Why positive thinking is bad for you

Does all this mean that you can't give yourself a pat on the back once in a while or tell someone to have courage? Of course not. What's good deserves to be recognized as such. It merely means that, as you try to be positive, you also should be cognizant of the negative and try to come up with reasons why you are or will become able to overcome what's not so rosy. It means that, ideally, you'll treat what's bad as a learning opportunity and grow from looking at the issues. This is a logic-oriented process where you justify the conclusion you're coming to and make conscious, educated plans about how to move forward.

It is not simply saying what you want to be true. It is acknowledging facts, both good and bad, so that you can make it true--it's problem solving with an understanding of strengths and weaknesses and clear, measurable steps.

Once you have a realistic, grounded plan and initiate it, progress happens you can feel positive about, with the predictability of the plan relieving worry and stress. Top Stories. Nevertheless, it is not a very effective tool and can be downright harmful in some cases. There are much better ways to get the benefits that positive thinking allegedly provides. Perhaps the statement that best exemplifies positive thinking is "When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

But it does not take a whole lot of digging to unearth the flaws in this reasoning. First, did fate really hand you a lemon or was this merely your initial, unthinking response? Second, is a lemon really a bad thing, something that you would rather not have, but now that you do have it you will somehow salvage something by making lemonade?

Finally, it is quite stressful to be handed a lemon until such time as you figure out how to make lemonade. Do you really have to go through this phase? No matter what happens to us in life we tend to think of it as "good" or "bad". And most of us tend to use the "bad" label three to 10 times as often as the "good" label. And when we say something is bad, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such. And that is when we need positive thinking. We have been given something bad, a real lemon, and we better scramble and make some lemonade out of it and salvage something out of this "bad" situation.

Now think back on your own life. Can you recall instances of something that you initially thought was a bad thing that turned out to be not so bad after all or perhaps even a spectacularly good thing? Like the time you just missed a train and had to wait a whole hour for the next one and it was horrible except that your neighbor also missed it so you talked for the first time and a beautiful friendship developed.

You will find many instances in your life, some of them very significant such as the job you desperately wanted but didn't get only to find that a much better one came by and you would not have been able to accept it if not for the earlier rejection. Now lets propose something radical and revolutionary. Lets propose that, no matter what happens to you, you do not stick a bad thing label on it.

No matter what. You are fired from your job This seems so far-fetched as to be laughable. Of course these are horrible tragedies and terrible things to happen.

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Please try again. Something went wrong on our side, please try again. Show references Carver CS, et al. Clinical Psychology Review. Hernandez R, et al. Health Behavior and Policy Review. Applebaum AJ, et al. Optimism, social support, and mental health outcomes in patients with advanced cancer. Seaward BL. Reframing: Creating a positive mind-set. In: Essentials of Managing Stress. Burlington, Mass. Karren KJ, et al.