Toxic Positivity - When we don’t leave room to anything but positive

"I have to stay positive."

"Why are you always so negative?"

"I know, I know, I need to stay away from my negative thoughts."

"It's okay. Everything is going to be fine."

Come on, everyone! Let's stay away from negativity and look at the bright side."

"We have to stay positive."

We can see that on social media, we can see that in conversations with friends and even at work. Why, so often, do we tend to tell them that everything will be okay when people have a challenging situation?

It seems like positive emotions are the only ones we can have. 

What's going on?

Why is there no room to feel it all?

What will happen if we open the door to give ourselves permission to feel it all?

In this article, I will invite you to look beyond the positive and see how maybe we got the Positive Psychology idea all wrong because of Social Media or some unclear movement.

So wrong that until I did some deep dive to research and get a better understanding of what is Positive Psychology I didn't realize how much harm we can be doing to ourselves, to the people around us, and as leaders of our team members and peers when don't allow anything but positive in the room.

There is even a new term for this phenomenon—toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is when the environment and the surroundings tell us that we need to stay positive all the time; there is no room for negative feelings or thoughts. And that experience can lead to shame, anxiety, and even low engagement and mental health issues in the workplace. 

So let's see how, as leaders, you can influence a different experience when you identify toxic positivity in your team or with your leadership.

Hi, I am Noa, and I work with leaders, executives, and founders of companies like you to go beyond their leadership. Are you ready? Let's go. 

So let's take a moment to understand what positive psychology is. During the 90s, the Positive Psychology movement was established by Martin Seligman; the main idea behind this movement is that when people reach therapy, rather than diagnosing what is wrong with them, they choose to look at their strengths, what emotions, thoughts, or behaviors serve them, and work for them. 

Sometimes I say that when people meet with me for the first time, they are all gray; it can be seen as if they might have lost connection with the part in them that makes them shine and feel at their best. Sometimes in one conversation or even more, you can see the colors coming back when they are reminded through a coaching conversation that they are creative, resourceful, and whole human beings with many strengths that helped them get to where they are today; they need that reminder.

Unfortunately, with the rise of social media posts in the past few years, most of us focused on showing the "good stuff" in our day. No one will want to see my frustrated face when the kids fight with each other in the back seat of our rented car during our family trip to Yellow Stone Park. People would like to see smiling family pictures with a background of beautiful views and my smiling face with a cup of coffee. We started to see faked reality that communicated without words: "show me the positive, don't be toxic with your low emotions and lost suitcase; no one wants to see that on their daily feed."

But the Positive Psychology movement did not intend to eliminate the space for emotions or thoughts that don't serve us. Understanding them can help us create a new perspective on ourselves and the world surrounding us and be more gentle with ourselves when we feel low. We learn to give permission to be with these emotions and thoughts without freaking out that something "bad" will happen if we experience them.

What do we miss when we don't allow anything but positive?

1. You think about it more.

    Every time we don't want to think, talk, or feel something, the research shows that we think about it 49 times more. Giving yourself permission to be with the "unwanted" thought or emotion will save you time and spiraling with the self-deprecating thoughts that might sound somewhat like: "Why do I keep thinking about it???"

2. The Negative Bias. 
    In a few of my articles and videos, I mentioned these phenomena.  Our ancient brain was programmed and even obsessed with searching for our mistakes and failures. Why? Because one mistake had cost us our life. So even though we don't live in the out, the mechanism is still with us. So whether you want it or not, our brain is programmed to search for the negative first. 

3. Our emotions

   Some people break the word emotions to e - motion, energy in motion. Our emotions are not staying the same all the time. At the last minute, I probably had a lot of different emotions going through me, and so did you. I don't know a single person that is happy all the time. Our emotions, like energy, change many times. We are happy, sad, frustrated, excited, and so on. Emotions come and go, and we can learn to remind ourselves that one emotion, even a negative one, will not stay forever.

The problem is that when we don't create room for ourselves, another person, or as a team (or family) for any thoughts or emotions but positive, we unconsciously can create an experience of toxic positivity, where some people can feel it is not safe to share what they feel or think. The research shows that suppressing emotions can lead to shame, anxiety, and disengagement in the workplace. (Talaifar & Swann, 2020, Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, and Hofmann, 2006.)

Here are a few ways you can reassess your approach to leading yourself or a team without stepping into Toxic Positivity:

1. Let them be 

    We tend to jump into fixing emotions and thoughts. Most people need us to be with them. It can feel uncomfortable because we were trained most of our lives to fix problems. Sometimes just acknowledging where the person is can do much more, even if you cannot solve the experience for them. 

2. Empathy and Compassion 
   I wish you, the leaders of the people I coach, were with me in the coaching conversations when clients share how much your compassion and empathy opened the door for them to see themselves the same way. We can be hard on ourselves. When our leaders remind us of our strengths and our need to be gentle with ourselves, we can access something within through this open-heart acknowledgment and give ourselves permission to be gentle and compassionate with ourselves. It is one of the most powerful moments I see in my interactions with my clients; Don't underestimate your ability to inspire and simultaneously remind your people that it is okay not to be at your best all the time. It is okay to recover; it is okay to breathe; it is okay not to be okay. When you give permission to your people, you reframe for themselves how they see themselves. 

3. The words: should, need, have

   Those three words, should, need, and have, can bring a lot of judgment and shame to the other person or ourselves. When hearing these words, call on your people. For example: "I hear a lot of shoulds or needs in this conversation – I am curious what do you want?"

As a leader, if you identify that your team or you lead discussions with a language that can facilitate toxic positivity, and there is no room for nothing but positive, here is something I will leave you to ponder on:

Emotions or thoughts are not "positive" or "negative": Although we have judgments of them, what if we asked: "What can I learn from this emotion/thought at this moment, what is it trying to communicate to me?"

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