- So I think we've probably taken positive thinking too far.
- Positive thoughts.
- Like I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy.
- Think positively.
- [Man] Positive thoughts.
- [Narrator] And Rhonda Byrne film, "The secret"
a film that popularised the law of attraction
at the mainstream level,
there are several examples and quotes
that allude to the fact that disease like cancer
can be cured through the idea of positive.
- In this video, we're gonna go over three reasons
as to why positive thinking might actually be a bad thing.
We're gonna talk about the progress paradox.
We're gonna talk about the first effect,
and the ironic effect.
And we'll talk about why negative thinking
can be a better way of helping us achieve our goals
and also live healthier, happier, and more productive lives.
Right, so within this world of self-help gurus,
there's this idea that if you think positively,
then that'll help you achieve your goals
and help all your problems melt away.
And the idea does have some good parts about it,
but there is a danger that we take things way too far.
Up to a certain point
positive thinking can be a pretty good way
to help us reduce our anxiety and reduce intrusive thoughts.
And because our subconscious brains
apparently can't really tell the difference between
what's real and what's imaginary.
If we visualise positive outcomes
that can help reduce our worry
and increase the amount of joy that we have.
There's a closed study that they did
in King's College, London,
where they got 102 people
who were suffering with generalised anxiety disorder,
and they split them into two groups.
One group they asked to think positively
about specifically the thing that was worrying,
and the other group they asked to just think positively
in general.
The cool thing was that after a month
of doing this positive thinking staff,
both groups had a significant reduction
in their anxiety levels.
Even the ones who were thinking positively in general,
rather than just the ones who were thinking positively
about their specific anxiety issue.
So clearly thinking positively
can help work in those kinds of contexts.
But the fact that our brains can't tell the difference
between what's real and what's imaginary
is also why positive thinking can sometimes be a problem.
And let's start with the progress paradox.
The progress paradox is this idea that
if we think about something, or explain it,
or visualise the outcome enough,
then we fool ourselves,
we trick ourselves into thinking that
we've achieved the thing,
even though we haven't necessarily taken any actual steps
towards achieving the goal that we want.
For example, I'm in the middle of writing a book
at the moment,
and it's very easy for me to
think that I'm being productive,
that I'm actually making progress.
When I'm spending two hours doing mindless research,
an hour browsing Twitter on the toilet
looking for #writinginspo,
and all of this feels like work,
but it really doesn't translate to words on the page.
And therefore, I'm bsing myself into thinking
that I'm being productive and making progress
towards this thing,
but actually, I'm just not making any progress at all.
And so, the advice I'd give to myself is that
I should just stop thinking about
making progress on the thing,
and actually start to actually make progress on the thing.
And there's a similar story that Ryan Holiday talks about
in his book "Ego is the enemy."
And he writes about this guy called Upton Sinclair,
who was running in the 1930s for governor of California.
Now, just before he ran,
this guy, Sinclair, wrote a whole book in the past tense
about exactly what he accomplished
when he became governor of California.
And so, this is like positively visualising the future
to the extreme.
The guy's literally written a book
talking about this future, where he has won this election,
and he's going to be the governor of California.
But after he published the book,
he actually lost interest in running his election campaign,
and weirdly ended up losing the actual election.
And the reason for that is probably that he ran out of steam
because he visualised it so much.
He thought about the future
and then didn't actually do the work taken to get there.
So that's the progress paradox.
It's one reason why visualising and positive outcome
might be bad.
Let's talk about another one.
And that's called the thirst effect.
There's another called series of experiments,
where they got a bunch of thirsty people in a room together.
And they asked them to visualise what it was like
drinking a glass of cold water.
(drink slurps)
And the research has found that
for the people who visualised to drinking the drink,
their energy levels and motivation to actually get a drink
fell because they'd already visualised having this drink.
And obviously they were still thirsty,
like physiologically they were still thirsty,
but psychologically they'd sort of convinced themselves
that they didn't need to drink water.
So the positive feelings and positive thinking
it gives us this kind of full sense of security,
where we think that we're doing well,
and we're achieving stuff,
but the reality is completely different.
But there's also research that shows that positive thinking
can sometimes even make us feel worse.
And that is the ironic effect.
There's another study I found that looked at whether
self-affirmations could be useful.
Believing in the phrase, "I am a lovable person."
Now self-affirmations is one of those classic things
that's supposed to help us think positively,
and help us be happier.
But, weirdly, the researchers found that
people who already had low levels of self-esteem,
they felt even worse about themselves
when they were doing this positive affirmation stuff
like, "I'm a lovable person."
Now this is something that Harvard psychologist,
Daniel Wagner calls ironic effects.
It's similar to the idea that
if you try not to think about a polar bear,
you will end up just thinking about a polar bear.
Like, the study says that it can kind of be the same
with positive thinking.
Like, if you're a person with low self-esteem anyway,
and therefore you feel like you need these
positive self-affirmations
to help you feel better about yourself.
The fact that you're having to repeat this affirmation
to yourself over and over again,
ironically means that you are conjuring up counterexamples
as to why it's not true.
And ironically, making yourself feel worse.
I'll put a link to the study in the video description.
If anyone wants to check it out.
It's kind of interesting.
But it just kind of goes to show that sometimes
thinking positively is not as useful a thing
as it can sometimes seem
if we're not really examining the second-order effect of it.
I think the solution here is to actually reframe
the way that we're thinking about negative thoughts,
and maybe even embracing negative visualisation.
It might seem counterintuitive,
but thinking negatively about the future
rather than positively
might actually help us achieve our goals more easily.
And there's broadly two ways that we can do this.
There's number one, mental contrasting,
and number two, defensive pessimism.
Method number one, mental contrasting.
If we visualise a positive outcome that generally
has a relaxing effect on the body.
Like, if you imagine yourself winning a thing,
or like getting the girl or whatever,
it generally reduces our systolic blood pressure,
it makes us feel relaxed,
it reduces our levels of anxiety.
And so, if you're the sort of person
who feels particularly anxious, then as the earliest study
that we mentioned a while ago showed
positive thinking can help reduce that anxiety.
But the problem is that if you want to do something
that requires taking action and being a go getter,
then in a way that slight sense of anxiety
is quite useful
as a thing that helps improve our performance.
And if you have reduced levels of anxiety,
it might even decrease our performance.
I've certainly found this true in my life.
In med school when I was preparing for exams
on the exams where I was like,
"Oh, I got this, it's gonna be a breeze."
I ended up being quite complacent
in the way that I was studying,
whereas on the exams where I was like,
"Okay, this is actually kind of hard."
I have like some like slight level of anxiety and stress
around this exam,
that meant that I was putting in more effort
into studying for them,
which meant I ended up doing better.
Equally, these days when I run my course
to Part-time YouTube Academy,
though, I always have this slight sense of anxiety of,
a, what if no one signs up to it,
and b, what if the course is bad?
And that means I put a huge amount of time and effort
into marketing the course,
and spending tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of time,
really refining the material,
and trying to make it as good as it can possibly be.
And I think if I didn't have that anxiety,
if I was a bit more complacent,
if I was a little bit less anxious about the outcomes,
then I would have put so much less effort into it.
And it wouldn't have been as good of course, as it is now,
if I say so myself.
And so, if you wanna achieve our goals,
whatever they are,
but we don't wanna fall into this trap of positive thinking,
there is this thing called the WOOP framework,
which is kind of interesting.
And that stands for wish outcome, obstacle, and plan.
And the idea here
is that when we're planning a goal,
like what we want to happen,
and we know what the desired outcome is gonna be,
which is how we often think about goals.
But we should also think about what the obstacles are.
That's the second, O,
and the plan that we're gonna do
to overcome those obstacles,
and the person who came up with this,
this psychologist,
Gabriele Oettingen says that
this method of mental contrasting
helps "circumvent the calming effects of dreaming
and mobilised dreams as a tool
for prompting directed action."
And that's from a book called
"Rethinking Positive Thinking."
So basically it's fine to dream big and think positively,
but we need to contrast that mentally with the obstacles,
and the plan to get around those obstacles,
because whatever we do,
we are gonna come across obstacles along the way.
And if we're just like single-mindedly
focusing on positive thinking,
we are deluding ourselves into thinking
that the road is gonna be easier than it actually is.
This idea of negative visualisation and mental contrasting
is nothing new really.
The Stoics, who I'm a big fan of,
Ancient Greek school of philosophy,
they called this premeditatio malorum.
I always have to look that one up.
It's called a premeditating adversity.
And that basically encourages us to think about
all the different ways in which something can go wrong.
And in the modern day, we call this defensive pessimism.
Now, in a couple of different studies
research has found that by setting low expectations,
and envisioning worst case scenarios,
defensive pessimists, optimise their performance
on a variety of tasks from dots and maths problems
to fulfilling real life goals.
This approach might even work across our entire lifetime.
For example, there's this other really cool study
that they did over 30 years on 10,000 Germans.
And they found that people who were older
were more likely to underestimate
their future life satisfaction.
Like, they were more pessimistic about how much fun
they'd be having later on in life.
But those people who did that ended up living longer,
and having more positive health outcomes.
Obviously, this is correlation rather than causation,
but it's kind of interesting how there is
this effect of thinking slightly pessimistically
about the future rather than optimistically about it,
and how that actually potentially
translates to a real world health outcome.
And so, negative visualisation is great.
I do this all the time,
where I think, like, whenever I'm making decisions,
I think, "Okay,
what is the absolute worst case scenario here?
What are the things that could go wrong?"
And a, usually I find out that those things
aren't actually so bad,
like, if I got rejected,
or if a thing,
a YouTube video doesn't work out,
or if someone leaves a negative comment,
these things really aren't that bad.
But also, it means that once I visualise
the negative outcome,
I can then take steps to try and mitigate the risks
of that happening.
And there's this nice quote from the Stoics that says that
we often suffer more in imagination than in reality.
And so, premeditating adversity, defensive pessimism,
negative visualisation,
all of this is stuff that helps us recognise the suffering
that we do in our imagination.
And hopefully, it wouldn't translate into reality.
Now, as you guys know,
if you've been watching the channel for a while,
I'm a huge fan of stoicism.
It is the school of philosophy that I'm most follow.
And it's what I generally attribute to my baseline,
very high levels of happiness and tranquillity.
And the fact that people say that I'm generally unflappable.
I mostly put it down to the fact that
I've just been drinking the stoicism Kool-Aid
for like 10 years now.
And if you're interested in learning more about stoicism,
you might like to check out my Skillshare class
on how stoicism has made me happier.
That's a class that I've done jointly with my friend, Sam,
who is a researcher and teacher in philosophy.
And he does a lot of research into stoicism.
And we talk about the real world effects
that stoic philosophy has had on our lives,
and how it's made us happier.
If you wanna check that out,
you can sign up to a free trial of Skillshare
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You can also watch the other eight classes
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We've got the stoicism one,
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Again, a video that me and my friend, Sam, did together,
10 quotes from stoicism and how they helped our lives.
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bye-bye.