What Is Toxic Positivity and Why We Shouldn’t Always Say the Phrase “It’s Going to Be Okay”

Many people must have heard encouraging advice, which only made them feel worse: “Don’t be nervous, it’ll be okay!”, “Don’t cover yourself too much, it’ll be okay!”, “Don’t make a storm in a glass of ‘water, it just makes things worse’. Phrases of this kind, seemingly positive and harmless, can end up suppressing true feelings instead of helping to deal with the problem.

we, from awesome.club, we set out to find out why it can be dangerous to have an overly optimistic outlook on life and why it is so important to allow yourself to experience the full spectrum of emotions, including “negative” ones. Follow up!

Toxic positivity is understood in Psychology as an approach to life, in which a person always maintains a positive attitude and does not give in to negative emotions. This kind of thinking is often taken to extremes. When trying to find the “positive side” of everything, you end up repressing some feelings, instead of accepting and dealing with them — which only tends to worsen the condition itself.

In an attempt to offer solidarity and support to a friend, for example, such people may end up exhibiting behavior that is more harmful than beneficial. They sometimes fail to understand why the other person becomes increasingly uncomfortable and upset when listening to certain motivating advice, such as “don’t be upset” or “lift your head”.

An example of toxic positivity is when a person not only hide your true feelings behind beat-up phrases (“It wasn’t meant to be”, “Happiness is a choice”, “Smile at the world, and the world will smile at you”), as well as shame the others for not being optimistic enough: “So what if you got fired? The important thing is that you are healthy”, “Why so much stress on account of your divorce? Tomorrow you will find someone else.”

Instead of looking for a solution to a difficult situation, fall into self-deception🇧🇷 In the same way that small children do, when they cover their faces with their hands, thinking that no one will be able to see them: if I ignore it and pretend I don’t see the problem, then it’s as if it doesn’t exist.

By denying and silencing “negative” emotions, we actually end up intensifying them. It might seem that the ability to keep “bad” feelings inside—such as anger, sadness, frustration—is a resilient personality trait. Nonetheless, lie to yourself constantly that everything is always fine, when it’s not, inevitably reverberates in our mental health.

Extremely positive people generally cannot accept their own negative feelings as well as those of others. When faced with people who are experiencing anxiety, loneliness, or depression, they seek to reduce the negative experience of the other and, at the same time, distance themselves from this “negativity” to avoid their own discomfort.

The line between supporting and belittling the feelings of others is very thin. Many people feel uncomfortable being with those who are going through emotional problems and pain. In order to hide their discomfort, they begin to demanding from the behavior of others reactions of which they are not capable of having: “Control yourself! Be strong!”, “Oh, smile. Tell me something funny!” Such advice usually only adds to feelings of guilt and shame.

With the advancement of social media, toxic positivity has become even more common. Many people tend to only share the good side of their lives on the internet. Increasingly, optimism is established as the norm to follow, and pessimism is criticized.🇧🇷 Often, however, behind the “perfect image” lurks a deep inner discontent.

By showing constant joy, fall into a trap: such people hide what they are really feeling, accumulating dissatisfaction, which are just waiting for the time to “explode”. This creates an internal dissonance: “Why do I feel so bad when everything seems to be going so well?” Inhibiting genuine feelings often leads to depression and self-rejection.

Psychologists advise to stop categorizing primitive emotions in black and white. The truth is feelings are not even positive🇧🇷 nor negatives — they are just signs that help us to better understand certain important aspects of our own lives; and they also serve as a source of information for those around us. Accepting and honestly living with “difficult” and “uncomfortable” emotions only makes them overcome more quickly.

Healthy optimism, unlike toxic optimism, allows a person not to repress “bad” emotions, but to treat them with attention and empathy. To support someone in this position, in the most appropriate way, it is enough to not judge and give him time for the bad moment to pass. It’s like working together to find the best way out of a given situation.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging someone, nor with reinforcing positive affirmations for yourself. The most important thing is not to oversimplify the difficult experiences we all go through at one time or another, and not to suppress painful feelings as if they didn’t even exist.

Is there anyone you know who is always too “positive”? What are the most encouraging phrases that bother you the most to hear? Comment!