The Fatal Flaw of Positive Thinking and How to Fix It

The power of positive thinking can revolutionize your life for the better, but there is a fatal flaw in thinking that it means eliminating everything that’s negative in our lives. Do you know why? Because eliminating everything that’s negative is impossible. We don’t live in a world where it’s all one way or the other. It’s a mix of both and it always will be. Like the contrast between light and dark, or joy and sorrow, we have contrast that allows us to comprehend both. Even positive and negative protons and electrons coexist and work together in a beneficial way. By having contrast, we have unlimited options to choose and create what we want. Without contrast, our options are profoundly limited.

In today’s world, there is a popular idea to “cut off toxic people” for the sake of “being positive.” This option is valid to a degree because there are probably people in our lives that don’t have our best interests in mind, and we probably shouldn’t associate with them. But is it possible that some people are trying to tell us the truth? They may appear to be difficult or negative, but what if they are trying to help us rather than keep us from what we really want? In other words, looking past their negative tone may hold a positive way forward. To find the value in what they say will require us to let go of our anger, disappointment, and hurt. If there is value in what they say it becomes a positive experience.

The pursuit of a positive life can be sabotaged by instant gratification. In fact, it seems many believe that instant gratification isn’t instant enough. For example, it’s easy to compare our lives to celebrities’ and wonder why their lives seem to be picture-perfect, and ours seem to suck. Aside from the fact that they are only showing you the pretty parts of their lives to impress you, they probably have some pretty sucky days and months that they don’t reveal. (Perhaps in part because they value a certain level of privacy.) Many of us admire and want to be like our favorite celebrities. It’s easy to get caught up in whatever the latest trend of “success” might be, hoping to emulate them to achieve a similar life. And those who write and speak about success, including celebrities, usually use the same keywords over and over. Words like “dedication,” “determination,” “set goals,” and “don’t allow negativity”. We get inspired long enough to decide to grit our teeth and push our way to what we want. We believe we must cut off “toxic” people, or we fall for instant money-making schemes, or a shady lure to gain millions of followers overnight, or try an unhealthy binge diet, or overdose on workouts at the gym our first month until we are sick and tired and want to quit. Just reading that last sentence is filled with tension. Constant tension is not a positive thing, it’s destructive. No wonder it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that positive thinking doesn’t work—because thinking positively all the time and having only positive results are impossible.

If you were to make a graph of your progress through life, it certainly wouldn’t be linear with a steady, straight line, angled upward. It would be as complex as looking at a graph of the stock market from the past several decades. You’d see small blips up and down, some enormous dives and some huge vertical leaps. But overall you’d see at each ascending point a line moving upward.

You are designed to be well. Even healing from illness is not completely linear. There are setbacks, good days, and bad ones, but we usually progress to wellness again. That’s because our natural state is wellness. It means that our bodies always work to be well, despite setbacks. (Isn’t that an amazingly positive thought about illness?) When I realized this in the middle of some huge depression and health issues, I decided to wake up each morning and thank my body for working so hard to make me well. That waking gratitude every morning changed my life for the better. My gratitude list began to grow longer and longer, and my depression began to fade and my health improved. I still wake every morning with gratitude.

There is a beautiful way to look at negative things: any negative experience that you don’t want might actually be a gift that helps point you toward something that you do want. If you can find something valuable about a negative experience, you win. You discover that no matter how bad, no matter how negative the experience is, there may be a lesson of value in it that could give you knowledge and power to ultimately achieve or become what you want. This is one of the secrets to living a life without regrets.

To summarize, there are two critical parts to make positive thinking effective: 

1) Avoid the flawed assumption that positive thinking means to eliminate everything negative. Trying to do so is impossible in a world where positive and negative experiences always exist. 


2) Positive thinking—and this is your superpower—is the result of allowing and accepting both positive and negative experiences, which help you learn and adapt, giving you the power to create a happy, positive life.