Bad Pop Psychology: Is Positive Thinking Just Bad Pop Psychology?

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and this week’s video is all about positive thinking. I was motivated to do this video because, last week, I talked about positive psychology and made this distinction between positive psychology as a legitimate field of psychological study, and positive thinking is sometimes a woo-woo out there, kind of sense of magical thinking. It’s filled with a lot of pop psychology, and that does not mean that I think positive thinking is a bad thing. In fact, it is one of the subjects of positive psychology. However, it’s often portrayed in ways that are a bit unrealistic, and I think can be actually damaging. So, let’s start with that. What is it not?

Well, it’s not Rhonda Byrne’s philosophy or spiritual path that she writes about in the book called The Secret, which had a film by the same name. I don’t think Rhonda Byrne is wrong per se; it’s just that she goes too far. It has this magical thinking component that basically says if you’re just grateful for whatever the universe is going to give you that you know with confidence, I’m going to win the lottery; 10 million is coming my way, thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, it’s going to lead to a lot of disappointment, and it’s that kind of over the top positive thinking that I think has given the positive psychology movement as a whole a bit of a bad name. Rhonda Burns’ The Secret is not what positive psychology is. Nevertheless, Rhonda Byrne is on the periphery of legitimate science about positive thinking, and that’s what this video is about. So stay tuned, I’ll tell you all about it.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so if positive thinking is not the pop psychology stuff that Rhonda Byrne made famous, then what is it? Well, it is a legitimate subject matter within the broad field of positive psychology, along with topics like forgiveness and mindfulness. Positive thinking is one of them. In its simplest term, positive thinking is contextualized by the contrast of pessimism. Pessimism is, you know, this tendency to think that the world is out to get us.

Optimists, by contrast, tend to think the world, the universe, is a friendly place, that things should work out more often than not, and that when things do work out, it’s because of my own efficacy, something I did that made things go well. And when it’s bad, I often, as an optimist, I’m going to look to external forces as the result of something bad happening in my life. That makes sense, this contrast between optimism and pessimism. Clearly, pessimism has all kinds of significant disadvantages to it. Most of all, it makes us feel bad, and when we feel bad, we get negative health effects.

Optimism, by contrast, has a lot of proven, really good benefits for us. Things like we’re healthy physically, we actually live longer when we’re optimistic, we do much better in the field of stress management, and this one’s really critical. In the challenging world that we live in, to be able to cope better with the challenges that come along, the argument of people that we meet, the financial crises that occur, getting lost in a train station in a foreign country, and all those kinds of things that are real in our lives. To manage those, the stress of those things, better is huge. We also obviously have things like less depression, better relationships. Optimism is very, very helpful in many ways in our lives.

But here’s the kicker, optimism needs to be contained. If we have this optimism that’s got the magical thinking, like some pop psychology thinkers tell us to have, that we’re just convinced that the world is going to be a great place, it actually can lead to harm. So, not as much harm as pessimistic thinking styles, but nevertheless, legitimately harmful things. When we start saying, I’m going to win the lottery, and then when the year goes by, and you don’t win the lottery because the odds are 1 in 63 million or whatever the odds are, that can lead to a great deal of disappointment and disheartening beliefs about optimism as well.

So when people have unrealistically positive, optimistic viewpoints, we tend to get disappointed, suffer a lot of harm when those disappointments invariably come. An overabundance of optimism is a negative thing, not as negative as pessimism, but still a negative thing. So what we’re trying to shoot for is kind of a realistic optimism, based and grounded in facts, and critical thinking. Believing that if I can lean into my life and lean into the undertakings that I have with wise eyes wide open, practical ways of approaching them, but with a belief that, yeah, if I work real hard at this, I can get what I want.

As long as my getting what I want isn’t unrealistic, like I’m going to suddenly learn how to fly, sprout wings, and fly all over the place. Then, if it’s stuff that says, yeah, I can have better relationships, yeah, I think I can save more money, yeah, I think I can make of a bigger influence in my place of work or in my community. And if I have this belief that the world is fundamentally going to be friendly and responsive to my good efforts, based in some realism, critical thinking, then that serves people exceptionally well. It is one subject matter within the broad field of positive psychology.

Positive thinking is great for us. I hope you like this kind of content, I hope that explanation was useful to you. Click the like button if you do like it, it’s good for my analytics and gets more people watching this stuff. Share the video with others if you think they could benefit from it. Thanks for watching, see you next time. Bye for now.