Monday Mornings with Madison

Overcoming the Positivity Paradox

What could possibly be wrong with being positive?  People love a person with a positive attitude.  Positive people are usually smiling, cheerful and enthusiastic.  At work, they have a can-do disposition and a cheerleader-like energy.  They want to encourage everyone around them to do their best and be their best.  Super positive people always look at the bright side of any situation and are unflappable in their genial disposition.  These perpetuators of positivity are ready to praise every plan, support every initiative and embrace every idea.  When they aren’t using their hands to applaud, they are busy patting coworkers on the back or high-fiving colleagues in the hallway.

Leaders and hiring managers love the “Perky Pamelas” and “Cheery Charlies” of the workplace and for good reason.  Like plants that are drawn toward sunlight, people are also naturally heliotropic — drawn to positive energy.  Our propensity for positivity is wired into our DNA and validated in tons of scientific studies.  For example, research shows that:

  1. people are more accurate in processing positive information, whether the task involves verbal discrimination, organizational behavior, or the judgment of emotion.
  2. people think about a greater number of positive things than negative things and for a longer period of time.
  3. babies three months old and older become distressed if an adult who was smiling at them suddenly stopped smiling and became unresponsive.
  4. people tend to respond with positive rather than negative words in free association tasks, as when asked to identify the first thing that comes to mind.
  5. positive associations are more frequent than negative associations, and positive responses occur more quickly and more often than negative responses.
  6. positive items take precedence when people make lists.
  7. people recall positive life experiences more frequently than neutral or negative ones.
  8. people mentally rehearse positive items more than negative items.
  9. positive memories tend to replace negative memories over time.
  10. positive items are registered in memory more accurately than negative items so they can be recalled easier and more accurately.
  11. positive information is more accessible than negative information and tumbles out more rapidly and accurately.
  12. adults, like babies, tend to seek out positive stimuli and avoid negative stimuli, as when given a choice about looking at smiling faces or frowning faces or pleasant scenes versus disturbing scenes.
  13. people who see positive and neutral stimuli equally often report the positive stimuli occurred more frequent than the negative.

In general, people have a natural and universal habit of being drawn to and remembering the positive and forgetting the negative.  After all, what’s not to love about positivity?  Well, at the risk of being a Debbie Downer, there is a downside to people who are upbeat all the time, especially in the face of serious problems and true tragedies.  And after a year of global pandemic, experiencing and expecting imperturbable positivity from employees may have some wondering if there’s a way to tone that down.  The problem with relentless positivity, like anything else that is artificial or contrived, is that it denies reality.  It also pushes people to suppress emotions and pretend to be fine even when things are not fine.  That is a problem that’s been labeled Toxic Positivity.

While the premise of “being positive” is to put a person in the driver’s seat of how he/she experiences the world, which is good, it should not mean experiencing only positive emotions.  What it should mean is that people experience a full range of emotions in order to understand and perceive the world and navigate through it with purpose.  Emotions are data and that data says something.  So, from this viewpoint, how could any emotion be negative?  But in an insistently positive environment, expressing some emotions are considered “unacceptable.”  The problem is that ignoring emotions and pretending something that is false actually creates a negative backlash.  It allows problems to fester, permits people to feel hurt without support or compassion and buries dissent.  And therein lies the paradox… that pushing positivity can actually generate negativity.

The Tyranny of Positivity and the Law of Reversed Effort

How does the push for positivity result in such an unintended consequence?  After all, in most areas of life putting in more effort at something means achieving a better outcome.  The more consistently a person exercises, the more fit he/she gets.  The more hours a person works, usually the more the person is rewarded (if not immediately, then usually in the long run).  And the more hours a person studies, the better grades he/she achieves.

However, there are some situations where the opposite happens.  Aldous Huxley called this ‘the law of reverse effort”.   The harder a person consciously tries to do something, the less successful he/she is.  For example, novice racecar drivers are told that to drive faster they must drive slower.  The goal is to be as smooth as possible and aim for balance.  If they hit the accelerator too hard coming out of a corner and the front of the car lifts, a loss of weight and traction over the front wheels causes it to drift wider.  This also uses more fuel, which means more stops. Brake too hard and the back-end slides around, losing control and wearing the tires, which reduces grip and speed later.  So, driving too fast causes the car to lose traction, efficiency and endurance.  However, by driving slower, balance is optimized allowing the car to ultimately go faster.  There are many such instances where the law of reverse effort kicks in.  Also known as the Backward Law, this concept is best summed this way:  When a person tries to stay on the surface of the water, he sinks; but if he tries to sink, he floats.  Essentially the more a person tries to grab a hold of something, the more it slips through his fingers.  This happens in many areas… where the harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we succeed.

This happens when trying to instill a positive mindset in others.  Consider this.  If you ask a person to think of anything they want – anything in the world – EXCEPT for a pink elephant, invariably the person will think only of pink elephants.  (You are probably thinking of pink elephants right now.)  That is what happens when promoting positive thinking, especially when it is being pushed by managers and HR programs.  When a company pushes positive thinking at work, there’s a feedback loop of negative thinking by trying to suppress negative thoughts or actions. Promoting positivity sends the message that positivity is absent and needs to be promoted.

In the book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life, Harvard Medical School professor and psychologist Dr. Susan David dubbed it as the “tyranny of positivity.”  Dr. David noted that this relentless push for positivity not only encourages people to ignore emotions like sadness, anger, despair, and grief, but also promotes strategies and tools to suppress those emotions.  This unrealistic expectation to always be positive inundates workplaces, homes, schools, music, art and even our inner life.  People are pushed to deny or avoid emotions that might indicate that life is something other than great.  When they can’t ignore or stifle them on their own, culture provides things to distract, including medication to overcome depression, games and “smash rooms” to vent anger, and compartmentalization to “get over” grief. But the more this happens, the less positive people feel.  It makes for a cold and lonely world where people can only recognize privately and silently the fragility of existence and the grief that comes from losing people and things that matter.

So pushing positivity can produce negativity.  And no one wants a toxic workplace either.  What’s to be done?  It presents a special challenge for business leaders.  A leader is expected to be relentlessly optimistic and positive to inspire and engage the team.  After all, research shows that a leader with a combination of self-confidence, optimism, resilience, and hope is most likely to increase employee job satisfaction and performance.  However, leaders also need to be authentic and honest in order to be trusted.  And that sometimes means moving through a gloomy pool of less socially-acceptable emotions like fear, doubt, sadness, and frustration.  So how can a leader be genuine and display those less socially acceptable emotions without increasing negativity?  And, how can coworkers demonstrate a positive attitude and yet not cause the unintended consequence of a tyranny of positivity and a backlash of negativity?  That is the Positivity Paradox.  The need to be positive is often in conflict with the need to be real and honest, and forcing the issue produces the opposite result.

A Positive Workplace without Pushing Positivity

So how does a workplace reinforce positive attitudes and a can-do energy without pushing positivity and ending up with toxic workplace instead?

  1. Stop faking it. While people are drawn to positive people, energy and attitudes, it cannot be fake, forced or constant.  Accept that bad things happens (pandemics happen; computers get hacked; employees quit; sales decrease) and acknowledge the emotions that go with it as real.  It is better to recognize issues honestly and then determine the best course forward toward achieving a more positive outlook even in the midst of the situation.
  2. Stop insisting. To stop the law of reverse effort, give up the struggle of achieving positivity and let the ‘desire to instill positivity’ dry out on its own.  Stop trying to eliminate negativity by force.  Just let it dissipate by itself by leaving it alone.  The goal then is to acknowledge all emotions, not just the positive ones, in a productive and insightful way.
  3. Let negative emotions serve as a compass. The strongest negative emotions usually come when something really needs to change or something is about to or needs to happen.  Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear provide data and teach us.  Those emotions are there to guide.  So running from negative emotions is like finding the ‘X’ on a treasure map and running in the other direction.  Listen and learn and then do what needs to be done to address the problems and resolve the feelings.

So how does this work in practice?  One way is to try to say things that acknowledge the reality of a situation.  For example, instead of telling a coworker who lost a family member to Covid “You’ll get over it”, it might be better to recognize the reality of the situation and say “This is hard and it is understandable for you to feel how you do.”  Or, if a salesperson just lost a major account, instead of saying “Let’s look at the bright side!” or “Think happy thoughts”, it might be more effective to say “It can be difficult to see the good in this situation, but I’m here to help you.  How can I support you?”  Fake positivity in such situations does nothing to make things better.

By adopting a workplace where genuine optimism and honest dialogue about negative situations co-exist, everyone is able to bring their own brand of optimism and energy.

Quote of the Week

“Toxic positivity is the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.”
Jamie Long, PsyD

 

© 2021, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Blogplay
Comments Off on Overcoming the Positivity Paradox

Comments are closed.