Positive isn’t always good, negative isn’t always bad. There’re always two sides to a coin. Your mental health is a balance of positive and negative emotions, and how you handle them effectively.
Introduction
If you want to achieve a major goal, ancient wisdom and scientific research says to think positive. Envision an ideal life, a good job or marriage. Although being positive may sound compelling, it turns out that they often backfire. Many of us are more successful when we focus on both sides — positive and negative.
Positive negativity is good
Some negativity is good, and beneficial. It’s right to examine ourselves for sin and ignorance, to repent of it when we find it, confessing it, humbling ourselves, and seeking forgiveness.
I think there’s a lot of noise about negativity. People are big on negativity stuff. They’re going crazy over it — abusing the word.
Negativity comes as a friend or body-guard. It’s like the thorns below the roses. There’s nothing bad in it. Like there can be no light without darkness, there’ll be no positive without negative.
It also means empty and unless there is emptiness, there can’t be abundance.
Let the hard things in life break you, affect you, and change you. Let the hard times inform you.
Let negativity be your teacher. It’ll go ways once it has finished teaching you. It’s here to teach us. It’s like a guest who has come to our home-sweet-home.
There can’t be positivity without negativity.
Negativity can help us prepare for these days of pain and suffering, and get us through them to the destination of positivity.
Toxic positivity is bad
It’s the culture of portraying yourself as being happy no matter what. You’re switched off to anything which might be viewed as negative. It’s also the idea of encouraging people to always see the bright side, and not open up about anything bad.
It’s the excessive and ineffective over-generalization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.
Just like anything done in excess, when positivity is used to cover up or suppress human emotions, it becomes toxic. By disallowing the existence of certain feelings, we fall into a state of denial and repressed emotions.
The truth is, humans are faulty. We get jealous, angry, resentful, and greedy. By pretending that we’re positive vibes all day, we reject the validity of a genuine human experience.
Being a healthy human being involves being conscious of ourselves and how we show up in the world. If you recognize yourself as a transmitter of toxic positivity, it’s time to cut it out. You’re hurting yourself and the people you care about most by insisting on this monochromatic mindset.
Instead of it, aim for balance and the acceptance of both good and bad emotions rather than all-or-nothing thinking.
Conclusion
Personal growth, realization, awareness, and mental wellness come from letting everything happen in your life. There has to be enough grief-relief, misery-joy, suffering-happiness, negativity-positivity, and all of that.
