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Start your complementary happiness journey!
Story time: Around the 70s, in a world fatigued and burdened with the aftermath of the wars and the plagues, and in case of India, also a mightily emotional and gruesome partition + the natural transition that follows, the focus was redirected towards (finally) feeling happy. Good intentions.
This gave rise to a culture that we now know as 'positivity' or a 'positive mindset'. However, somewhere down the line as time passed and the world was more or less in a state of stability, reduced and/or at least distanced strife, the counter-culture element of positivity quickly slipped into the mainstream. Positivity was now not a relief factor BUT a requirement. A heavily-sought 'state of mind'; it was almost a look.
In other words, positivity became fetishised. It was everywhere. It was in everyone's language. The 'just think positively ya' and 'when life gives you lemons...' has skipped the existence of no human being in the present times. And what did this do?
Welcome to the era of 'toxic positivity'. Where problems can be solved by reading some self-help books about being happy, you can will positive thoughts into existence if you wake up early enough in the morning and chant some things or bend your bodies into certain pretzel-looking shapes, or just perhaps achieve a better state of mind if you remind yourself to 'smile more’.
Dr. Susan David (Harvard Medical School faculty) and a PhD in the field once shared and to paraphrase: Constantly suppressing our negative emotions in the hope that being 'positive' or not acknowledging any of the 'negative' emotions will eventually help us escape them, but that is not how our systems work at all. You cannot do-away with any set of emotions just by willing them to not exist.
CAN one technically gain some benefits out of these activities and their implementation? Yes. Are they an end-all-be-all solution? No.
It is like looking at the lit-side of the Moon and forgetting that the 'Dark Side of the Moon' exists (I love you Pink Floyd). To even WANT to do this is not normal in the first place. We are not created to live in a perpetual state of 'happiness' with no other emotion in play. It has created a 'moral code' of what is now known as 'good/light/positive' emotions and 'bad/dark/negative' emotions. So what do we do?
Human beings, body and mind, are built to experience a range of emotions. These have developed over centuries of evolutionary processes as a way to serve us, help us be safe, warn us, create a defensive mechanism around us, etc. To try and bypass them entirely is not only unachievable, it is entirely ridiculous!
We learn to accept, feel, analyse and release all emotions that erupt in the core of our being. We do not try to numb them, brush them under the carpet or try to transform them, as if by heavenly magic, into a 180-degrees-opposite emotion on the emotion-wheel.
Be curious about your emotion. Where did it come from? Why now, why so much or so little? Are you even identifying the emotion correctly or is it one thing masking as another, and showing up during an entirely unrelated episode as a third thing altogether?
Ask those questions of yourself, of your loved ones. Seek help. Seek help in educating yourself about tools that will equip you to better manage your emotions. Understand how you can turn a seemingly negative emotion into one of the most transformative and powerful channels of positivity.
There are no shortcuts. Be curious about yourself.
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