Sana Qadar: This is Professor Brock Bastian.īrock Bastian: I'm a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne. You know, it's been a year with some pretty major struggles for me, just like work-wise with the pandemic and stuff, but I had generally thought of myself as handling things okay, but at the end of 2021 I genuinely thought there must be something just so wrong with me if I'm not able to wake up smiling.īrock Bastian: That's the toxic part of it, that idea, that standard of being happy all the time has been perhaps sold to us or promoted in a way which just makes us feel like if we are not feeling happy, there's a problem.

Sana Qadar: By the end of the year, Anna's mental health had taken a dive.Īnna: I think that I'm generally a pretty well-adjusted person.

But I'd just lost my job and really just wanted to acknowledge that a bad thing happened to me. Sana Qadar: What other kinds of things would she say?Īnna: Pretty much everything that was mentioned as a bad or a negative thing she would spin it as, 'Okay, but what can we be learning from this?' Which again, nice to start off with, but sometimes things are just bad, you know, you just want someone to be like, 'Yeah, that sucks.'Īnd just other things, like I jokingly said, 'Curse you, universe!' and she chastised me and was like, 'No, no, we can't, the universe might overhear and we don't want to bring bad luck,' and then was thanking the universe for all the things that we do have. Sana Qadar: But Anna says over the course of a year her friend's focus on self-improvement and positive thinking had an insidious effect.Īnna: I think it sort of starts as it looks like she's trying to take care of you, but then when pretty much every time I left my room and I wasn't smiling or acting peppy she would ask me, 'What's wrong, are you okay?' and treat me like I needed help, which seems nice at first but when it happens so often you start to think, oh, is there something wrong with me because I'm not smiling all the time? She's 27 and lives in Sydney, and about a year ago she moved in with this yogi friend of hers.Īnna: I was really excited about it, I was really excited about living with someone who valued mental health and was trying to improve themselves. Sana Qadar: This is someone we're calling Anna. Today, toxic positivity, why we engage in it, why it's so damaging when we do, and whether something called tragic optimism can be the antidote we need.Īnna: So I met my now ex-housemate a couple of years ago and she is a yoga teacher and so that was how we first started our friendship, was her teaching me yoga. Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. And really in some ways it's not so much about that desire to be happy or even for other people to want us to be happy, that's actually quite a good thing, it's when it becomes at that level where failing to achieve that at some point (and inevitably we all do) feels like we are failing to achieve some sort of important social standard. Sana Qadar: There's a term for these kinds of comments and the attitude they push, it's 'toxic positivity'.īrock Bastian: You know, it's about the idea to be positive all time, to maintain positive thoughts, a certain level of positive emotionality. Really? You know, it's absolutely pathetic. Jaime: So many people are reflecting back to you these kinds of statements, you just learn it's not safe to express those feelings, it's not okay to talk about how you are feeling sad.Ĭeara Rickard: And they are telling me that if I'm just positive enough, that cancer won't kill me. But these statements aren't just irritating, they can really chip away at our sense of what is an acceptable way to feel. Sana Qadar: That last one, if you've had an illness or cared for someone who has, you know that sentiment can be especially awful. Sana Qadar: A helpful refrain later down the track but not as a first response.Ĭeara Rickard: Oh, it's all in your attitude, you have to have hope, you have to be a fighter. Sana Qadar: That one is a personal pet peeve.Īnna: Okay, but what can we be learning from this? Jessica Mead: You always have those people who say it could always be worse.Ĭeara Rickard: You know, everything happens for a reason… Sana Qadar: When things are going wrong in our lives, there are certain platitudes that people tend to say which are perhaps meant to be helpful but often aren't.

Opposite of tragic optimism