The Pitfalls of Positive Thinking - Affirmations Versus Optimism

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I'm lucky enough to be a natural optimist. But I don't do positive thinking or affirmations. It's not that I don't think they work. They do for some people, it's just that there are more effective, healthy and easy ways to think!



Positive thinking affirmations claim to work by repetition. Basically, the harder you hit that unconscious mind of yours with the positive thinking hammer, the deeper the affirmation will go!

Do Positive Thinking Affirmations Cause Depression?

No, of course they don't, but the methods of thinking have a lot in common. That might be a little surprising so I'll explain...

Positive affirmations require you to come up with a set of sentences to repeat to yourself, or, for a small fee, you can repeat someone else's.

Benefits: All the time you're repeating your affirmations, you can't be thinking bad stuff about yourself.

Negatives: All the time you spend repeating your affirmations, you're not using your brain to creatively solve problems. And you may be teaching yourself a harmful thinking style.

But what has that got to do with depression? Well, there are several elements to a depressive thinking style. These have been identified through thousands of pieces of clinical research and are now well accepted within the psychology field.

Too much focus on the self. Lots of use of personal pronouns such as "I", "Me", "Myself"

Perfectionistic thinking: unless it's perfect, it's not worth feeling good about.

Globalisation: "Everything's ruined now"

Over-emotionality: responding to even minor events with extremes of emotion - excitement, anxiety, anger and so on.

So how does that compare to positive thinking affirmations?

Next, Affirmations

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