Forget about positive thinking. If you really want to be happy, focus on all the ways your life could go wrong. Test your will power: try not to think about polar bears for the next five minutes.
Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 short story The Imp of the Perverse
is a tale told by a murderer. He has committed an undetectable crime,
killing his wealthy benefactor by poisoning his bedside candle, then
stealing his fortune. He’s guaranteed to escape unpunished. But then,
one day, an “unnameable feeling” creeps over his heart. Poe compares it
to that urge you’ve probably felt, walking near a clifftop or ascending
the Eiffel Tower, to hurl yourself off – for no other reason than how
calamitous that would be. Poe’s narrator knows he mustn’t blurt out a
confession, which is precisely why he does. And why he’s telling his
story, the closing lines reveal, in the cell from which he’ll soon be
escorted to the gallows.
This fictional account of a poisoning may not seem to have much to do
with the modern quest for happiness. But it does: Poe was identifying
how prone we are to what contemporary psychologists less vividly call “ironic effects” – when we try so hard to reach one outcome that we bring about its opposite instead. Some of the first formal studies
of the phenomenon asked people to try not to think of a polar bear for
several minutes at a time; of course, they could think of little else.
This is one major reason that the techniques of positive thinking so
frequently fail. Since positive thinking entails attempting to use sheer
willpower to focus on positive thoughts and emotions, to the exclusion
of negative ones, it’s horribly prone to ironic self-sabotage. Repeating
upbeat affirmations, it’s been shown, can make people feel worse; visualising successful completion of your goals can make them harder to attain.
Assuming you’re a reasonably sceptical person, you probably didn’t
need telling that such cheesy things don’t work. But the assumption
underpinning positive thinking – that trying hard to feel happier is the best way to become happy
– infects our whole culture. It creeps into many corners of the
happiness industry, and the field of happiness research known as
“positive psychology”, even when it’s not acknowledged. When our focus
is too fixed on being happy, our efforts backfire, or as Aldous Huxley
put it: “The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the
less we shall succeed.” Fortunately, however, this ironic principle has a
flipside: although it limits the usefulness of positive thinking, it
points to the neglected potential of thinking negatively instead.
Taken literally, this means there’s happiness to be found in
deliberately contemplating how badly your work, relationships or
personal goals may unfold. The Stoic philosophers
of ancient Greece and Rome called this pessimistic technique “the
premeditation of evils”, and recognised three ways it can bring peace of
mind. First, you may realise that your anxieties were disproportionate
to what might really go wrong; second, you’ll be better prepared,
mentally, should disaster strike; and third, you’ll feel more
appreciative of the good things you currently enjoy. “If you kiss your
child, your brother, your friend,” declares Epictetus, taking this last
point to its logical conclusion, remind yourself “that you love a
mortal, something not your own; it has been given to you for the
present, not inseparably nor forever”.
This Stoic line of thinking has slowly been accumulating empirical support. The influential American psychologist Gary Klein
recommends a business practice, the “pre-mortem”, which involves
imagining that a project has already failed, in the future, and then
asking why. The process helps bring hidden perils to the surface;
permits team members to voice doubts they’d otherwise feel pressured to
suppress; and “reduces the kind of damn-the-torpedoes attitude
often assumed by people who are over-invested in a project”. Meanwhile,
Gabriele Oettingen, a researcher at New York University, has argued that “mental contrasting”
– not glibly picturing success, but focusing on how far you’ve still
got left to go – is a more reliable source of motivation, delivering a
useful kick up the backside.
But there’s another, more expansive sense in which this “negative
path” to happiness is worth pursuing, one that goes beyond tips and
tricks. It’s a shift in perspective, based on the understanding that
were you actually able to defend yourself completely from negative
feelings – which is the implict goal of the optimism brigade – you
wouldn’t be able to feel positive ones, either. We’re only able to feel
love, pleasure, tranquility or excitement because we can feel worry, uncertainty, fear and gloom. “You can’t selectively numb emotion,” is how Brené Brown,
a writer and researcher on vulnerability and shame, expresses this
thought. “You can’t say: here’s the bad stuff; here’s vulnerability,
here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment: I don’t
want these.” Therapy culture champions “closure” as the ideal endpoint
following a breakup or bereavement, but Paul Pearsall,
a psychologist who died in 2007, may have offered better advice in
urging “openture”, a radical insistence on not shutting down in the face
of pain.
Perhaps no corner of the happiness industry better illustrates the
pitfalls of positive thinking, and the benefits of staying open to
negativity, than mindfulness meditation. Judging by the images on mindfulness books,
or magazine photos of meditators smiling serenely by shimmering lakes,
you’d be forgiven for assuming it was a technique for halting your
thoughts, and replacing inner turmoil with monotone calm. Yet anyone
who’s tried to meditate for long knows it’s futile to hope you’ll stop
thinking, or feel perfect tranquility; indeed – in line with the ironic
principle – any attempt to do so will only make things worse. A kind of
resilient stillness does arise eventually, but only once you stop trying
to eliminate certain thoughts or feelings, and see that the key is to
observe non-judgmentally whatever weather, stormy or sunny, passes
across the mind’s sky. “The only thing you need to stop thinking,” says
the meditation instructor Susan Piver, “is that you need to stop thinking.”
There are promising signs that this stance toward negativity may be catching on. Acceptance and commitment therapy,
a novel twist on cognitive behavioural approaches, places special
emphasis on relaxing our efforts to fight negativity as a way to foster
positivity. A willingness to experience failure is fast becoming a
business-world cliche, although there are a few books – Carol Dweck’s Mindset, or Jim Paul’s recently republished memoir What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars – that go far deeper. The Death Cafe
organisation holds pop-up gatherings at which “people, often strangers,
gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death”, bringing the most
negative topic of all back into daily conversation. We seem gradually
more willing to acknowledge that, behind our grinning faces, we’re all
bundles of uncertainty and doubt – and that we are better off that way,
in fact, than trying to eradicate such feelings.
“The truth that many people never understand,” wrote Thomas Merton,
the Catholic monk and scholar of Buddhism, “is that the more you try to
avoid suffering, the more you suffer.” Although I still think the late
American stand-up comedian Ronnie Shakes expressed it best: “I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: ‘What the hell good would that do?’”
