No BS: What people get wrong about positive thinking  

No B.S Friday: It’s a discipline, not a prison sentence.  

I think most people misunderstand what positive thinking is actually about.  

What we are talking about (in my humble opinion) is disciplining the mind so our thoughts naturally run to optimistic, grateful and self-loving forms.  

A gratitude practice, for example, carves a groove through our neural pathways, so our thoughts just naturally flow towards gratitude, without any effort on our part.  

This is what positive thinking is about.  

But the mistake many people make is thinking that positive thinking means positive feeling.  

They think it means only allowing yourself to feel positive emotions.  

Through sheer force of will, they refuse to allow negative emotions (and really, are any emotions ‘good’ or ‘bad’?).  

But they don’t like the feeling of grief, so they don’t let themselves grieve. (Get a tight grip. Don’t let it in.)  

And they don’t like the feeling of anger, so they don’t let themselves be angry. (Bottle it up in the stomach. Pretend it’s not there.) 

And so on.  

Rather than disciplining their thoughts, they are trying to ‘control’ their feelings 

– forcing them into narrow band centred around happiness, bliss and contentment.  

And you might have limited success with this strategy for a while, but it has an expense.  

By smothering your negative emotional responses, you smother all emotional responses, until all you leave yourself is a sort of numb, disassociated boredom.  

And without ‘natural’ joy in your life, you then try to keep your mood elevated by constantly boosting it up artificially – with a constant stream of novelty and stimulation, or by just ‘forcing’ yourself to feel good.  

But all this energetic effort takes its toll eventually. And eventually you just run out of puff, and sink back down into the emotionally retarded swamp you have created for yourself. 

(Welcome to depression. Have you tried our drugs?) 

This is not the way.  

I get where the confusion comes from. A lovingly disciplined mind tends to be a happy mind.  

If you have trained your thoughts to naturally run towards abundance thinking, towards gratitude, towards self-belief, towards self-compassion and towards wonder, then you are probably going to have a pretty nice time.  

Positive thinking creates positive experiences. 

It doesn’t guarantee that only good things are going to happen to you. Life will still be life. But your experience of life is going to be better. You will find yourself much better-resourced for life’s hard times. …In my opinion.  

But just because positive thinking is correlated with positive feelings, don’t mistake one for the other.  

And don’t make the mistake of trying to control how you feel, and especially don’t try to control how you feel through repression.  

This is NOT what it is about.  

Positive thinking is a training regime that requires discipline. It is not a straitjacket on the heart.  

JG.