If your answer is yes, you've likely experienced toxic positivity. While being positive is essential to achieving your goals, ignoring or suppressing negative feelings worsens things in the long run. Your financial situation may also suffer from toxic positivity if you believe things will work out perfectly and effortlessly. Moreover, your situation will worsen if you try to get out of a difficult financial predicament using positive thoughts alone.
The Difference Between Toxic Positivity and Resilience
We are often told we need to think positively before improving our lives. You cannot advance in life if all you do is sit around and think positive thoughts, even though a certain amount of positivity and confidence is required.
According to Psychology Today, toxic positivity is the avoidance or suppression of negative emotions, attitudes, or experiences in life. When things get tough, people may ignore their emotions and believe in a better future without taking action.
Conversely, resilience is the ability to move on with your life despite adversity, such as being diagnosed with a serious illness or losing your job, even while acknowledging the difficult circumstances. Resilience enables you to endure the negative things that happen in your life and adapt to the feelings they cause, whatever they may be. In certain circumstances, thinking positively may even inspire you. However, ignoring negative emotions such as fear, anger, anxiety, or shame is typically ineffective over the long term.
According to Psychology Today, negative thoughts tend to get more frequent and confusing when we don't address our feelings. This may cause hopelessness or inappropriate rage outbursts. You can propagate "positive feelings" by avoiding tough financial decisions or by trying to pay off debts with toxic positivity alone. Still, you don't make the necessary changes to improve your situation.
Future Issues Result from Approaching Financial Matters with Toxic Positivity
Certain topics may be uncomfortable to discuss. Thinking about death, divorce, illness, job loss, or lack of financial security is one of the most hated things ever. However, planning for unexpected events in advance and even taking steps to reduce their impact on our lives is helpful, such as creating an inheritance plan or an emergency fund.
Postponing discussing life insurance or retirement savings won't protect you from the negative emotions these subjects evoke. If you use toxic positivity to avoid uncomfortable financial topics now, you will pay a price later if you don't have a plan in place to shield yourself from that. Let's assume that you have accumulated debts after you have overspent on the pretext that one only lives once, and you have not set a plan to repay that money.
You could ignore the issue or promise to set a budget, but you never seem to have the time. However, you will not be able to eliminate your debts until you ascertain how much you owe and take the appropriate actions to pay it back. Even though optimism is a positive and healthy quality, it is more difficult to improve your life when you deny the issue.
How to Protect Your Financial Matters from Toxic Positivity?
Although addressing negative emotions like fear, shame, and anger is annoying, doing so helps us process our feelings safely and move forward in life. So, here’s how to protect your life and finances from toxic positivity.
To start protecting your finances from toxic positivity, acknowledge that both positive and negative emotions exist and don't minimize them. Understanding the functions of our positive and negative emotions helps us better manage our feelings, as each serves a distinct purpose. For example, if you’re trying to set a budget, you might say to yourself, “I’ll never be able to do this correctly,” or “I’ll be paying off debts all my life, so why should I care about it?”
If you try to suppress these thoughts and distract your attention, you are likely to rethink them more and more. Instead, address these thoughts and pose questions about them. It may seem strange, but these negative thoughts may cover an unacknowledgeable fear. You might find a way to lessen your anxiety and boost your confidence if you can identify what it is that you are afraid of.
Identifying Toxic Positivity Through Others’ Reactions to Your Issues
It might be simpler for you to recognize that you depend on positivity to put off resolving your personal and financial problems if you observe how others respond to you when you seek their help. Let's say you were trying and asked a friend for support. They might just be trying to get you to see the positive side if they tell you to be grateful for having a job or that things are not as bad as someone else's.
However, you feel frustrated because people don't understand your suffering and push you through these reactions to repress your emotions, telling you that they can't handle negativity. Although most toxic positivity users do not intend to hurt others, their lack of empathy causes the same amount of harm. To experience this, observe how you might minimize others' emotions and encourage them to repress them by using toxic positivity.
Also, you should consider alternative ways to react when someone confides in you about a problem. Even if you say something as basic as "I'm sorry to hear that" or "Your situation is very difficult," others will sense that you are interested in them and their suffering.
Seeking Others Help
Eliminating toxic positivity from our lives and conversations is difficult, especially regarding financial matters. Additionally, it may take some time to consider your feelings and find the source of the issue.
Speaking with a trusted third party, such as a friend, coach, or therapist, can help you better organize your feelings and alter your perspective on them without suppressing negative emotions. Consider working with a financial psychologist if you're having trouble coping with complex emotions or if you're handling your financial affairs using old techniques. Financial psychologists combine financial counseling and psychotherapy with helping you manage your money better.
You must persist, as toxic positivity and other negative traits won’t be eliminated overnight.
In Conclusion
You can’t make any progress if you don’t believe you can solve the issue. Maintaining an optimistic outlook is frequently essential to reaching your goals, whether they relate to your personal, health, or financial situation. Therefore, having a healthy dose of positivity helps you keep moving forward, even when you feel like giving up.
Don’t let toxic positivity hold you back from achieving your financial goals. Therefore, strike the correct balance between having faith in your capacity to realize your goals through thoughtful work and positive overthinking to the point where it prevents you from growing.
It's a challenging mission. However, you can progress if you look after yourself and treat it kindly.
Add comment