without the empathy of, “It’s really hard right now; how can I help?” doesn’t work.

Repeating “I’m sure you’re going to make a full recovery from your illness” without the empathy of “It’s not fair that this has happened to you, and I’m sorry that it did,” doesn’t work.

Empathy is critically necessary when people grapple with social oppression. Don’t tell me, a woman, that sexism has gotten better. Tell me, as a woman, “I believe you when you say that you’ve experienced sexism; I believe you when you say that there are inequalities. It’s wrong. How can I support you?”

Tell people of color this. Tell the LGBTQ community this. Tell people who are struggling financially, this.

Empathize when they feel like nothing’s getting better and nothing ever will—that’s a really real feeling for anyone who has experienced social oppression.

And when they’re ready, let them know that you’re there to help them forge a new path, a more positive one that leads to change.

Simply Positive

I do my best to adopt positive thinking. I resisted it at first, because I thought that it was like a lie, like telling myself to believe that I felt like enough in those moments when I didn’t feel that, at all. But positive thinking doesn’t need to be, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh-darnit, people like me!”

It can be as simple and true as this: “I’m willing to try, and trust that that’s going to get me somewhere.”

That’s it. No pom-poms. No slapping an affirmation on it to make the pain go away—your pain is valid. No putting on a bright smile and “Faking it until you make it.”

Sometimes, life is hard. We need to honor that it feels hard. And at a certain point, we need to understand that life will feel harder and quite miserable if we repetitively tell ourselves that what we want most isn’t possible, that there are no options. At some point, in the name of our own mental health, we have to ask ourselves what we can reframe into a more positive direction.

You’re thinking thoughts, either way. How can we make them work for us, rather than against us? That’s the best use of positive thinking as a tool that can support our lives.