Toxic Positivity in an Instagram Age
“I’d rather be whole than good” — Carl Jung
There’s a pervasive “think positive thoughts” trend that has rooted itself in North America, and probably other parts that has gone viral since the COVID pandemic. There is no shortage of self-help gurus who tell you that you too can be happy and successful, if only you can think positive thoughts. There’s a whole self-help industry built around positivity netting over ten billion dollars a year in the US.
In her Master’s thesis Alison Huggins writes, “In our current capitalist culture, self-obsession, and lust for an immaculate inner self, concurrent with a multimillion-dollar self-help industry, makes a lot of sense to many people. If we can somehow buy a better self, or at least buy a book which promises to help us “win friends and influence people,” which would, in turn, make us more money, why should we not invest?”
There are tremendous benefits in nurturing positivity, in fact the benefits show up as factors in better health outcomes including longer life expectancy. But too much of a good thing can have the opposite effect. Too much positivity can lead us to denying our struggles and difficult emotions. When we do that, we can find ourselves pushing down healthy emotions. This is toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity is an obsession with positive thinking. It is the belief that people should put a positive spin on all experiences, even those that are profoundly tragic. It silences negative emotions and minimizes our struggle. It is culturally pervasive; in fact, it reinforces the Zeitgeist of our times. Toxic positivity is a mindset, it underpins cultural narratives reenforcing certain behaviours that in turn affect our wellbeing and mental health.
The word gaslighting had not previously crossed my mind until recently regarding this phenomenon, but that’s what it is, it’s a form of gaslighting. Toxic positivity sets the stage for this form of manipulation that can be used to make you question your own sanity, very often used in abusive relationships to control and silence the other partner. Its affect on us is we internalize the messaging we get from extreme or toxic positivity, and we feel feelings of shame, and guilt as a result because we are feeling less than positive.
In Peacock Plume Michaela White writes, “Toxic positivity, at first glance, may not seem unhealthy. However, this form of communication can be harmful as it can cause shame, feelings of guilt, and the prevention of human emotional growth. It is a form of gaslighting.”
Toxic positivity is pushed with evangelical-like zeal and fervor on social media. We have seen since the pandemic that this “positive vibes” trend has gone viral. “Given the collective trauma we’re all experiencing with the coronavirus pandemic, toxic positivity is an especially relevant concept right now. All those Instagram posts saying we need to lean into this experience, embrace spending more time with our family, get fit, pick up a new hobby, learn a new language, and finally write that novel? That’s toxic positivity,” said psychotherapist Noel McDermott.
Social media reenforces and amplifies toxic positivity. On social media users curate their posts to represent a brand or identity they want to portray to the world, #livingmybestlife. This is understandable on some level, but the problem is there’s a disconnect between how we present ourselves and our actual lived experiences.
Sarah Renald with the Bottomline, at University of California, Santa Cruz frames this dilemma we face, “These mantras often provide people with short-lived encouragement, which isn’t enough to truly fix the issue. Just as Tylenol removes pain temporarily, the positive mantras provide a temporary fix to our negative emotions.”
Platitudes like “Positive vibes,” and “think positive thoughts” are often not helpful and can be invalidating. Realize, this is not only what we hear from others, but what we also tell ourselves. We can gaslight ourselves into believing the toxic mantras of positivity and feeling awful because we can’t live up to them.
We all struggle with difficult emotions like sadness, anger, and grief. In fact, we may experience a wide array of emotions at any given moment. It’s part of being human. Not allowing ourselves to feel certain emotions diminishes our human experience and silences us.
Mark Manson the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck writes “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.”
Emotions are pesky, they are like a game of whack-a-mole, you push them down in one spot and they show up somewhere totally unexpected. We’re playing a game of stuffing our emotions down believing they will go away, but they don’t, instead they show up later pushing back with equal or greater force.
The problem with social media is the tendency for us to compare ourselves to other users. Toxic positivity sets us up for a never-ending loop of toxic fall out. The Addiction Center reports, “Social media facilitates an environment in which people are comparing their realistic offline selves to the flawless, filtered, and edited online versions of others, which can be detrimental to mental well-being and perception of self. Excessive social media use can not only cause unhappiness and a general dissatisfaction with life in users but also increase the risk of developing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Constantly comparing oneself to others can lead to feelings of self-consciousness or a need for perfectionism and order, which often manifests as social anxiety disorder.”
This façade of flawless selfies and an idealized presentation of self is about creating a persona living my best life, there is no room for flaws and imperfection.
The crux of toxic positivity is avoidance. According to the American Psychological Association avoidance is the practice or an instance of keeping away from particular situations, environments, individuals, or things because of either (a) the anticipated negative consequence of such an encounter or (b) anxious or painful feelings associated with them.
Avoidance leads to psychological issues; it can create serious problems for both our physical and mental health. It can fuel addiction, shame, feelings of inadequacy, and even angry outbursts. Remember when I talked about the game of emotional whack-a-mole earlier, we can never escape negative emotions, they pop up in our lives and present themselves in unexpected places. But when we embrace ALL of our emotions, the good, the bad and the ugly we can set ourselves on a path to a robust emotional life.
Research suggests accepting negative emotions, rather than avoiding them may actually be more beneficial for our mental health in the long run. For example, a 2018 study found that people who regularly avoid difficult emotions end up feeling worse.
On the other hand, “People who tend to not judge their feelings, not think about their emotions as good or bad, not try to avoid or put distance between themselves and their emotions, these people tend to have better mental health across the board,” said Brett Ford, the study’s lead author and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
Signs of pushing toxic positivity include minimizing other people’s experiences and emotions with “feel good” platitudes, chastising, belittling, or shaming others for expressing emotions that are other than positive. It can also take form of actions like trying to cheer someone up or give them a pep talk instead of validating their emotional experience. Telling someone “think positive,” or “you’ve got this,” is less about being helpful and more about our own struggles and the pain we want to avoid.
When we internalize toxic positivity, a part of us starts to believe that what’s happening is okay, we gaslight ourselves. We might mask or hide our true emotions by suppressing them and dismissing things bothering us with an “It’s just the way things work” attitude instead of thinking more deeply about these experiences and processing and learning from them.
Emotions both positive and difficult are a vital part of the human experience. They provide us with an opportunity for connection, self-awareness, and growth when we’re not afraid to accept and explore them in depth. If our emotions stay bottled up inside or come out as anger instead of sadness because there wasn’t room for sadness and other painful emotions in our “positive vibes only” world we miss out on the full human condition. When we curate a fake emotional world, we attract counterfeit intimacy and superficial relationships.
The best way to cope with toxic positivity is setting healthy boundaries, someone else’s toxic positivity is not your shame. Listen to your self-talk, what kinds of stories are you telling yourself? Nurture acceptance and learn skills to observe and accept your emotions.
