The Imagined Power of Positive Thinking

As a miserable teen I developed quite a crush on the self-help industry. On my darker days I could be found poring over the works of the industry’s earliest progenitors – Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale. Later, I moved on to their modern-day successors – Wayne Dyer, Steven Covey, Tony Robbins, Leo Buscaglia, etc.

I couldn’t get enough of the stuff, the central message being that a positive mental attitude was all that stood between a miserable me and a life of health, happiness and material success. Here at last was my church, promising to cleanse me of life’s anxieties and uncertainties in the baptismal pool of universal laws of attraction and 7-step think and grow rich programs. “The Secret” was at last mine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the world of perpetual optimism and positive thinking: I never actually found it. To be sure, I encountered plenty of folks who thought they had. They never tired of espousing the gospel of positive thinking, of crediting their seemingly never-ending happiness and success to their optimistic natures. The mansion on the hill, the dedicated mate, complete inner confidence and joy all had become theirs (or eventually would) courtesy those magnificent can-do attitudes.

Try as I might to tune my mind only to more upbeat channels, however, my thoughts had an annoying habit of wandering into darker territories where pain and suffering were all too real. Could I be happy? Of course. But just as easily I could suffer. How, I wondered, were the optimists able to create and sustain that laser-like focus?

And then I began to notice something in the makeup of the positive thinkers: a reluctance to acknowledge the suffering in themselves or others. It wasn’t just that they focused on positive thoughts; it was a refusal to entertain their opposite. In a dualistic universe of hot-cold, up-down, happy-sad, they’d decided that ‘sad’ was no longer part of the equation. I came to see that, as a population, positive thinkers are deeply allergic to the fears and suffering of themselves or others.

Worse was the propensity of many positive thinkers to blame the unhappy for their unhappiness. To their way of thinking, all that was missing in the hearts and minds of the miserable, diseased and downtrodden was a commitment to a more positive attitude. As Barbara Ehrenreich explains in her new book, “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America,” her breast cancer diagnosis was immediately met by a vast army of yellow braceleted, pink-ribboned optimists hellbent on convincing her of how she could ‘manifest’ away her tumor through positive thinking, expressions of gratitude for the ‘gift’ of cancer, and re-syncing with the universal energies with which she’d clearly run afoul.

Ehrenreich noticed a disturbing refusal on the part of her cheerleaders to acknowledge even the possibility of negative outcomes and their habit of implicitly blaming the victims if their condition worsened or, despite all that positive thinking, they went ahead and died. The positive thinkers were essentially cherry-picking life’s realities and frowning on those who would dare crash their party.

Ehrenreich’s subsequent research and examination into the positive thinking industry revealed a culture literally unable and unwilling to countenance unhappiness, defeatism or negative outcomes. She points out that this kind of thinking, which has become epidemic in its popularity in America (and increasingly around the world), helped to fuel the dot-com and real estate bubbles, where otherwise reasonable people convinced themselves that, say, a travel search engine like Priceline was worth more than all the airlines combined; or that a home that had risen in value an average of 2% per year for decades suddenly was worth 3x its price of a year earlier.

Unfortunately, the ‘science’ behind positive thinking and its purported ability to manifest health, wealth and happiness (among other goodies) turns out to be bunk. Real scientific study of human thinking, it turns out, demonstrates that a healthy dose of pessimism (translated as ‘realism’) is actually a far better predictor of a longer, happier life. Like the forest-dwelling deer cocking an ear for danger, the realist recognizes that in a dualistic universe there is as much of a chance that the twig snapping nearby is a mountain lion as a rabbit, and that the mountain lion doesn’t give a damn how positive the deer is thinking much as the cancer doesn’t care if you’re upbeat or feeling gratitude for its presence (and studies increasingly are confirming, much to the chagrin of the bright-siders, that a positive attitude has no effect on your cancer’s progression – or the size of your bank account, etc.).

The brightsiders, says Ehrenreich, are far more likely to be blindsided by the tumor, the cheating mate, the lying president, etc., because of their refusal to acknowledge life’s unsavory truths (“life is suffering”). Unfortunately, the world has gone gaga over the positive thinking movement and over the past two generations billions of dollars have been spent by individuals hoping that phenomena like “The Secret” will deliver to them the wealth and happiness God/the Universe is simply waiting to deliver.

Not with a little irony does Ehrenreich point out that the rise of the positive thinking movement has coincided with the nation’s overall decline in wealth, happiness and physical longevity. So even as tens of millions of people proclaim the power of positive thinking to lead to happier outcomes, the real income for virtually all Americans has actually declined, our expressed states of happiness have fallen precipitously (along with a monstrous increase in the use of antidepressants), and our health has worsened.

As one who drank his fair share of ‘Secret’ brand Kool-Aid over the years, who espoused the gospel of universal energies and wholeheartedly believed I could change my future merely by changing my thoughts, I now see optimism as just another story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The allure of positive thinking is completely understandable: why would one wish to focus on life’s negatives if he or she doesn’t have to? But in a sense, the very motivation behind the optimist or positive thinker is fear – he essentially is running and hiding from the truths he doesn’t want to see, praying that the boogieman isn’t really lurking in the closet, that death will not come, that we will all live happily ever after.

Maybe the real ‘secret’ to life is to acknowledge the duality of all existence: birth and death, pain and joy. And that rather than avoid the negatives we look them straight in the eye and discover that the thoughts that alternately leave us exalting and despairing are not really ours to begin with. As Leo Hartong points out, if you really had control of your thoughts would you ever think another negative thought? Instead of hiding from those thoughts or pretending they aren’t there, why not ask where they come from, who are they coming to, and see where that takes you?