It isn’t a bad thing to be positive. In fact, it is important for your mental health to try and be positive every so often. However, there is such thing as too much positivity. This is known as toxic positivity and can have a serious impact on your mental health. In fact, it could have a serious impact on those around you.
Denial That Negative Things Are Happening
When you attempt to be positive about everything, there is a chance that you will start to ignore some of the negativity that surrounds you. For example, you could start thinking “it could be worse” or, in bad situations, you are trying to look for a positive side. Just to convince yourself that there is something good in the situation.
The problem is that not every situation is a good situation to be in. There are some people that you really shouldn’t be around. There are some situations that you shouldn’t find yourself in. If you are positive about everything, you will end up getting hurt.
Repressing Your Emotions
Those that are too positive about the world will often suppress feelings like anger, embarrassment, jealousy, and greed.
Suppressing negative emotions is never good. You are just hiding them away. You aren’t dealing with them. Those negative emotions are still going to be there, and they are going to eat away at you. Eventually, they are going to bubble up to the surface, and they are going to be much worse than if you had dealt with them originally. In fact, you may end up suffering long-term mental health issues because of emotional suppression.
It is not uncommon for those who are positive all the time to just ‘snap’. They suddenly have a burst of anger, because a situation has finally pushed them over the edge.
Ignoring Other People’s Emotions
Toxic positivity isn’t just going to impact you. It is going to impact those around you.
When you look on the bright side of things, it may result in you ignoring the emotions of the people that surround you. For example, rather than providing the support that a person needs to get through something traumatic, you may say things like “it could be worse” or “look on the bright side”.
Toxic positivity will result in you losing friends. People are not fans of being around those that have little to no care for their emotions.
Feelings Of Guilt
Those that suffer from toxic positivity are more likely to experience feelings of guilt. As we mentioned previously, toxic positivity involves the suppression of negative emotions. This means that when a person starts to feel something negative, they feel guilty. They feel that they shouldn’t be feeling that particular emotion.
Not only this, but when a positive person cannot make a situation seem great, it really eats at them. They will try and make the situation great but, if they can’t, they will feel guilty. Of course, they will also try and suppress that guilt, which makes things even worse.
