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The Problem With Positive Thinking
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times explains research into how our mindset can influence results. The common refrain when striving for a goal is to stay positive and imagine success — people say this will help you accomplish what you want. But a series of psychological experiments show such thinking tends to have exactly the opposite effect. "In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week. One group was asked to imagine that the week would be great. The other group was just asked to write down any thoughts about the week that came to mind. The students who had positively fantasized reported feeling less energized than those in the control group. As we later documented, they also went on to accomplish less during that week." This research has been replicated across many types of people and many different goals.
Building on that research, the scientists developed a thought process called "mental contrasting," where people are encouraged to think about their dreams coming true only for a few minutes before dedicating just as much time to thinking about the obstacles they'll have to deal with. Experiments have demonstrated that subjects using these techniques were more successful at things like exercise and maintaining a healthy diet than a control group. "[D]reaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals."
Building on that research, the scientists developed a thought process called "mental contrasting," where people are encouraged to think about their dreams coming true only for a few minutes before dedicating just as much time to thinking about the obstacles they'll have to deal with. Experiments have demonstrated that subjects using these techniques were more successful at things like exercise and maintaining a healthy diet than a control group. "[D]reaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals."
The negative thinkers/pessimists get all the work done, then the positive thinkers say "See, there was nothing to worry about" and take all the credit.
Positive thinking == false hopes
I thought it was just me that was was motivated solely by fear and worry, but apparently it's most people if not everyone! Of course if you expect things to go great already then wtf are you working so hard for, things are going to turn out great anyway remember?
Positive thinking .... I always knew it would never work
Positive thinkers already get some of the mental-benefit of the task being complete. Imagining being finished is just a little bit like being finished. That saps some of the motivation to finish, since they've already received part of the payoff. Negative thinkers have actually increased the payoff even more, because they get the additional payoff of having been wrong about their negativity.
Its always interesting to read articles that challenge the accepted wisdom
That sounds like exactly what I normally do when I daydream.
:|
I have chronic depression that has kept me unemployed for most of my adult life, and I'm fat as hell.
Insanity later.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"I'm positive things are going to suck!"
'Positive thinking' is essentially the vein hope that the current situation you judge as undesirable will change to something desirable just because you desire it. It fails to recognise that being happy and content can be achieved simply by changing your judgement. You can decide to be content with your life. The truth is that those external things; wealth, health, power and fame, are all fleeting. The only thing you really have control over is you. The solution isn't hoping that things will get better, it is accepting that they won't and pleasantly surprised if they do.
Don't worry: I'm skinny as hell and my chronic depression keeps me unemployed 50% of my adult life. The good news is you can get 50% of your adult life back just by eating less. The bad news is: you'll never have more than 50% of your life back unless you stop thinking so negatively(as if you have a choice ;P ). Don't worry: the stink of being a sweaty mass of flesh is easier to wash off than the stink of failure. I haven't found a soap good enough to wash that stench off(but I'll let you know)!
While you wait: work on the being a fatass thing. It's easier to fix than depression in my experience! lol.
I'd rather divide the world into idealists and pragmatists. People on both sides fit into the same spectrum of Talk to Action. To me, idealists that are all talk is just as annoying as pragmatists that are all talk (or whining, as the case may be). The ideal team should be composed of both idealists and pragmatists capable of implementing their ideas.
I just move them to whatever I've accomplished... *Mission Accomplished!*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Or you could just be a little bit less narcissist and not obsessed with yourself so much. Why should I care how super-efficient I can manage my week? How about just doing your job, living your life and generally having fun while caring for others, and so forth?
Not funny. Not remotely funny.
In a business book by James C. Collins called Good to Great, Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.[11]
When Collins asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Stockdale then added:
I don't see why establishing unrealistic views of reality would ever be constructive. Imagining the week will excel in every way and finding out that it doesn't isn't what I consider "positive thinking" -- obviously the week is going to fall short and then the lesson learned is not going to be a habit of thinking positive, it is going to be the opposite, that thinking positive is futile and incorrect.
What I consider "positive thinking" is a realistic perspective which acknowledges the good and the bad but emphasizing the good aspects. Seeing losing your job as an opportunity to start a new chapter. Seeing the misfortune of others as an opportunity to help them. Being thankful for what you already have instead of craving everything you don't. It's a more accurate view in any case -- it's quite rare that losing a job or a relationship deprives the rest of your life of meaning or success, and solving problems actually does give the brain a sense of euphoria, so why should you be upset about encountering them?
The mental contrasting approach the article describes seems oriented along those lines, but to me it's not a matter of "contrast" so much as a matter of compatibility -- positive thinking doesn't contrast with realism, realism simply sets the context in which positive thinking should take place.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The negative thinkers can turn into over-achievers. Thinking that if they're really productive, they will get promoted.
Unfortunately for them, once they realize this is not the case, they get angry, frustrated, cynical.
Meanwhile the positive thinkers become high performers, who achieve less individually and in any given week and realize that working as a group and motivating people is more important than individual contributions. They stay in the game longer and turn into good leaders. They get promoted while the negative thinkers leave in search of the recognition they've earned but don't seem to get anywhere.
Liberty.
And negative thinking doesn't help all that much either. Negative thinking just assumes nothing will ever work.
Pragmatic thinking, on the other hand, asks "What might go wrong?" Pragmatic thinking says, "I want this to work well, but what would keep it from working?"
Pragmatic thinking ends up getting things right much more often than either positive thinking oe negative thinking.
People I worked with would always cringe when I'd say "Hold on a second!", until They found out how often I was right in the end. Eventually they'd bounce ideas off me for projects I wasn't even on to se if they forgot or didn't think of something.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Positive people are dangerous. Because they assume everything is going to be fine, they fail to plan for things to go wrong, and then after you're stuck cleaning up the mess they caused, they sweep it all under the rug and act like everything went smoothly - so not only do you get no recognition for your heroic efforts to fix everything, but they're fully confident in their ability to handle the next situation just as well as the last.
But nobody wants to listen to the pessimists, because they're so negative.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
eat them and pretend it's lemonade
no, wait..
The idea behind positive thinking was never to simply visualize the positive goal, it was to envision the challenges and think through overcoming the challenges.
Ignoring the challenges is an absence of thinking.
My dentist, of all places, has someone they employ who wanders around and asks you if you want a hand or neck massage while you are waiting.
I loved the reaction the first time that I said "no thank you; I prefer to remain tense."
Thinking positively about the future has loads of negative effects. For example, increased Anger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuDAfU3uj6o).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to be in their study. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.
Have gnu, will travel.
Optimists and pessimists share the same shortcoming: both disregard how their action can influence how things will go on.
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Again.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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The study is really more about setting unrealistic goals. You don't want to do that. But from a mental health perspective it is still good to manually steer the ship towards positivity as our minds are so clever picking all sorts of negative trash anyway.
A healthy balance is important.
We could all complain here about the optimists, but the true pessimists would not be able to participate because they have all already killed themselves.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
In my experience, management consists of optimists, engineering consists of pessimists. Which is why managent is sure the project can be done with half the resources, in a third the time, while the engineers obsess over the thousand ways the product can fail. This is why good engineers are not wanted for management.
So it is not about thinking positively or negatively, it is about thinking about the obstacles. This comes down to the problem brought up by another article yesterday. Majority of people don't have good critical thinking.
If life is futile maybe the smart ones are the ones who refuse to play the game?
Life is it's own punishment for the people who refuse to see what is staring them in the face:
Life is suffering, and reproduction is an attempt to shed that suffering by bringing another person in to the world to suffer in your stead. The entire mess only propagates as long as successive generations accept the dogma that "suicide is cheating and not playing by the rules". Plenty of people have spared themselves and their own offspring the eternal hell of existence by putting a stop to their miserable genetic lineage once and for all.
Doesn't it seem strange that human intellect seems to have peaked at it's current level? Intelligence beyond a couple standard dev. above a 100 IQ seems to be negatively correlated with reproduction(or else 100 would be more intelligent than it is).
It is through Darwinian tautology we have failed to get any smarter than we already are. Human intelligence is(and always will be) backed against the wall of suicide. If we're ever going to get any smarter: the world will need more compelling arguments to convince the most intelligent among us to inflict life on anyone that they care about. In particular, living a life surrounded by the mentally handicapped.
You can escape their company, but you are never free from their influence. It's an enormous conspiracy by the people who cannot compete to be carried by the people who can. What choice do they have when they are outmatched and the alternative is to starve?
Keep you head down, stay below the radar, and avoid having to depend on others. When interaction is required, don't talk like a fag and pretend you watch American Idol.
And optimist and a pessimist do their laundry, and after removing it from the dryer, they both discover they have an odd number of socks.
The pessimist thinks, "Damn, I lost a sock."
The optimist thinks, "Wow! An extra sock!"
This all boils down to leading a balanced life. You want a healthy amount of optimism and hope grounded in reality. Leading a life looking too far into the future or the past is not necessarily healthy either. Zen Buddhism teaches that life must be balanced and will seek balance. Furthermore the philosophy teaches us to accept and embrace impermanence versus fear it. The sooner we learn to embrace impermanence, the less anxiety we experience. This then translates to a healthier mind, body, and spirit.
The Three Rules of Life:
1. Visualize an outcome, *really* want it for long enough (and don't jinx it with anticipation), and it'll happen. It really works. -Though, you may not immediately recognize or remember that you asked for it, and you may not be happy with the reality of it when you arrive at its feet, but otherwise... You really do live in a mail order universe.
Meanwhile, paradoxically...
2. Wishful Thinking is Bad: Visualizing a desirable outcome while pretending that you can get there without having to work, without having to hone your skills or make difficult choices and without respecting or recognizing the obstacles along the path is a Bad Plan. Visualizing without Taking Care of Business is like wishing for a girlfriend and winding up with an abusive alcoholic partner and an STD. The Universe delivers but quality control is up to you.
3. Positive Thinking, (as I define it): Maintaining a working assumption that the Universe is an extremely awesome place where amazing things can and do happen if you put in the necessary work, stay aware of objective reality left and right, and react appropriately to challenges. -All while secretly knowing that Reality subtly favors those who are courageous, active and alert; the Creative Principle takes care of its own.
Doesn't it seem strange that human intellect seems to have peaked at it's current level? Intelligence beyond a couple standard dev. above a 100 IQ seems to be negatively correlated with reproduction(or else 100 would be more intelligent than it is).
IQ != intelligence.
I suspect the optimal strategy is to dwell on the success just long enough to convince yourself the goal is achievable and then switch to the mindset of "ok, now I need to make it happen".
Too much thinking about the positive and you feel like you've already won and lose the motivation to put in the work.
But if you only dwell on the negatives your task seems impossible and you again have no reason to work.
I stole this Sig
But the correlation is quite high.
It is true that the concept of intelligence is a bit amorphous, and that the measures we use to put a number on it are not comprehensive. But the serious IQ tests have demonstrated effectiveness at rating our commonsense concept of intelligence, so it is good enough.
It is also true that people who have very high IQ scores tend to suffer social isolation. It is very hard for them to relate with people who can't keep up with them in a conversation, and who aren't interested in talking about pretty much anything that interests them. Further, they must live within a system of laws that was built by such people; the deficiencies scream for correction that will not come (precisely because any corrections require understanding on the part of large numbers of people who can't think it through as far).
The smarties drift towards elitism, as is natural enough in their position, but that only further contributes to the isolation and consequent depression.
It's a tough life. Good thing some of them are smart enough to figure out some useful coping strategies.
In any setting I need to see shortcomings in order to improve on them. So called "positive thinkers" have a tough time dealing with that. (Usually their claim to fame on my work is that they too cooperated. Usually by not inhibiting me.) But as age grinds on, I learned to naturally word my concerns in a positive sounding fashion. I sometimes utter a kind of new-speak -which I detest- but it enables me to proceed with development, so I indulge.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The negative thinkers/pessimists get all the work done, then the positive thinkers say "See, there was nothing to worry about" and take all the credit
In reality no one can be said to be absolutely pessimistic nor absolutely optimistic
Most often the one who truly gets the work done follows the "Expect the _worst_ but hope for the _best_" adage
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
They also have zero common sense and are crap at sport. Any other stereotypes you'd like to trot out?
Assuming the intelligent person is normal in other respects (e.g. not an aspie) he'll be able to adjust to the crowd he's with. And even if he has zero interest in Celebrity Honey Boo-Boo Monster Truck Ballroom Shore he'll either be able to fake it or steer the conversation away without anyone noticing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
College students are very easy to use as test subjects but not representative of the population at large. Their experiences are definitely very far from 3rd world adults and children who make up the majority of the world's population.
Perhaps in a population of people that are oppressed and beaten down positive thinking can get them out of bed, as opposed to the college age students whose positive thinking puts them back into bed. (I'm not an overly positive thinker, just wondering about the test subjects. The results of the Iraq invasion seem to be a good example of overly positive thinking in adults.)
NYT ? Remember they proselytized FOR the Manmade Global Warming hoax (amongst other pseudo science BS)
I wouldnt trust them with ANYTHING scientific any more than I would Algore the Scientific Moron ("the debate is over").
Methodology, Data, Reproducible results.
I can get you a 'study' that claims anything you want. Like anything the NYT writes, facts/logic/truth is something they make up as they go along.
I am wary of all this stuff which says "reserach shows x works this way" and then, another "research shows it actually worked the opposite way". What if you were doing according to wrong recommendations all along? Just do to make it work whatever way you can.
Funny this appears on the 100th anniv of WWI, the ultimate example of positive thinking - everyone though they had a plan and could win quickly. They were positive when they had no right to be. They never took into account modern warfare developments, and went to war completely unprepared - but positive!
But the correlation is quite high.
Actually, no. Fools have arbitrarily decided that certain things are relevant to intelligence (how well you do in school, how much money you make, etc.) without a shred of evidence. We haven't even properly defined intelligence in any sort of rigorous way.
But the serious IQ tests have demonstrated effectiveness at rating our commonsense concept of intelligence, so it is good enough.
Nonsense. Common sense is often neither common and nor does it often make sense. Plenty of nonsensical things used to be "common sense." That is not science, either. The "common sense concept" of intelligence does not matter in the least.
Stop repeating myths.
Optimism: I do not think this word means what you think it means. Visualizing a prior success is not optimistic thinking. Visualizing is imagery. It gives you a reference point so you can determine what needs to get done. The key is determining obstacles and working your behind off to get what your trying to get. Visualizing how it feels to do that thing or how you've done something like that thing before sets up the pathways in the brain to more easily recreate the experience. Wow that article is messed up. Optimism doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a process to called goal setting where you make an achievable plan to get what you want. When Peter Pan throws fairy dust on you, you still have to think happy thoughts and jump out a window before you can fly.
Has anyone contacted Norman Vincent Peale about this?
(I had to say it, there was no obligatory reference to him this entire thread.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
Positive thinking keeps you going.
Negative thinking gets the job done.
Having both gets the job done right.
This article is definitely crafted for a targeted audience.
What was studied in both articles linked to is not what is usually meant by those who talk about the power of positive thinking. As others have pointed out the idea behind the power of positive thinking is imagining successfully completing the goal, not imagining having successfully completing the goal.
I am a fencer. One of the people I fence with often says before they fence someone, "I can't beat them. I am a terrible fencer." Unsurprisingly, after saying this they usually lose, even against people I have fenced and know they are better than. Occasionally, they will be convinced that they are not a bad fencer. They will enter a bout against someone convinced that they can win. When that happens, they usually win, even against fencers I know are better than they are. Positive thinking does not cause them to beat fencers who are a lot better than they are, but it, sometimes, allows them to take advantage when those fencers underestimates them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Hope for the best, plan for the worst...
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism
... given I watched "Pain and Gain" yesterday, in which Positive Thinking gobshite is held up as the inspiration behind meatheads torturing and murdering people. (It's a comedy).
Ultimately it is fear that is the driver of all biological action. You don't perform an action because of what will happen, but rather because of what you fear will happen if you don't. Every single decision you, or any animal, makes can be factored down to fear. In an evolutionary sense this works fine because your sole purpose is to survive and reproduce, but when you expand it to a macro scale it really fucks things up. This fear is what eventually leads people to try to control things, as a mitigation of that fear. But fear is an emotional response, and emotions work to shut down the rational thinking parts of our brains, so at a macro scale, like in a large human society, you end up with things like laws, which again are just people trying to control the world in order to mitigate their fear. Now most laws are fairly rational, but unless you are quite vigilant you end up with things like the Patriot Act or the War On Drugs which are very irrational fear-driven constructs contrived by scared people. And then there are wars which are sort of the ultimate manifestation of fear. Roosevelt's famous, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" quote is great rhetoric for sure, but also surprisingly insightful and philosophical. Does it seem humans have been stuck in constant conflict for the past 50,000 years? Indeed, and if you analyze it and try to discover "why?" it always ends up back at 'fear'. We will never break out of that and move onto the next evolutionary stage until we learn to master our fear. Of course, the first step to that is just to even recognize when you are being driven by an emotional fear response and not rationality. I think that will be the hardest part, getting enough people in the world into a state of philosophical awareness such that it has enough driving force to become self-sustaining.
When an Optimist is wrong, they are disappointed.
However, when a Pessimist is wrong, they are pleasantly surprised.
Pessimism FTW!
The positive thinking is necessary for the sales people. The negative thinking is necessary for the engineers. That's why most companies have a "wall" between the groups.
But the engineers need some of sales' positive thinking to avoid loss of enthusiasm. And the sales people need some of engineering's negative thinking to avoid "floating away into the sky". So the "wall" should not be too high. 8-)
They also have zero common sense and are crap at sport. Any other stereotypes you'd like to trot out?
Assuming the intelligent person is normal in other respects (e.g. not an aspie) he'll be able to adjust to the crowd he's with. And even if he has zero interest in Celebrity Honey Boo-Boo Monster Truck Ballroom Shore he'll either be able to fake it or steer the conversation away without anyone noticing.
In fact, many undiagnosed adult Asperger Syndrome sufferers pick up enough social scripts that people will actually think they're extremely social, extroverts even. In reality they'll all go home and have a private freak out. Of course, at that level it's pretty hard to distinguish between one being on the spectrum vs. being an extreme introvert. This can all happen even if they have an anxiety disorder (frequently comorbid, though usually not of the disabling severities).
Remember, most adults (35-50) currently would never have been picked up during their school years, the identification stuff just wasn't there. Functional adults, from the perspective of work, rarely get looked at twice, even if they're a bloody mess in the rest of their life. Only people with decent insurance and a particular outlook will seek enough medical and mental health help that they'll eventually get identified and helped.
Cheer up, my friends said, things could be worse. So I cheered up, and, sure enough, they got worse.
mark "if I am depressed, it is for good and sufficent reasons, and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality"*
* copyright, me, 1983