Why Positive Thinking Is Bad For You

So I think we've probably taken positive thinking too far. Positive thoughts. Like I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy. Think positively. Positive thoughts. In Rhonda Byrne's film The Secret, a film that popularized the law of attraction at the mainstream level, There are several examples and quotes that allude to the fact that disease like cancer can be cured through the idea of positive thinking. In this video, we're going to go over three reasons as to why positive thinking might actually be a bad thing. We're going to talk about the progress paradox. We're going to talk about the first effect and the ironic effect. And we'll talk about why negative thinking can be a better way of helping us achieve our goals and also live healthier, happier, more productive lives. Right, so within this world of self-help gurus, there's There's this idea that if you think positively, then that'll help you achieve your goals and help. Help all your problems melt away. And the idea does have some good parts about it, but there is a danger that we take things way too far. Up to a certain point, positive thinking can be a pretty good way to help us reduce our anxiety and reduce intrusive thoughts. And because our subconscious brains apparently can't really tell the difference between what's real and what's imaginary, if we visualize positive outcomes, that can help reduce our worry and increase the amount of joy that we have. There's a cool study that they did in King's College London where they got 102 people who were suffering with generalized anxiety disorder and they split them into two groups. One group, they asked to think positively specifically the thing that was worrying them, and the other group, they asked to just think positively in general. The cool thing was that after a month of doing this positive thinking stuff, both groups had a significant reduction in their anxiety levels, even the ones who were thinking positively in general, rather than just the ones who were thinking positively about their specific anxiety issue. So clearly thinking positively can help work in those kinds of contexts, but the fact that our brains can't tell this difference between what's real and what's imaginary is also why positive thinking can sometimes be a problem. And let's start with the progress paradox. The progress paradox is this idea that if we think about something or explain it or visualize the outcome enough, then we fool ourselves, we trick ourselves into thinking that we've achieved the thing, even though we haven't necessarily taken any actual steps towards achieving the goal that we want. For example, I'm in the middle of writing a book at the moment, and it's very easy for me to think that I'm being productive, that I'm actually making progress. When I'm spending two hours doing mindless research, an hour browsing Twitter on the toilet looking for hashtag writing inspo. And all of this feels like work, but it really doesn't translate to words on the page. And therefore I'm BSing myself into thinking that I'm being productive and making progress towards this thing. But actually, I'm just not making any progress at all. And so the advice I'd give to myself is that I should kind of just stop thinking about making progress on the thing and actually start to actually make progress on the thing. And there's a similar story that Ryan Holiday talks about in his book, Ego is the Enemy. And he writes about this guy called Upton Sinclair who was running in the 1930s for governor of California. Now, just before he ran, this guy Sinclair wrote a whole book in the past tense about exactly what he accomplished when he became governor of California. And so this is like positively visualizing the future to the extreme. The guy's literally written a book. Talking about this future where he has won this election and he's going to be the governor of California. But after he published the book, he actually lost interest in running his election campaign and weirdly ended up losing the actual election. And the reason for that is probably that he ran out of steam because he visualized it so much, he thought about the future and then didn't actually do the work taken to get there. So that's the progress paradox. It's one reason why visualizing a positive outcome might be bad. Let's talk about another one and that's called the thirst effect. There's another cool series of experiments where they got a bunch of thirsty people in a room together and they asked them to visualize what it was like drinking a glass of cold water. And the researchers found that for the people who visualized drinking the drink, their energy levels and motivation to actually get a drink fell because they'd already visualized having this drink. And obviously they were still thirsty, like physiologically they were still thirsty, but psychologically they... sort of convince themselves that they didn't need to drink water. So the positive feelings and positive thinking gives us this kind of false sense of security where we think that we're doing well and we're achieving stuff but the reality is completely different. But there's also research that shows that positive thinking can sometimes even make us feel worse and that is the ironic effect. There's another study I found that looked at whether self-affirmations could be useful specifically the phrase I am a lovable person. Now self-affirmations is one of those classic things that's supposed to help us think positively and help us be happier But weirdly, the research has found that people who already had low levels of self-esteem, they felt even worse about themselves when they were doing this positive affirmation stuff like I'm a lovable person. Now this is something that Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner calls ironic effects. It's similar to the idea that if you try not to think about a polar bear you will end up just thinking about a polar bear. Like the study says that it can kind of be the same with positive thinking. Like if you're a person with low self-esteem anyway and therefore you feel like you need these positive self-affirmations to help you feel better about yourself, the fact that you're having to repeat this affirmation to yourself over Ironically means that you are conjuring up counterexamples as to why it's not true, and ironically making yourself feel worse. I'll put a link to the study in the video description if anyone wants to check it out, it's kind of interesting. But it just kind of goes to show that sometimes thinking positively is not as useful a thing as it can sometimes seem if we're not really examining the Second order effect of it. I think the solution here is to actually reframe the way that we're thinking about negative thoughts and maybe even embracing negative visualization, right? It might seem counterintuitive, but thinking negatively about the future rather than positively might actually help us achieve our goals more easily. And there's broadly two ways that we can do this. There's number one, mental contrasting and number two, defensive pessimism. Method number one, mental contrasting. If we visualize a positive outcome that generally has a relaxing effect on the body, like if Like if you imagine yourself winning a thing or like getting the girl or whatever, it's It generally reduces our systolic blood pressure. It makes us feel relaxed. It reduces our levels of anxiety. And so if you're the sort of person who feels particularly anxious, then as the earlier study that we mentioned a while ago showed, positive thinking can help reduce that anxiety. But the problem is that if you want to do something that requires taking action and like being a go-getter, then in a way that slight sense of anxiety is quite useful. as a thing that helps improve our performance and if you have reduced levels of anxiety it might even decrease our performance. I've certainly found this true in my life like you know in med school when I was preparing for exams on the exams where I was like oh I got this it's going to be a breeze I ended up being quite complacent in the way that I was studying whereas on the exams where I was like okay this is actually kind of hard I have like some like slight level of anxiety and stress around around this exam that meant that I was putting in more effort into studying for them which meant I ended up doing better. Equally these days when I run my course the part-time Part-time YouTuber Academy. I always have this slight sense of anxiety of A, what if no one signs up to it? And B, what if the course is bad? And that means I put a huge amount of time and effort into marketing the course and like spending tons and tons and tons of time really refining the material and trying to make it as good as it can possibly be. And I think if I didn't have that anxiety, if I was a bit more complacent. If I was a little bit less anxious about the outcomes, then I would have put so much less effort into it and it wouldn't have been as good a course as it is now, if I say so myself. And so if we wanna achieve our goals, whatever they are, but we don't wanna fall into this trap of positive thinking, there is this thing called the WHOOP framework, which is kind of interesting. And that stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. And the idea here is that when we're planning a goal, we shouldn't just think about the wish and the outcome, like what we want to happen and what the desired outcome is gonna be, which is how we often think about goals. But we should also think about what the obstacles are, that's the second O, and the plan that we're gonna do to overcome those obstacles. And the person who came up with this, the psychologist Gabrielle Oettingen, says that this method of mental contrasting helps circumvent the calming effects of dreaming and mobilize dreams as a tool for prompting directed action. And that's from a book called Rethinking Positive Thinking. So basically it's fine to dream big and think positively, but we need to contrast that mentally with the obstacles and the plan to get around those obstacles, because whatever we do, We are going to come across obstacles along the way. And if we're just like single-mindedly focusing on positive thinking, we are deluding ourselves into thinking that the road is going to be easier than it actually is. This idea of negative visualization and mental contrasting is nothing new, really. The Stoics, who I'm a big fan of, ancient Greek school of philosophy, they called this premeditatio malorum. I always have to look that one up. It's called... Premeditating Adversity. And that basically encourages us to think about all the different ways in which something can go wrong. And in the modern day, we call this defensive pessimism. Now, in a couple of different studies, researchers found that by setting low expectations and envisioning worst case scenarios, defensive pessimists optimize their performance on a variety of tasks, from darts and maths problems to fulfilling real life goals. This approach might even work across our entire lifetime. For example, there's this other really cool study that they did over 30 years on 10,000 Germans. And they found that people who were older were more likely to under, Underestimate their future life satisfaction like they were more pessimistic about how much fun they'd be having later on in life But those people who did that ended up living longer and having more positive health outcomes obviously, this is correlation rather than causation, but it's kind of interesting how there is this effect of Thinking slightly pessimistically about the future rather than optimistically about it and how that actually potentially translates to a real world health outcome. And so negative visualization is great. Like I do this all the time where I think like whenever I'm making decisions, I think, okay what is the absolute worst case scenario here? What are the things that could go wrong? And usually I find out that those things aren't actually so bad. Like if I got rejected or if like, you know, a thing a YouTube video doesn't work out or if someone leaves a negative comment, like These things really aren't that bad but also it means that once I visualize the negative outcome I can then take steps to try and mitigate the risks of that happening. And there's this nice quote from the Stoics that says that we often suffer more in imagination than in reality and so premeditating adversity, defensive pessimism, negative visualization, all of this is stuff that helps us recognize the suffering that we do in our imagination and hopefully it wouldn't translate into reality. As you guys know, if you've been watching this channel for a while, I'm a huge fan of stoicism. It is the school of philosophy that I most follow and it's what I generally attribute to my Baseline, very high levels of happiness and tranquility. And the fact that people say that I'm generally unflappable, I mostly put it down to the fact that I've just been drinking the stoicism Kool-Aid for like 10 years now. And if you're interested in learning more about stoicism, you might like to check out my Skillshare class on how stoicism has made me happier. That's a class that I've done jointly with my friend, Sam, who is a researcher and teacher in philosophy. And he does a lot of research into stoicism. And we talk about the real world effects that stoic philosophy has had on our lives and how it's made us happier. If you want to check that out, you can sign up to a free trial of Skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video. There'll be a link in the video description. And if you're one of the first 1,000 people to hit the link in the video description, then you'll get a one month free trial to Skillshare. And during that month, you can watch my class on stoicism. You can also watch the other eight classes that I've got on Skillshare. Three of them are themed around productivity. Two of them are aimed specifically at students about how to study for exams most effectively. We've got the stoicism one. We've even got a class with my piano teacher where we're teaching the basics of jazz piano. So that's kind of interesting. But in particular, you can check out the stoicism ones and the productivity ones and the studying themed ones if you're a student. So if you're one of the first 1000 people to hit the link in the video description, you can sign up for a free trial of Skillshare. And on Skillshare, there are thousands of other classes about a ton of other topics as well, but definitely check out my ones first. So thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video. And if you wanna learn more about the stoicism stuff, click this video over here, which is 10 quotes from stoicism. Again, a video that me and my friend Sam did together, 10 quotes from stoicism and how they helped our lives. Thank you so much for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.