Why Everyone Says Positive Thinking Is Important

Are you optimistic or not? I guess most of you answer with "sometimes yes and sometimes no."

There is no pure positive thinker and no pure negative thinker. Everyone is between pure positive and pure negative. Even when someone is optimistic about their future, they may feel somewhat anxious about it simultaneously. There is also a case that someone had thought positively of something one day, but the very next day, they were pessimistic about another thing.

However, everyone says you need to be positive. I participated in several seminars in the past year. Every instructor told me how essential it is to think positively for your growth. I read dozens of books, many of which say something like this; be positive, and your life will start to shine. Should we always be positive? Why is it widely said that positive thinking is essential? Let's think about it.

Monochrome photo of a person looking out the car window

Photo by Abigail on Unsplash

Is it wrong to be negative?

Everyone says something like this; positive thinking is essential; you should think positively. Some of them even state that you shouldn't be negative. However, is positive thinking always necessary, even if you force yourself to do so? The answer is no.

As the film Joker (2019) tells us, positivity obsession is harmful.

Joker is about how Arthur Fleck, a citizen of Gotham City, becomes Joker, a well-known antagonist of the Batman series. Arthur has a neurological disorder that causes him to laugh at inappropriate times. He lost his job, unfortunately. He is far from happy. Yet, he is always expected to be happy, or at least try to be. He also dreams of becoming a comedian who makes people happy. It was an awful tragedy. There lies a sort of unnaturalness throughout the film.

The following is Arthur's quote from a dialog with a therapist:

You just ask the same questions every week. "How is your job?" Are you having any negative thoughts? All I have, are negative thoughts.

We shouldn't force anyone – including ourselves – to be positive.

We also need negativity

Not only should we not be obsessed with being positive, but also negative thinking is essential for us. Here are the reasons:

Pessimistic thinking helps us be well-prepared

Kazuo Inamori, known as the founder of Kyocera, a Japanese ceramics and electronics manufacturer, left the following words:

Conceive Optimistically, Plan Pessimistically, and Execute Optimistically

– Kazuo Inamori

What part I would like to focus on here is "Plan Pessimistically." Of course, he pointed out the importance of optimistic viewpoints, but he also said we should be pessimistic in the planning phase.

In the planning process, however, we should review our concept from a pessimistic perspective while maintaining a strong will to achieve our goal no matter what. We should try to identify all potential problems and plan how we will deal with them.

– Kazuo Inamori

A book, To Sell Is Human, also pointed out the necessity of negativity. According to the book, 3:1 is the best positivity-negativity ratio. It means we need negativity. Of course, you will probably not be happy if your positivity ratio is lower than 3:1. Still, a too-high positivity ratio is also not good for you – too much positivity results in low productivity.

Suppose you try to get a perfect score on next week's exam. When will you prepare for the exam? If you're too optimistic, you might think only one hour in the day before the exam is enough. However, you may need more time after one hour preparing for it. Even if one hour is fair enough, someone may suddenly ask you for an urgent affair the day before the exam. Make a plan with a pessimistic forecast, or it will become more challenging for you to get a perfect score.

Negative thinking prevents fatal risks

According to this article, when the mountaintop is before you, it takes more courage to give up than to aim for the summit.

When the writer and his friend were climbing a mountain in winter, they were about to be lost. The visibility was terrible because of a snowstorm, and they stepped off the climbing route. Feeling in danger, they thought it was time to give up.

However, after making up their minds about turning back, the snowstorm suddenly disappeared, and the visibility became clear. The summit came into view. Getting encouraged again to aim for the mountaintop, he suggested climbing up to the top, but his friend immediately declined. Did he want to die? He then realized that he was about to make a mistake. If they had continued climbing the mountain, they might have been dead.

This story tells us that pessimism sometimes prevents you from making profound mistakes.

People embracing negativity are more human

Have you ever liked someone who looked perfect more just because they sometimes had negative feelings? I remember a friend – let's call her Alice – who regarded herself as a negative thinker when thinking about positive and negative thinking.

When I was a freshman in college, one day, on my way home from campus, I was talking with Alice. When we moved on to how we had been before entering college, the friend asked me if she could speak of her negative thoughts before actually starting her talk, being afraid of me feeling ennuye. I said yes, and she began to talk.

I listened to her negative thoughts about her past. She was not satisfied with her college life. She wanted to enter another college but gave up before trying to do so just because it seemed too challenging for her. Looking back at her decision, she wished she had not given up her goal. If she had not given up her goal, she would not be regret giving up her dream.

Listening to what she said, I was surprised she had negative thoughts. She always looked cheerful, as if she had nothing negative inside. Come to think of it, however, who is a pure positive thinker? Her story reminded me that even cheerful people sometimes have negative thoughts. Naturally, everyone has a dark side in their mind. I often have negative thoughts, so I felt empathetic while listening to what she told me. Also, I came to like her more after knowing she sometimes gets negative feelings.

Negative feelings can be the power to lift you up

There's more to Alice's story.

After speaking of everything about her regret about giving up on entering the college where she wanted to enroll the most and about her dissatisfaction with her college life, she began to talk about what she would do in the future as if she declared to herself. She said she would study more and more to work on challenging tasks at graduate school. Her negative feelings stem from her dissatisfaction with the status quo. Although she was negative, simultaneously, she was ambitious. Being impressed, I listened to her silently yet intently.

A few years later, I heard from a friend from my freshman year that Alice became one of the most prominent students in the faculty. On top of that, I saw her face on an official college brochure a few years later. She was introduced in the brochure as a student with excellent academic success. I was glad to know she studied hard as decided and, as a result, achieved academic success in her college life.

She changed her negative feelings to the power to lift herself up.

So why everyone says, "Be positive?"

So here arises a question: why is positive thinking emphasized, although negativity is equally essential? That is because positive thinking is more difficult for our brain to practice than negative thinking.

A book, Insta-Brain, shows us the evidence. Since our ancestors lived in a world far more dangerous than today, imagining a bad scenario every time was an essential survival strategy. Those who wrongly regarded the grass crunching in the bushes as a sign of an enemy's approach were more likely to survive than those who did the opposite.

Recently, however, more and more people have lived in a world with little or no life-threatening danger. And the problem is that human brains have mostly stayed the same since our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Even if we make some mistakes, they are often not fatal, but our brains tend instinctively to think negatively because our brains are not adapted to the non-brutal world.

As a result, we're more likely to think too negatively when we should be more optimistic than to think too positively when we should be more pessimistic. If I suddenly send a chat message to someone I have not seen for a long time, it might embarrass them, I want to change my hairstyle, but friends of mine might think it does not suit me, or what if I try a project I have never done before and fail? Even if my sudden message surprises a friend, even if someone thinks my hairstyle is terrible, even if I fail to finish a project successfully, it is not the end of the world.

Easier said than done, of course. That's why many people emphasize the importance of being positive.

Conclusion

The importance of positive thinking is often stressed. However, it's not because being positive is better than being negative. Negativity has a good side. People say we should be positive because we tend to get negative even when we don't need to. You don't have to force yourself to be positive. You can try to be a little more positive when you get tired of being negative.

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