Why "Think Positive" Is Terrible Advice

If you do something a thousand times, you're going to mess it up at least once.

I've hung maybe three hundred picture frames over the years. Last month, attempt three-hundred-and-something involved a hammer, a nail, and my left thumbnail. The hammer won.

What followed was predictable: a sharp intake of breath, a word that rhymes with "duck," and approximately forty-five seconds of hopping around my kitchen while my thumb turned an interesting shade of purple.

Here's where it gets interesting. Later that evening, someone told me I should be grateful for the experience. That the universe was sending me a message about being present. That I should "think positive."

I stared at them for a long moment, thumb still throbbing, wondering which of us had lost the plot.

The Positivity Industrial Complex

Somewhere along the way, we got sold a story.

The story goes like this: negative emotions are problems to be solved. Sadness, anger, frustration, fear — these are bugs in your operating system. If you were doing life correctly, you wouldn't feel them. And when you do feel them, your job is to replace them with something more pleasant as quickly as possible.

Hit your thumb with a hammer? Find the lesson.

Lost your job? It's making room for something better.

Going through a divorce? Everything happens for a reason.

I spent years inside spiritual communities where this was the implicit — and sometimes explicit — expectation. Negative emotions were seen as evidence of insufficient practice. If you were frustrated, you weren't meditating enough. If you were angry, your ego was too strong. If you felt sad, you just needed to connect more deeply with your inner peace.

The message was clear: evolved people don't feel bad. And if you feel bad, you're doing spirituality wrong.

There's just one problem with this approach: it contradicts almost everything we know about how human emotions actually work.

What Your Brain Actually Does With Suppressed Emotions

Here's what neuroscience tells us about trying to push away negative feelings.

When you experience an emotion, your amygdala — the brain's alarm system — activates. This is normal. It's supposed to happen. The amygdala then communicates with your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, decision-making, and — crucially — regulation.

Here's the key: healthy emotional regulation isn't about stopping the emotion from happening. It's about processing it, extracting the information it contains, and then deciding how to respond.

What happens when you try to suppress an emotion instead of process it? Research shows that emotional suppression doesn't actually reduce the feeling — it just drives it underground.¹ The emotion persists, but now it has nowhere to go. Studies show that habitual suppression is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and even physical health problems like elevated blood pressure.

The phrase researchers use is telling: emotional suppression "breeds guilt, shame, sadness, and anxiety." It can even "backfire by magnifying suppressed feelings."

In other words: when you tell yourself to "just think positive," you're not actually solving anything. You're just adding a layer of performance on top of an emotion that's still very much present.

"The problem with 'think positive' isn't that positivity is bad. It's that forced positivity is just suppression with better marketing."

The Crucial Distinction Psychology Makes

Here's where it gets nuanced — and where the "think positive" crowd gets something half-right.

Psychologists distinguish between two very different strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.²

Cognitive reappraisal is when you change how you think about a situation to alter its emotional impact. For example: "That deadline felt overwhelming, but actually, it pushed me to prioritize what mattered most." Research consistently shows this is effective for reducing distress and improving wellbeing.

Expressive suppression is when you try to inhibit or hide an ongoing emotional response. You feel angry, but you push it down. You're grieving, but you force a smile. Research consistently shows this makes things worse.

Here's the critical difference: reappraisal acknowledges the emotion first. You feel the frustration, you recognize it, and then you choose to think about the situation differently. Suppression tries to skip straight to "positive" without ever acknowledging what you actually felt.

That's why "think positive" often fails. It's asking people to reappraise without acknowledging — which is just suppression disguised as wisdom.

"Reappraisal says: 'I felt that, and here's another way to see it.' Suppression says: 'I shouldn't have felt that.' One works. One doesn't."

When Positive Thinking Actually Works (And When It Backfires)

Here's where I need to be fair to the positive-thinking people, because they're not entirely wrong.

A 2013 study found something fascinating: cognitive reappraisal was effective for reducing depression in people experiencing uncontrollable stress. But for people experiencing controllable stress, reappraisal actually increased depressive symptoms.³

Why? Because negative emotions serve a purpose. When something in your life is broken and fixable, frustration and dissatisfaction are signals that motivate you to take action. If you reappraise your way into feeling fine about a situation that actually needs changing, you remove the motivation to change it.

Think about that for a second.

When something is genuinely out of your control — a diagnosis, a global pandemic, someone else's behavior — reframing how you think about it can help you cope without the additional burden of fighting the unwinnable fight.

But when something is within your control — a toxic work environment, a relationship that needs honest conversation, a habit that's harming you — "thinking positive" about it isn't enlightenment. It's avoidance dressed up as wisdom.

The self-help industry rarely makes this distinction. It offers "positive thinking" as a universal solution, when actually it's a contextual tool that works for some situations and makes others worse.

What I Actually Learned (The Hard Way)

For years, I practiced what I'd now call "competitive serenity."

Every negative emotion that arose got immediately reframed, transcended, or meditation-ed away. Bad day at work? Focus on gratitude. Disagreement with my wife? She's on her own journey. Creeping sense that something in the spiritual organization wasn't right? Just the ego resisting growth.

I got very good at appearing peaceful. I got very good at having the "right" spiritual response to every situation.

Know what I was not good at? Actually being peaceful. Or present. Or honest — with myself or anyone else.

The emotions I refused to acknowledge didn't disappear. They accumulated. They emerged as irritability, as physical tension, as a vague sense that something was wrong that I couldn't name because I'd trained myself not to name things.

It took leaving that organization — and years of learning to actually feel what I felt — before I understood what I'd been doing wrong.

I wasn't regulating my emotions. I was suppressing them. And I was calling it spiritual practice.

"I spent a decade being spiritually serene on the surface and emotionally constipated underneath. Smart move, Soren."

Viktor Frankl's Better Alternative

If "think positive" doesn't work, what does?

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who developed a whole therapeutic approach around meaning and suffering, offered something he called "tragic optimism."⁴

Tragic optimism is "the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life, despite its inescapable pain, loss, and suffering." It's what he called "saying yes to life in spite of everything."

Notice the crucial difference from toxic positivity.

Toxic positivity says: "Don't feel the pain. Focus on the positive instead."

Tragic optimism says: "Feel the pain. Acknowledge the loss. And still find meaning and hope."

Frankl wasn't advocating for denial. He was advocating for something much harder and more honest: sitting with the full reality of human experience — including its inevitable suffering — and choosing to find meaning anyway.

This isn't about reframing your smashed thumb as a spiritual lesson. It's about acknowledging that sometimes things hurt, sometimes life is hard, sometimes there's genuine loss — and meaning can coexist with all of that.

You don't have to choose between suffering and hope. You can hold both.

Emotions Are Data, Not Enemies

So here's the practical reframe that actually helped me — and it took embarrassingly long to get here:

Negative emotions are not problems to solve. They're information to receive.

When you feel angry, that's data. Something has crossed a boundary, violated your values, or threatened something you care about. The anger isn't the problem — it's the alarm system telling you something needs attention.

When you feel sad, that's data. Something has been lost, or is being grieved, or needs acknowledgment. The sadness isn't a failure — it's the appropriate response to a situation that warrants it.

When you feel afraid, that's data. Something feels uncertain, threatening, or beyond your control. The fear isn't weakness — it's your system trying to orient you to a potential danger.

The question isn't "how do I stop feeling this?" The question is "what is this feeling trying to tell me?"

And after you've received that information — not instead of receiving it — you can decide how to respond. Maybe that includes reframing. Maybe it includes action. Maybe it includes acceptance.

But whatever you do, you're doing it from a place of having actually processed the emotion, not from having suppressed it under a layer of forced positivity.

A Framework That Actually Works

Here's what I do now, based on what the research actually supports:

Step one: Notice what you're actually feeling. Not what you think you should be feeling. Not the spiritually-upgraded version. The actual feeling happening in your body right now. Name it if you can.

Step two: Let it exist for a moment. Don't analyze it. Don't fix it. Just let it be there. Research suggests that simply labeling an emotion ("I'm feeling frustrated") actually reduces its intensity through a process called "affect labeling."⁵

Step three: Ask what information it contains. What boundary got crossed? What need isn't being met? What's being grieved? The data is in the feeling.

Step four: Assess the situation. Is this something I can control or influence, or isn't it? This distinction determines what comes next.

Step five: Choose your response. If it's controllable, the emotion might be motivating you to take action — don't reappraise that away. If it's uncontrollable, reframing how you think about it might genuinely help.

This is not complicated. It's just honest.

The Permission You Didn't Know You Needed

Here's what I wish someone had told me twenty years ago, when I was deep in the spiritual self-improvement industrial complex:

You're allowed to feel bad about things that are bad.

You're allowed to be angry when someone treats you poorly. You're allowed to be sad when something ends. You're allowed to be afraid when things are genuinely uncertain. You're allowed to be frustrated when things don't work.

You're allowed to hit your thumb with a hammer — even after doing it successfully hundreds of times — and say "fuck" without anyone telling you to find the lesson.

Not everything is a lesson. Not every emotion needs a spiritual upgrade. Sometimes painful things happen and the appropriate response is to acknowledge that they're painful.

This doesn't make you less evolved. It makes you human. And the whole point of any practice worth doing is to become more human, not less.

"Real spiritual maturity isn't being above emotions. It's being with them — all of them — without drowning or pretending."

For You

If you've spent years in the "think positive" trap — smiling when you wanted to scream, performing gratitude when you felt grief, pretending equanimity while your insides were a hurricane — I want you to know something:

You're not doing it wrong. You're just human.

And being human means having the full range of emotions, including the ones that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or spiritually unfashionable. Including the ones that don't fit the narrative. Including the ones that are messy and complicated and don't look good on Instagram.

Your negative emotions aren't evidence of insufficient practice. They're evidence of being alive.

The next time someone tells you to "think positive," consider this instead:

Feel first. Understand what the emotion is telling you. Assess whether the situation is something you can change. And then — only then — decide how you want to think about it.

Frankl called this tragic optimism: hope and meaning that don't require denial.

I just call it honest.

~ Soren Ross

Notes & References

¹ Gross, J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). "Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362.

² Gross, J.J. (1998). "The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review." Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271-299. This foundational paper established the distinction between reappraisal and suppression that now underpins most emotion regulation research.

³ Troy, A.S., Shallcross, A.J., & Mauss, I.B. (2013). "A person-by-situation approach to emotion regulation: Cognitive reappraisal can either help or hurt, depending on the context." Psychological Science, 24(12), 2505-2514.

⁴ Frankl, V.E. (1984). Man's Search for Meaning. Washington Square Press. The concept of "tragic optimism" appears in Frankl's postscript to later editions of this classic work.

⁵ Lieberman, M.D. et al. (2007). "Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli." Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.