Why positive thinking can be toxic🌿
How to think positively — guilt free
Hey love,
Day 2. I’m so glad you’re here.
Especially as you roll your eyes when you reaad “positive thinking” — I GET IT!
It can be toxic and mostly is these days. “Only positive thoughts” makes you feel guilty, and it sure did for me.
Today I want to talk about something that might ruffle a few feathers.
Positive thinking.
Stay with me.
I was the queen of it. Still am.
Sticky notes on the mirror. Gratitude lists. Affirmations before my feet even hit the floor. I was doing ALL the things — and underneath all of it, the same ache.
The same heaviness. Just now, with a layer of guilt on top, because I was doing everything right and still not feeling okay.
Sound familiar?
Here’s what I’ve come to understand and what took me far too long to admit:
Positive thinking, when it’s used to bypass what we actually feel, is just another form of pressure in a prettier outfit.
“The brain is plastic. It can change. It can be rewired. And that rewiring? It starts with you.”
That’s a line from this chapter of the book. I stand by it completely.
The brain CAN change.
But it changes through truth, not through papering over the cracks with forced optimism.
We are wired, biologically, to be more negative than positive.
It’s not a personal failing. It’s survival.
Our brains scan for threat, not sunshine.
When we fight that or tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel what we feel, we don’t heal it.
READ THAT AGAIN.
We bury it. And buried things have a way of coming back louder.
Think about the people in your life: at work, at home, in your social circle:
Do most of them think positively or negatively?
It is SO much easier to complain. I have only realised in others the past few years because I was always the annoying, sheer optimist, still am. But when my mental health went down, I had to let myself feel. I had a lot of grief from my grandma’s passing, my parents breaking up, that I hadn’t truly felt.
So the positive thinking didn’t help.
What are you putting on pause that is stopping you from thinking well?
That’s what this work is really about. Not performing wellness. Not pretending.
Giving yourself full permission to feel what is true and treat yourself with grace!!!
Trusting that the feeling, when you stop running from it, will pass through.
Because it will.
Your child is not the problem — they are the prescription.
Children laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults? Around five.
Directly from my book too… crazy, ey?
Laugh a lil more today!!!!!
Somewhere between childhood and now, we swapped wonder for worry.
Curiosity for correction. Play for performance.
What if today you borrowed just a little of their lens?
🌿 Today’s tiny shift — from the book:
Instead of reaching for a positive thought today, try reaching for a true one.
Even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially if it is.
That’s where the real rewiring begins.
Tomorrow is a big day — I’ll be holding my first live parenting workshop here in Costa Rica, Chill Out and Raise Up, based on my Parent Handbook companion guide.
I am scared!! But a good kinda scared. All this is coming together in its own divine timing. I am here to remind mothers about their power within. I am ready.
More on that tomorrow. 🌱
Rest to be your best. 🌿
With gratitude, Grace
Live with Grace | @treatyourselfwithgrace
What I appreciated here is the distinction between healing and emotional self-management.
A lot of people use positivity as a way to negotiate with pain rather than actually feel it. The result is often not peace, but exhaustion layered with guilt for still struggling underneath the affirmations...
Hi There,
https://princejefferson.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-silence-makes-you?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6204je