Toxic positivity

Toxic positivity or sometimes positive toxicity or serenity now is a dysfunctional approach to emotional management that happens when people do not fully acknowledge negative emotions, particularly anger and sadness. It is a "pressure to stay upbeat no matter how dire one's circumstance is", and this pressure may prevent a person from coping emotionally with such circumstances by simply feeling sad. Toxic positivity happens when people believe that it is not good to feel negative about anything, or complain, or feel sad, even as a response to events which normally should evoke sadness such as real losses or hardships, because such papered-over feelings of happiness may bring about more bad things as part of a vicious circle.

In one sense toxic positivity is a construct in psychology about how to handle human emotions that is built upon the following assumptions: there are positive emotions such as feeling happy and elated and content, and there are negative emotions such as feeling sad or depressed or blue; accordingly, what is good is to match the appropriate emotion to the current state of affairs. In other words, when something good happens, people should feel good, and if something bad happens, people should feel bad, that is, the emotion should match the situation, and this is viewed as healthy psychologically, according to this view. Implicit in the construct of toxic positivity is criticism of the idea that one must feel positive all of the time, even when the external reality is negative, which is seen as unhealthy.

Positivity is generally seen as a good and helpful attitude for most situations, since it reflects things like optimism and gratitude and positive reappraisal, and it can help lighten one's moods and lift one's spirits. What brings about toxic positivity is an unrealistic expectation of having perfectly happy lives, all of the time, and when this doesn't happen, people "can feel shame or guilt" by being unable to attain the perfection desired which ends up highlighting insecurities. Accordingly, positivity becomes toxic when a person rejects negative feelings when situations arise in which negative feelings are an appropriate response.

What is problematic is trying to maintain high levels of positivity and happiness all the time. This is seen as an unrealistic expectation. People who have a constant hunger for positive experiences or states of high subjective well-being may be inadvertently stigmatizing their own negative emotions, such as depression, or suppressing natural emotional responses, such as sadness, regret, or stress, and this is not seen as healthy. The thinking is that when people need to feel sad about something, they should feel sad, and not try to deny the sadness by imposing artificial feelings of happiness. Proponents of combating toxic positivity advocate for allowing oneself to accept and fully experience negative emotional states. It is better to "sit with our low or uncomfortable emotions" when they happen rather than trying to evade or deny or escape from them, and in this manner, a person will probably be happier over time, according to this line of thought. Negative emotions can help humans cope with some types of negative situations and people should not be "shoving them away without acknowledgment". Whitney Goodman, a psychotherapist and author of the book Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, sees toxic positivity as a form of personal emotional gaslighting. She believes that it's fine to be "sad when you're sad and angry when you're angry" and to fully feel our "rainbow of feelings".

An account in Psychology Today suggested that it is important to distinguish between uncontrollable and controllable situations; when something happens which is out of a person's control, then there is no harm in trying to look at the bright side of things and to hunt for a silver lining; but if the situation is controllable, then trying to paste over a negative situation with artificially positive thinking can thwart a person's ability to fix the negative situation. In another account, the problem with toxic positivity is not the positivity itself; rather, it's how a person's attitude toward happiness prevents them from responding optimally to the inevitable negative experiences that life brings. Another account agrees; positivity becomes toxic when people are unable to examine their past mistakes and to fix those mistakes. According to this line of thinking, everybody makes mistakes, but to gloss over them with exaggerated confidence is unhelpful since it prevents people from learning from their mistakes. Put simply, glossing over past mistakes is making a further mistake. One writer blamed social media for romanticizing how people view their lives; in reality there are both positive and negative aspects of living, but over-exposure to social media which often emphasizes only positive experiences may make people less able to cope with the inevitable downsides.

In the academic world, the concept implies a measure of criticism toward the field of positive psychology in that it suggests that the field places too much importance on "upbeat thinking, while shunting challenging and difficult experiences to the side." Researchers in medicine and in psychology are studying whether there may be physical consequences of toxic positivity: by not allowing negative emotions to be experienced, or by suppressing or hiding negative emotional responses, individuals may experience harmful cardiovascular and respiratory consequences.