13 Ways to Counteract Toxic Positivity and Embrace a More Fulfilling Version of Happiness

Dr. Andrea Bonior: Did you listen to episode one about toxic positivity? And did you think, sure, that makes sense, but what can I actually do about it? Today, we're following up with some realistic, concrete actions that you can take to counter toxic positivity in your own life. We're not going to send you to blaze some trail out there to change the culture unless you want to. But what we do want is for you to be able to lessen the effects of toxic positivity on your own daily existence and to embrace a fuller, more meaningful definition of happiness. So for today's show, we have 13 ways to counteract toxic positivity. Is 13 unlucky? Am I going boldly forward into certain annihilation? My house is still covered in Halloween decorations as I'm recording this, so maybe this is tempting fate, choosing 13 for something while a bunch of skeleton heads are already staring me in the face every time I get my mail. I suppose we'll see, because the thing is, we're learning about trying to embrace discomfort and stay away from rigid perfectionism. So 13 seems oddly fitting, as does the fact you might have noticed that my voice is not quite its usual self. Whatever non COVID respiratory crud is going around-- well, it got me too. But that seems oddly fitting as well, because perfectionism is not quite what we're after here. Now, I struggled with this myself, too. Admittedly, I really fretted about how my voice would sound. I did lozenges, steam, salt water, honey, hydrating myself until I made a sloshing sound when I moved, doing vocal warmups like I thought I was the next Lena Horne. Well, I waited two days to record, and I could wait no longer. But again, somewhere in there is a message. You can understand what I'm saying. It's not quite to the level of fingernails on a chalkboard, unless you found my voice already to be like that. Maybe you even appreciate the deeper tones. So let's do it. So our premiere episode, episode number one, introduced the idea of different conceptualizations of happiness and how there's a particularly common one that seems to be doing a lot of damage in modern life, and that is toxic positivity. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, definitely give it a whirl, because this episode is going to pick up where that one left off and get actionable. Action. Yay. I wanted to talk about some concrete tips to do something about this toxic positivity and make a difference rather than just bemoan it. So these are the things that you can do in your daily life that help reject toxic positivity. they all move in the direction of engaging with a fuller, more nuanced version of what it means to be happy. A version that values struggle and growth and meaning rather than just the performative display of happiness that we talked about last week. that so called happiness that values arrival and appearance and achievement and checking a box. So let's begin. I have 13 ideas here. Unlucky number or not. Number one, enlarge your vocabulary about emotions and your acceptance of them. Here's the thing. Feelings are okay. Really, they are all okay. Multiple feelings are okay. Big feelings are okay. Small feelings are okay. Here's something particularly important. Contradictory feelings are okay. Emotions aren't an either or proposition, nor do they exist on a pole where the more you have of one, you automatically have less of the other. Joy can include grief and loss and often does just look at the face of a parent as they watch their child get married. Excitement can include fear. And in fact, since they arouse the same type of physical reactions in our body, they often go together. Anger can include amusement. Pride can include a sense of regret. You can be exhausted and restless at the same time. You get it. There are so many great words for emotion, whether in English or in other languages. Actually, some other languages are probably even better for that. Think about the words that you use to describe your feelings. Why not make even more room for expressing your emotional experience? And parents out there, you are literally giving your kids the words to understand their feelings as they grow. How do you talk about your feelings? Is it just being happy that your kid is happy and making no room for owning the more difficult emotions too? Make those more complicated emotions part of everyday dialogue, whether you're a parent or not. That made me a little sad. I got mad when that happened, but I was able to breathe through it and look for a solution. I felt really nervous before my big talk today, but I knew that was okay, and I'm really glad I had the opportunity. Labeling these feelings is good modeling for ourselves and also, if we happen to have kids, listening. Number two, understand the difference between naming your feelings and acting on them. This is so huge and honestly, maybe one of the single biggest barriers that gets in the way of us learning to tolerate and manage negative feelings. So many of us have grown up with the notion that feeling mad or sad or scared is threatening precisely because if we feel those emotions, we're going to do something damaging or act on them in some way that is not healthy. Maybe we were told, not only don't cry, but don't be sad or don't be mad or there's no reason to be afraid. And that was probably because our caregivers were worried that if we were sad, then we wouldn't appreciate the amusement park and all the money they spent on it. Or that if we were mad, then we'd automatically hit our older brother. Hmm. They might have been right on that one. For a time anyway. Or maybe they were worried that if we were afraid, then we'd refuse to go to the dentist. But let's make this clear right now. We can hold space for emotions. We can experience them and sit with them without having to act on them. It is a separate, additional step when we choose a behavior because of our emotions feeling something and acting on something, they're not the same thing. In fact, when we pause and acknowledge our feelings, we break the automatic habit of sailing into behavior as a reaction to them. We need that pause to get ourselves off of autopilot. Autopilot can sometimes make us do something destructive or dysfunctional. Let's take anger management. There's a management there, folks. It's not anger erasure. It's not about making sure someone somehow lives a life where they never feel angry again. In fact, the opposite is true. It's about saying, let's see how you can experience anger and yet not haul off and clock somebody in the jaw. Anger management good anger management gets someone to practice handling that anger and building new pathways of responding to it. Maybe not acting overtly on it at all. Or maybe doing something much more functional like journaling or exercising or strategizing how to solve the problem that's making you angry in the first place. So when you think about emotions, make sure you recognize this distinction. Emotions are okay, always. They do not automatically equate with action. Number three cultivate the pause. Speaking of learning to manage emotions, this is where the pause comes in. As we mentioned before, so many of us do damaging things with our big emotions because we don't pause and we don't create a separation between the feeling and the action. and we also miss out on the intervention that can help us manage the physical parts of our emotions. In the moment. We get upset and our pulse quickens, our jaw tightens, our fists clench, and bam. We scream something cruel, or we get butterflies in our stomach and feel lightheaded and our hands go numb. So we decide to flee and bow out of giving the speech. But when we learn to cultivate a pause between feeling something and acting on it, this is where we can put strategies into place to keep us from doing something harmful or something that doesn't align, uh, with our values or something that thwarts our goals. So practice the pause. Even if you're not having big feelings, come back to little moments in your day where you just notice what you're experiencing and bring your awareness to the present moment. Your breath, your surroundings, your physical sensations, your train of thought. It helps us get off of autopilot. Number four become a curious, non judgmental, gentle observer of your feelings. we can also add our thoughts to this becoming a gentle noticer. Becoming a gentle noticer of our thoughts and of our physical sensations. This really brings us into classic mindfulness. Mindfulness is woven throughout so much emotional work. A lot of the work that I do with folks in psychotherapy and it's also part of the foundation of act or acceptance and commitment therapy and my book Detox or Thoughts. Mindfulness is such a beautiful way of learning to coexist with our feelings and thoughts and to choose behaviors that align with our values and with the person that we want to be. Being a curious, nonjudgmental observer of your feelings is also a direct antidote to toxic positivity because you're not running anymore. You're leaning in and embracing. When you don't view your feelings as the enemy or as a threat, you are less likely to fall into the just be happy, think positive type of trap. Instead. M, you can view difficult feelings as teachers. What are they trying to tell me? What might I need to change about this situation? What in my life is not working for me? Or maybe difficult feelings are just trying to tell me that I am fully alive, that this thing I'm going through is hard and upsetting, but it's part of the human experience and I'm here to show up for it and not decide to start a screening match in my own head with the fact that I am upset. Number five banish perfectionism. So much toxic positivity comes from the idea that we need to be achieving happiness. And not only that, that there's a happiness attainment exam coming up and we've got to be the ones to get the A plus. Curve or no curve. I'm gonna ace this. This goes very much along with a perfectionist mindset That things have to be a certain way. That there's no room for error or failure, which means, uh, less room for taking risks, which means less room for growth, which means a safe and comfortable existence that is just fine and makes for some pleasing photos for social media. But it doesn't make for as much depth as when we embrace the struggle and the mess. Hey, M. Perfectionism is great for things like neurosurgery. Bring on that perfectionism there for sure. I want my neurosurgeon to be the most rigid and anal and exacting person there is. I want them to have a silverware drawer without a single spot on any of the butter knives. Also, perfectionism for little projects, if you want to paint the trim on your driveway or bake that souffle perfectionism can help keep that to your standards. Or maybe keep from giving someone botulism. But perfectionism is kind of a gateway drug. When we start to adopt, it about everything we do or life in general. We start viewing ourselves in our emotional experiences with perfectionism, too, which definitely contributes to toxic positivity. Number six embrace the meaning of the struggle. So many times we avoid difficult emotions, and we slap on a smiley face instead, because we imbue, um, the idea of happiness with more meaning than we would give to the idea of a struggle. This idea that if we're happy, then that is the meaning of life. Look at this beautiful picture of us on the perfect vacation. Ain't that what it's all about? The perfect sunset and a group of family or friends who love each other? Well, uh, yes, that's amazing. But that's not all that life is about. And certainly that's not the only opportunity for us to find meaning. Meaning also comes in the struggle and the growth and the fact that the night before the sunset, we had a complicated and vulnerable conversation with one of those friends about the confusion they had about their marriage or their job. Or maybe meaning also came from the moment of connection we shared when part of the vacation plan went completely awry, and we're going to tell that story for years. or maybe there was actually a guy inexplicably peeing off to our right when we were trying to take the sunset picture. And, man, we haven't giggled like that in ages. Of course, if we get into serious struggle, that is where a lot of depth happens. The difficult stuff in life that feels like it's turning you inside out when you go through it and you come out of it having understood more about yourself and who you are and what's important to you. Of course, I am not saying it's great when bad things happen or that we at all want to seek them out. But let's also not say that the meaning of our life is going to be a highlight reel of triumphs. That would be pretty boring and probably not have as much meaning as including the struggles as well. Number seven stop defining yourself by your thoughts. We'll do so much work on this here at baggage check. This idea of beginning to learn that you are not your thoughts and that your thoughts are not you again, this is a big part of act and mindfulness, but it's a trap that so many of us fall into. We assume that our running narrative has our running mental narrative always has something to say about who we are as people when that's simply not true. Now, of course, our patterns of thoughts do matter and can reflect a lot about us. but some thoughts are random or arbitrary or don't reflect our values at all. Sometimes our thoughts just involve the fact that we're hungry for a gyro hiro gyro anyway. When you can learn to not believe that you are defined by your thoughts. You help combat toxic positivity because you understand that we don't have to fit into a certain box of always thinking the right way and that our thoughts don't always have to be for someone else's consumption. That the people we are have much more depth to them than just whatever our thoughts are in any given moment. Number m eight learn your feelings about your feelings and your thoughts about thoughts. So many times when I work with clients, it's this extra layer that we need to tackle most intensely the thoughts about the thoughts and the feelings about the feelings. My clients will feel scared to feel scared or mad that something made them mad, Or they think that a thought is unacceptable, so then they have the thought that they are a bad person because of the original thought. this is like going back to algebra. We're adding exponents to our thoughts, but when those exponents intensify our thoughts in an upsetting way, it makes things much worse. I mean, feeling anxious about feeling anxious, that's like anxiety squared, honestly. Uh, I've probably seen cubed as well. Fear to the power of 14, please. We all have reactions to our feelings and reactions to our thoughts, and that's okay. but we need to at least learn the messages that we tend to say to ourselves. And that way we can see them as distortions that we can let go of. Because at the very heart of toxic positivity is having negative reactions to negative thoughts or feelings. So this is where the work is done to counteract it. Number nine notice the environment that you are absorbed within not just what you're taking in, But also what you are performing. so if we're going to talk about helping free you from Toxic Positivity, then let's notice when you're hanging out in an absolutely boiling vat of it. Or maybe toxic positivity is more like a freezer where everything is fake and stagnant and eerily still like the snapshot of perfection we're always curating. It's so crucial to notice your environment here. It's going to be very hard to counteract Toxic Positivity internally when you're constantly being fed those messages over and over again from external sources. When maybe for hours of your day you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through a literal greatest hits list of Toxic Positivity. Now, I'm not saying you have to give anything up per se, but just start with noticing and consider making adjustments. What people in your life constantly tell you that you should or shouldn't feel a certain way. What social media exposure do you have? And how much of a reality check do you need that maybe your Instagram feed is 40% influencers trying to sell you their brand of happiness and 60% your high school acquaintances posing oddly for oversimplified humble brags. And it's not just what you are taking in, but what you're putting out there. What kind of performative happiness are you starring in? How many times do you succumb to the pressure of telling your best friend that everything's fine, when in reality your life feels really, really tough? Try taking little breaks from the parts of your environment that might contribute to Toxic Positivity and see how it makes you feel. Do some experimenting. Number ten connect with others and show vulnerability. Along with noticing your environment is learning to be with people in truly genuine ways. Where we show who we are and where we feel accepted and maybe even loved for those qualities. That's really the stuff of life right there, isn't it? It brings meaning to so many of us, and every time we do it, we counter Toxic Positivity by allowing our full cells to show up and be seen. Not the curated version of ourselves, not the edited, calculated, overly polished version. Of course, when you're standing in line at Target to buy some hangers, you don't need to launch into the full nuances of your emotional landscape. But think about where you can find true connection, where you can be vulnerable and have it be accepted and validated. These are the relationships that sustain us and help us. And they help us build a world with less toxicity positivity in it. Number Eleven cultivate your Values the more we have a sense of our values, the m more this helps counter toxic positivity because we realize that the depth of true fulfillment doesn't come from being positive all the time. It comes, at least in part, by feeling like we are living in line with our values. And those values are every bit as important during the tough stuff as the easy stuff. In fact, probably more so. those values are the guideposts that light up the way when there's a terrible storm with some pretty hideous winds and hail and maybe even some thunderstow. I kind of love the idea of thunderstow, honestly. It's my favorite weather phenomenon, even though, admittedly, I've never actually experienced it directly before. Anyway, our values light the way when things get dark, so we need to remind ourselves what those values are so that they'll light up naturally without us having to search hard for them every time. and we can get a sense of depth and meaning not from things being easy. But from knowing that we're being the people that we want to be. Or at least we're trying hard to. Even when things get tough. or especially when things get tough. No two people's values have to be exactly the same, but here are some examples of ones that seem to help people find a lot of meaning and strength integrity. Compassion. Humor. Freedom. Intellectual engagement helping others individuality energy being part of a community curiosity artistic expression adventure. Challenging the status quo independence. Peace. Scientific exploration. Truth. Think about what values are important to you And that helps you reject toxic positivity because likely your values go much deeper than just putting on a happy face all the time. Number Twelve do many exercises of learning to lean into discomfort. Now this can pretty easily go off the rails and start to look simply like being unkind to yourself. So I'm not talking about causing yourself harm or being hard on yourself for the sake of being hard on yourself. I'm talking about waiting to scratch certain itches Part of this sort of lesser idea of happiness and yes, I'm being judgmental here, calling it a little lesser, that hedonic view of happiness we talked about in episode one. part of that is buying into the notion that we need to experience comfort and ease or else things are wrong, that happiness doesn't include difficulty. And so we try to make ourselves more comfortable because that's how things are supposed to be. And in doing so, we get less and less practice in managing discomfort. It's a vicious cycle. The more we avoid discomfort, the more uncomfortable we become, because we don't know what in the world we should do to manage those moments when discomfort does come up. So do a few exercises with this. The bordemich is a good place to start. Can we stand in a line, for instance, without automatically scratching our boredom? Um, itch you m might be worried that I will forever be demonizing scrolling through phones. And that's not my intention, but it is a perfect example of how we've gotten away from tolerating a little simple discomfort. What would happen if we waited a little before automatically scrolling when we were antsy or bored? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to just be with our own thoughts? leaning into a little discomfort, especially when it brings us some growth, can be such an important exercise. what? Uh, about initiating a difficult but meaningful conversation with a partner? Think about areas of your life where you can practice leaning into discomfort. Because there's a lot to be gained from learning how to manage it in ways that don't run from it or try to numb it or mask it. Number 13, pay attention to basic selfcare. Selfcare can be such a cringy word, I know. And we'll have lots of discussions about the difference between genuine continuous selfcare, which honestly should look kind of boring, like a maintenance routine versus the emergency kind of all handson deck selfcare that so many of us are pushed to the brink of needing to do. like pulling an escape hatch and having to totally remove ourselves from life for a few days when real self care would have been uh, establishing boundaries that kept us from getting to that point in the first place. But consistent daily practice, making an effort to protect your sleep, moving your body, spending time outdoors, prioritizing social time and laughter and creativity, building some predictability and structure into your day to the extent that works for you. Choosing foods that nourish you. these are all foundations of taking care of ourselves mentally and physically, which really start to be the same thing. And these ways make us more resilient and less likely to be broken by difficult experiences, which in turn helps us learn to manage those difficult experiences and embrace what they mean rather than running screaming from them and telling ourselves that we're just supposed to be happy and that the other stuff is too scary to deal with. And m, if you feel that self care is selfish when the world seems to be falling apart, well, we'll talk about that sometimes too. But we all deserve the basics of nourishment. And if we weaken ourselves by neglecting to take care of our own needs, then we're more likely to tune out or burn out and not engage with the world and be active. Energized citizens who can actually make a difference. it helps no one if we neglect ourselves so much that we eventually give up and have to turn away from others pain, which brings us full circle about not turning away from our own pain either. And that really is the bottom line for helping us counteract toxic positive. And that really is the bottom line for helping us counteract toxic. And that really is the bottom line for helping us counteract toxic positivity.