What is toxic positivity?
Toxic positivity means showing yourself as positive and happyno matter what. Some people take positivity so seriously that they begin to suppress their actual emotions. You make yourself so sensitivewith positivity that you refrain negativity and also don’t let others talk about it.
Even if being positive is a good thing but hiding your emotions and pain behind it makes you dishonest with yourself. It is so important to feel every feeling of yours and then replace them with a positive thought. Positivity doesn’t mean you should never feel down, alone etc. It means you should feel every emotions but notto let them settle in you. Positivity means overcoming negative emotions and not restraining them.
What are the effects of toxic positivity?
· Obsessing over positivity and happiness can prove to be counterproductive which means forcing yourself to be happy can actually lead to being unhappy.
· Toxic positivity is a problem because ignoring your problems and issues in the name of positivity won’t help in solving them. Instead, they just become bigger and ultimately leading us to be unhappy.
· Toxic positivity leads you to force other people around you to be happy and you fail to understand them and empathize with them.
You must therefore acknowledge your feelings negative or positive and learn to grow through them.
How to avoid toxic positivity?
· Learn to accept your feelings and be comfortable with them. Only when you acknowledge your own feelings you will be able to understand other people’s feelings.
· Write down your feelings, everything that comes to your mind while you feel sad or you worry about something. Writing down helps you recognise your feelings better and learn more about it.
· Realise that social media is all about sugar-coating things, people hardly talk about their bad experiences and sad feelings but that doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
Bottom line: to avoid toxic positivity you must acknowledge all your feelings.
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