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rethinking positive thinking
Unfortunately for the proponents of positivity, most of the research in this area indicates that the effectiveness of positive thinking is substantially exaggerated. Dr Gabrielle Oettingen, Professor of Psychology, University of New York, has conducted in-depth research in this area. He has spent more than 20 years researching this topic and has found that unlike what we think, pleasant imaginations do not always help us accomplish our objectives. Positive thinking really saps our motivation and weakens our determination to complete the necessary activities.
Dr Oettingen critically reexamines positive thinking and provides a more helpful, nuanced view of motivation based on strong empirical data in her concise book, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. According to conventional thinking, inspirational dreams should ideally always motivate us to take action.
Dr Oettingen tests this by enlisting a group of undergraduate college students and dividing them into two groups at random. She advised the first group to imagine that the upcoming week will be a knock out: fantastic grades, amazing parties, happy times, etc., and asked them to visualise positive outcomes. Students in the second group were urged to write all of their ideas and daydreams about the upcoming week—both good and terrible ones— calculative neutral visualisations.
Surprisingly, compared to those who were directed to create a neutral dream, the students who were told to think positively felt far less motivated and productive. It turns out that blind optimism does not inspire individuals; rather, as Dr Oettingen demonstrates in a series of analytical studies, it fosters a feeling of ease and complacency. It is as if when we daydream or fantasize about something we want, our minds are duped into thinking we have already accomplished the objective. Studies reveal that simply daydreaming about a desire decreases blood pressure, whereas thinking about the same wish and imagining not receiving it raises
blood pressure, suggesting that there may be a physiological foundation for this impact. Daydreaming could make you feel better, but it saps your energy and makes you less ready to take action. It, also, puts our culture’s unwavering belief in the docks that, ‘if you can dreamit,youcandoit’.Itappearsthatthekeyto accomplishing your objectives is to be aware of both your desires and the actual obstacles that you and the outside world erect in the odyssey to success and happiness.
In another experiment conducted by Dr Oettingen, two groups of obese persons were assigned the task of reducing weight. One group was urged to see themselves as a leaner version of themselves and to think only positive thoughts about losing weight and the other group was asked to visualise practically about the outcome. The findings were startling after a year. The majority of optimistic thinkers dropped the least amount of weight. Why? Again, visualising success might make you feel good and accomplished before you’ve really achieved it, decreasing the desire to put effort into it. Thus, People fare badly in terms of having real achievement the more enthusiastically they fantasize and daydream about their future success.
Impeding positivity
Researchers forthrightly deny that simply thinking positively does any good and is almost toxic for our personal growth. Dr Susan David is a recognised Harvard Medical School psychologist and one of the top management thinkers. An expert on emotions and the author of the book Emotional Agility, she explains what toxic positivity is, how it appears in our culture, and how we as people and leaders may combat it. ‘A tyranny of positivity’, as Dr Susan calls it, toxic positivity is the refusal to let ourselves or others feel the complete spectrum of emotions, especially the unpleasant ones. When you are an individual, you can appear to be convincing yourself that everything is OK even when it is not. It can appear that you are experiencing an unpleasant emotion, but instead of letting the emotion go, you decide to focus on all the positive aspects of the situation.
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