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Ali Abdaal, Why Positive Thinking is Bad for You (1)

Why Positive Thinking is Bad for You (1)

- 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,


Why Positive Thinking is Bad for You (1) Γιατί η θετική σκέψη είναι κακή για εσάς (1) Why Positive Thinking is Bad for You (1) Por qué el pensamiento positivo es malo (1) Pourquoi la pensée positive est mauvaise pour vous (1) Waarom positief denken slecht voor je is (1) Porque é que o pensamento positivo é mau para si (1) Почему позитивное мышление вредно для вас (1) 为什么积极思考对你不利 (1)

- So I think we've probably taken positive thinking too far. - So I think we've probably taken positive thinking too far.

- Positive thoughts. - Positive thoughts. - Pensamientos positivos.

- 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 - En este video, vamos a repasar tres razones.

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, Vamos a hablar del primer efecto,

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. y ayuda a que todos tus problemas desaparezcan.

And the idea does have some good parts about it,

but there is a danger that we take things way too far. pero existe el peligro de que llevemos las cosas demasiado lejos.

Up to a certain point Hasta cierto punto

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, de hacer este personal de pensamiento positivo,

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, entonces nos engañamos a nosotros mismos,

we trick ourselves into thinking that nos engañamos a nosotros mismos pensando que

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, Cuando paso dos horas investigando sin sentido,

an hour browsing Twitter on the toilet una hora navegando en Twitter en el baño

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 Y la razón de eso es probablemente que se quedó sin energía.

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) (sorbos de bebida)

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, Como, si eres una persona con baja autoestima de todos modos,

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. Si alguien quiere comprobarlo.

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. y tal vez incluso abrazar la visualización negativa.

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, generalmente reduce nuestra presión arterial sistólica,

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. como algo que ayuda a mejorar nuestro rendimiento.

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, a, ¿y si nadie se suscribe?

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 ayuda a "eludir los efectos calmantes de soñar

and mobilised dreams as a tool y movilizó los sueños como herramienta

for prompting directed action." para impulsar la acción dirigida".

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. vamos a encontrar obstáculos en el camino.

And if we're just like single-mindedly Y si somos como de una sola mente

focusing on positive thinking,

we are deluding ourselves into thinking nos engañamos pensando

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 en una variedad de tareas de puntos y problemas matemáticos

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, Obviamente, esto es correlación más que causalidad,