Whether we’re clinically depressed, suffering a bereavement or just feeling generally down, the world around us is ready to throw a range of clichés and mantras our way, encouraging us to “chin up” and “look on the bright side.”
However, is this kind of attitude really going to change the way we think for the best? Or just make us feel worse about not being the happy, smiley person everyone wants us to be?
During a recent trip to Waterstones I came across a book called Smile or Die written by Barbara Ehrenreich. The general premise is that the notion of positive thinking has fooled everyone for a very long time. She claims the business of positive thinking, motivation and self help is just a money making machine and we have it to blame for a range of things, including recent problems with the economy.
So, what do we think? Should we actually stick a big plaster – or band aid – on our problems or accept our pain as a means of helping us overcome it?
Ehrenreich suggests that maybe we should stop trying to create a perfect utopia and look at what we have, maybe some countries are never going to see eye to eye, maybe some cultures are never going to see eye to eye. In the same vein maybe we’re never going to achieve the perfect happiness that we’re always trying to strive for and once we accept that we’ll have much more freedom.
If we’re talking about personal problems I think it completely depends on the individual. I’ve recently been getting panicked, worried and down about a few things and the best thing that worked for me was for my fiancé to just be mean. He stopped pandering to my worries and told me to go out, get on with it and stop giving a s**t. Obviously I can’t nearly compare that to those with a serious illness or depression – as it happens, Ehrenreich had breast cancer when she realised that positive thinking was more myth than cure – but I do think we should face up to our problems instead of trying to fix them all the time. I don’t think people should live in a state of fear and negativity but instead get real about what’s going on around them.
You can probably tell that I’m a little sceptical about the positive thinking and self help attitude to life. I find the people who are ALWAYS happy ALWAYS confident and ALWAYS trying to motivate us are a little unnerving and are probably the ones with a lot of inner turmoil.
Let’s embrace our flaws, our problems, our illnesses and actually work to battle through them, not just paint a smile on our faces and hope for the best.
Image via Katrina Nicole's Flickr