Escaping the Positivity Trap

There's an ongoing debate on the subject of positive thinking, which seems to have been raging for years. On one side is the camp which - broadly speaking - suggests that one can fix any multitude of problems in one's life if one changes one's outlook; the other, that such a position is naive at best, and tends towards a kind of victim-blaming narrative.

Both sides of the argument are, as always, not entirely wrong, nor entirely right. My personal feeling is that the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the synthesis of the two; in this post, I would like to hash out a few of my thoughts on the matter.

The pro-positivity crowd offer numerous solutions to life's problems, which on the surface seem to be mostly about thinking happy thoughts. The likes of Oprah relentlessly promote this strategy - that one can fix all, or almost all of one's problems simply by changing one's outlook. These can come in many guises - ranging from from daily affirmations, encouragement to smile, re-framing one's life experiences, meditation, and the ever popular "cutting negative people out of your life".

Glurgemonger-in-Chief  Doreen Virtue, to nobody's surprise, offers "Daily Guidance From Your Angels"; the equally crap-saccharine Louise Hay, of You Can Heal Your Life fame, has similar "Power Thoughts"; as does, inevitably, Deepak Chopra, the only man in existence who seems to understand less about Quantum Physics than Peter Carroll.

If you read any of the above and felt a sense of general revulsion trickling down your spine, you're not alone. One has to wonder if the advice is meant as a cure for depression, or merely to sooth the minds of those suffering from what Freud called "common unhappiness". Ask anyone who has ever suffered from clinical depression, and you'll quickly find out that these kinds of positive encouragements are worse than useless; indeed, they are often listed as being some of the worst things that can be said to a depressed person. Not only do those spouting such positivity seem to completely misunderstand the nature of depression - which is perhaps thought of less as sadness, more a profound feeling of meaninglessness and futility - but by giving such pieces of advice, even well-meaningfully, there is a tendency to shift the blame for one's circumstances onto the individual.

Even if one was to argue that psychological factors are the primary cause of depression (they aren't), the demographics of mental illness point towards extrinsic social factors as being a contributing cause. Even for those not suffering from depression, it is no great leap of logic to suggest that being part of a disadvantaged population is likely to reduce one's opportunities in life, and cause a greater exposure to stressful factors. For ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, women, the economically disadvantaged, and those on the LGBT spectrum, the simple fact is that the oppressive structures of society as it exists today are ones which act externally. No amount of positive thinking is going to change the pay gap between men and women, for example; no amount of smiling is going to prevent the trauma caused by governmental persecution of the most vulnerable (CW: sexual assault).

For this reason, there has been a great amount of backlash against the positivity movement, much of it justified. It could even be said that positivity is for "Rich White People" - a soothing balm for the worried well, who are not harmed by structural inequalities.

But that's not the whole of the story. As much as we rail against the cult of optimism, there are some small grains of truth at the root of all the mindless positivity; indeed, it clearly works for some people, one way or another. As much as it is argued that, as in the joke about the anarchist and the lightbulb, it's the whole damn system that needs changing more than the individual, if it works, then it's useful.

Let's take a two common examples of Positivity Advice and dissect them a little:

Happy Yoga - Mindfulness and Postural Feedback

Often touted as the psychological panacea that society needs, mindfulness is a form of meditation that involves deliberately moving one's attention away from one's thoughts, generally focusing on bodily sensations or on breathing. There's a lot that can be written about the effectiveness of meditative techniques for psychological and personal development, which I shall save for another post. The most crucial thing to note here is these techniques are, at least until one is very well practiced in them, merely a "pause button", most effective at helping reduce the feeling of being overcrowded by thoughts. Similar claims are often made about the efficacy of yoga.

The old phrase about it taking less muscles to smile than to frown is, whilst technically accurate, entirely unhelpful (and misses out the fact that it takes even fewer muscles to flip the middle finger at anyone who thinks that this qualifies as advice). However, it keeps getting repeated within positivity circles, often with some kind of scientific studies backing it up. The science behind this one is a bit sketchy at best - the theory dates back to Riskind and Goatey's 1982 study on posture having a regulatory effect on emotional feedback, and Laird's 1974 study on facial feedback, which I can't find a non-pay-walled link to. 

The idea of there being a biofeedback mechanism related to posture or facial expression is reasonable enough in itself - if only due to the psychological associations that one inevitably develops with any given posture. Practitioners of yoga and certain esoteric traditions will recognize this as old wisdom; couched in terms of energy meridians or chakras is the general sense of a biointelligence which mediates between body and mental states. This could all be seen as supportive of "Smile Therapy", were it not for the fact that facial expressions are not culturally universal. In essence, it seems to boil down to determining what postures have specific resonances for you - and if any such postures do aid in bestowing a specific mood, using those. As always, experimentation and observation are key.

Arguably, this all ties into the many strange and hard-to-explain observations around the placebo effect, but that is a matter for another post. 

Incidentally, I'll here plug Steve Wilson's excellent Chaos Ritual, sadly out of print and difficult to get ahold of, for having one of the most interesting deconstructions of the mind-body-neurology link when it comes to posture.

Positive Visualizations and the Law of Attraction

So, here's the big one. As a random aside, I've been reading David Allen's Getting Things Done this week (don't judge me), and I had a sudden insight into why Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and its numerous tie-ins got things wrong. Aside from the Chopra-level quantum woo, obviously. Allow me to save you a few pounds and reveal the Ancient Secret of the Secret Masters of Secretness:

Thinking about things gets you things.

Specifically, imagining a positive outcome, gets you that outcome.

Now, it is pretty clear that this is utter rubbish. If it were true, I wouldn't be writing this blog, because I'd be too busy lying on my poolside recliner in the blazing sunshine, being served cocktails by a selection of nubile personages of various genders as I gaze lovingly at my enormous, Scrooge McDuck-worthy pile of cash. But, as with so many things of this nature, it does contain a grain of truth.

A simple explanation is that by visualizing specific outcomes, you prime the part of your brain that acts as a perceptual filter - the reticular activating system, or RAS - to focus on information that you would not have consciously perceived. Like all simple explanations, it's not entirely true - the neurology is a lot more complicated than that; the RAS certainly has a significant role in the routing of sensory stimuli, alertness, and habituation (the process by which the brain trains itself to stop noticing background stimuli), but it isn't the all-powerful mental filtration system that some make it out to be. Nonetheless, it can easily enough be observed that there is some kind of perceptual filter which determines what the conscious mind becomes aware of. On some level, whether this is a neurological or psychological filter is irrelevant; the function can be considered to be the same regardless of the origin.

There's a good amount of evidence that suggests that these perceptual filters can be primed by expectation, as well as by thoughts, beliefs, and mood. The totality of these filters makes up what Robert Anton Wilson referred to as the "Reality Tunnel". The theory then follows that if one sets up the right positive attitude and visualisations, then one is more likely to notice opportunities and the like which can lead to the occurrence of the desired outcome.

And yet, what is missed so often here is that the visualisation is only the first step - it must be matched by action. This is seemingly obvious, but is easily missed in the flurry of positivity. No matter the strength of one's affirmations, they will remain mere words unless they are acted upon. This is the Positivity Trap, the new Opium of the Masses: the idea that merely changing your thinking but acting the same will magically lead to some great change. This is one possible cause behind the observation that positive fantasies predict poor achievement - if one buys deeply into one's visualization to the extent that one believes it to be inevitable, regardless of actions taken or not taken, then one is probably in for an unpleasant surprise.

So, what then?

I'm not going to say that you should simply chuck positivity. There are some useful tools to be found buried in the woo-mines. As always, the trick is to use them critically. Positive thinking for the sake of positive thinking is an exercise in intellectual masturbation: and, more to the point, it isn't the opposite to negative thinking. There is no forced duality - after all, most negative thoughts do have a kernel of truth to them, but so do most positive ones.

One should not attempt to annihilate all negativity with positive thoughts - this is the swift way into the Positivity Trap. Having the vision of a positive outcome is useful - it allows one to gain a certain degree of clarity, by which to direct one's actions. But this must be tempered by a degree of realism, and, of course, backed up with action - whether on a physical, or a psychological plane.