The Wrath of Toxic Positivity

You are going through a mental health crisis. You hate your job. You experience tragedy. Because you feel comfort in expressing your discontent to loved ones, you confide in friends, family, coworkers. They say:

“Things will get better — don’t worry!”

“Keep your head up and never stop trying!”

“It could be worse!”

Sound familiar?

Is there anything wrong with positivity? I don’t believe so. I do preach the idea of trying to maintain positive in trying times. Sometimes, we need a pick-me-up, and a reminder of how things could be in the future.

However, when positivity overshadows the gravity of a situation, and you are encouraged to reject negative emotions entirely, you may feel extremely discouraged to express these feelings in the future. Embracing solely positive ideals and rejecting any emotions that trigger negativity is known as Toxic Positivity.

As a result, you feel as if your loved ones don’t care about how you truly feel. You think, They aren’t listening to me! Toxic positivity can ruin relationships with loved ones when this ignorance continues.

When feelings are shut down, it can therefore create more negative and depressing emotions; squashing grief allows for us to believe that these negative emotions are wrong. The next time we feel negativity, we repress again, creating a vicious cycle of subduing true emotions. Doing so builds a person who is not self-aware or informed our their emotional intelligence. It a person who will then push repression onto others.

Toxic positivity can also take form on social media, portrayed by a single person to the outside world. It is the idea of depicting yourself in this positive manner 24/7, which is very easy to do with social media’s positivity-centered facade. Posting pictures where you seem happy, posting inspirational quotes, posting #MondayMotivation. We want the world to not know about our negative emotions. We want to world to think we are happy.

The real trouble comes from those who see these posts, and think “Why am I never that happy?” We think we must have this positivity shine through at all times or our lives aren’t going the way it “should” be.

Say it with me:

We are allowed to not be happy!

Everyone goes through hardships. This may be grim, but no one is happy every second of every day. It’s just not humanly possible. We have to remind ourselves that we are not our true selves on social media.

In the times of COVID-19, many of us have lost jobs, lost money, and unfortunately lost loved ones. We are cooped up inside, living through biological warfare that we cannot seem to defeat. It’s quite depressing — there’s no getting around that. The first response to something like a virus though, is to tell ourselves and our loved ones that it’ll get better. And while we all hope it does, it may not be what we want to hear. Sometimes, it may be better to say:

“It sucks! Everything sucks.”

Or — “I know how you are feeling, and I am here for you.”

Let your friends and families rant. Allow them to feel upset. Do not squash negative emotions. Most importantly, try to de-stigmatize feeling negative. You must remember — you are allowed to not be happy! And that is okay.

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