Why Avoiding Toxic Positivity is Important

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It is becoming increasingly popular to always look on the bright side of life, no matter what happens. Never acknowledging that bad things do happen in life can have many negative consequences on someone’s life, however. The following guide gives you a few reasons why you may want to try to avoid toxic positivity in your life.

Toxic Positivity Can Cause Mental Health Struggles

When you are going through a difficult situation in life, and someone tells you to “look on the bright side” this can affect you in a negative way mentally. It can make you question if the feelings you have are selfish, are unnecessary, or are childish. It’s okay to have negative emotions from time to time. While you don’t want to dwell on them nonstop, having negative emotions is normal and healthy. Squelching these emotions can lead to feelings of depression and anxiety, which can also affect your life negatively.

Toxic Positivity Can Create a False Sense of Security

Trying to always see things in a positive light can instill a feeling that everything should be great all the time. When something goes wrong, it can limit the feelings of responsibility someone has, which can give them a false sense of entitlement. It can make someone feel as though they are owed the positive things in life and when they don’t occur, it can lead to someone thinking they did something wrong, weren’t good enough, or cause them to blame someone else for their problems.

Toxic Positivity Can Cause Social Awkwardness

Being around people who are positive all the time can create social awkwardness. It can make you feel as though you have to hide negative feelings when they occur out of a fear of letting someone down or feeling you’ll be judged. Not being able to share your feelings openly and honestly causes things to become bottled up inside which is not a healthy way to live life. Avoiding toxic positivity isn’t always easy to do. You may need to limit your social interaction to people who live a more realistic way of life and don’t always try to find the good in everything that happens. Limiting social media allows you to avoid being exposed to toxic positivity unexpectedly and can help to provide you with time to process the way you feel about something in a healthy way.

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Spread the Positivity Virus

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Peer pressure is something adults tell children to watch out for. They are afraid because children are thought to be impressionable. Little do they know, the attitudes of their friends can affect them in similar ways. Your colleagues may not try to get you to engage in illegal behavior, but surrounding yourself with negative people may lead to negative feelings, and the same can be said with positivity. But why does this happen?

The culprit may be social cues. Most humans have the ability to sense a mood shift, based off of nonverbal cues. These can include posture, facial expression, and movement. Someone who is frowning is sad. Someone who can’t stop tapping their fingers is jittery. Someone with their arms crossed is closed off. There are hundreds of social cues humans subconsciously recognize.

Social cues are said to make up 55% of all communication. Before we learn our first words, we observe our family’s behavior and categorize behaviors by their intended effect. This means we can recognize the mood in any given situation without directly asking about it even before we begin school.

Obviously, social cues are a key to this puzzle, but how exactly do they fit in?

When someone does not adhere to social norms, they stick out like a sore thumb. Sometimes, there is an event which calls for celebration or one that calls for grief. However, sometimes a group’s mood can be a byproduct of one or two people’s attitude.

Daniel Goleman says that leaders influence their teams’ moods. A manager who angrily points out all of your mistakes can make you feel angry in return. A respectful boss will inspire respect from their employees. In your social group, there is almost always one particularly vocal friend (whether they are happy, sad, or any other emotion), who acts as the leader of the group. Everyone else tends to model their behavior around this centralized person.

There are circumstances where it is appropriate to experience negative emotions, but living a happy life is important to your mental health. Spending all of your time with negative people will ultimately lead you to feel more negative. Experiencing the world with positive people will allow you to enjoy more in life and lead to a deeper appreciation of all life has to offer.

Positivity can be spread as easily as a disease. Every positive word or action transfers this positivity to the next person. Surrounding yourself with positive people is the best and easiest way to live a fulfilling life.

So what are you waiting for? Go out into the world and find new people to share your positivity with. After all, your positivity is just as contagious and can make ripples in the world.