What’s your current mood? As I write this, mine is… happy and content with a hint of excitement and a side note of fear and uncertainty. A true mix of emotions with an overriding sense of positivity.

But I want to mention the words ‘toxic positivity’ to you…

So often we see numerous social media posts telling us to be ‘positive’ and how being ‘grateful’ will help us not feel overwhelm and anxiety.

Now, yes, the practise of gratitude does help develop positive emotions and we should always have hope and optimism and yes, everything I do is based on positive psychology and I will be the first to lift people up and help them.

But I want to call bullshit on some of these positive posts we read because they don’t allow us to be honest with our emotions and make us feel we should sweep our sadness under the carpet and just “be happy.”

They can also bring shame if we’re not feeling totally chipper… which invites a negative spiral into our life.

It doesn’t work like that.

Life is hard and awful and heart-breaking things happen to us all.

We have to allow ourselves to feel all those so-called negative emotions.

We need to feel sad, angry, overwhelmed and anxious.

It is healthy to feel all those things.

We need to have a balance of all emotions so we can learn to manage them, embrace them and move forwards with them, bringing more resilience when tough things face us.

This Pollyanna style positivity of saying things such as “everything will be OK” and “you’ll get over it” are not helpful.

This isn’t positivity. Positivity isn’t saying “everything will be OK” because life sucks and hard things happen and we need to know it’s perfectly OK to feel sad, angry, overwhelmed and anxious.

Positivity is saying “we will be OK regardless of what happens.” 

It’s acknowledging hard things will happen, it gives us permission to feel every emotion we need to (positive and negative) and it encourages action to manage these emotions and move forwards with hope and resilience.

Of course, everything CAN be OK; but that takes work and consistent daily action to protect our mental health and perform.

So, yes… we can all be happy and flourishing and we can do that whilst managing and feeling ALL our emotions along the way, but it’s definitely OK to feel happy, sad, joy, overwhelm, hope, anxiety, fear and every other emotion you want and need to feel at any time.

Much love
Tabby x