Stop Being So Positive!

The paradox of positive thinking for people who feel terrible

“Just perk up!”—can you imagine if this was advice that worked? And it should, if people who are feeling terrible, could look up, see the bright and sunny day, and feel better, things would be a lot easier. They are not.

There is a built-in paradox in trying to get people who feel bad to feel better. The thing most people will do is to tell people that “it's going to get better.” The irony? This is both true and absolutely the wrong thing to say. One of the reasons ‘60s counterculture adherents were so cloying was their relentless positivity.

“If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.”
― Timothy Leary

The problem with telling anyone “it's going to be all right” is mistrust. We are all running a program in our brain, essentially, that combines everything we're hearing with an X factor—should this New Information be Trusted?

We base our trust of any given piece of information not on what's contained in that information itself, but overwhelm…