Positivity Has a Limit

When a problem feels overwhelming, jumping straight into problem-solving can backfire. Today’s issue covers how to give useful support to others, process difficult emotions effectively, and stay grounded through uncertainty.

Today’s Quick Overview:

🔬 Science Spotlight: The surprising cost of emotional suppression…
🛠️ Tool of the Week: Listen, help, or encourage?…
📰 Mental Health News: Trauma impact on heart health; findings on everyday drinks…
🙏 Daily Practice: Let hope guide today's next step…

Most mental spirals come down to two things: a detail we need to go find, or an outcome we simply have to wait out.

When anxiety kicks up, name the specific thing bothering you. Ask yourself: Is there a fact here I can actually look up, or am I spinning on an outcome I can't control?

Pushing a feeling down doesn't neutralize it. It just prolongs the physiological arousal underneath.

The Reality Check for Advice

Good advice needs to fit your actual life. This free guide offers a simple 4-step check to run before turning someone else’s strategy into your personal rulebook, along with a practical framework for keeping what works and discarding the rest.

Toxic Positivity vs. Compassionate Positivity: When "Stay Positive" Becomes Harmful

Hayley Bilski (Accredited Mental Health Social Worker)

What Is Toxic Positivity?

There has been a lot of talk within my practice and online content about staying positive and being optimistic when things are tough. I am certainly an encourager of staying on the optimistic side of life. However, where I challenge this is when the lesson becomes about avoiding and ignoring the hard parts and staying with toxic positivity.

Demanding that we only feel happy or grateful, dismissing, minimising, and denying emotional pain, grounding in false promises, and believing that all we need to do is simply change our attitude about a challenging situation are all forms of toxic positivity.

Influencer culture is very prominent. Watch a YouTube video or scroll through Instagram and other forms of social media and we are likely to see this all around us. Sayings such as "Good vibes only," "Choose happiness," and "Manifest your best life" are in abundance. Influencers, self-help gurus, and sometimes friends and family promise that if we simply change our mindset, we can change our reality.

When Positivity Becomes a Trap

For someone struggling with anxiety, low mood, a hard life circumstance, or a lack of direction, these words may sound like a lifeline. In reality, they are a trap. Forcing ourselves to stay positive all the time does not get to the core of our challenges or cure pain. In fact, it may lead to the very opposite, creating a cycle of shame and failure as we compare ourselves to what seems like others' successes and perfection.

Why Forced Positivity Fails the Vulnerable

When people are vulnerable at a particular moment in their life or in pain, we often seek the guidance of and look up to role models, whether known to us or at a distance online or within the celebrity world. Often the encouragement to stay with constant cheerfulness can be extremely unhelpful for several key reasons:

There is an implication that if we are sad or anxious, we are simply not trying hard enough.

It creates a kind of secondary shame where we already feel bad, and then there is the added layer of feeling bad for feeling bad.

Reality is tainted. Within the human experience, we are all going to feel grief, systemic challenges, and pain as we learn and grow, and a positive attitude alone cannot move us away from this natural human experience.

A false persona is created, where we are forced to wear a mask and disconnect from our authentic selves.

There is a tendency for others to monetise joy. Fake happiness sells products. Toxic positivity put out there into the world can mean that we are comparing our messy, authentic life to a commercial product for another's gain at the expense of our own peace.

Fear of vulnerability may mean a defence mechanism for some, to hide their own deep insecurities and fears of being judged.

Finding the Balance: Hope Without Expectation

In having these realisations, this does not mean we need to choose bitterness or victimisation in our realism. The healthiest path lies in a beautiful balance and an understanding of the difference between hope and expectation.

Holding hope is a vital daily act of strength and resilience within what is happening in our lives, whilst expectation demands a specific outcome and may breed resentment or disappointment. When we live with hope, we are able to feel deeply for a current situation while remaining optimistic that this will not always be the same and shall pass.

We are able to hold a number of feelings all at once, or as I like to call it, "everything all at once like looking into a kaleidoscope." Hope also gives us a direction to walk towards, whilst expectation demands that we rush things and arrive there immediately. Without the immediate pressure, we are able to hold space for all that comes up and take small, less overwhelming steps towards betterment.

What Real Resilience Looks Like

Real resilience and healing do not look like a glossy social media feed. It requires space for uncomfortable emotions and helpful, everyday practices and rituals. This requires hard inner work in small parts to stay real and connected to what truly matters to us.

Emotional validation allows us to acknowledge that anger, grief, fear, envy, and other uncomfortable emotions are normal, necessary human experiences. Self-compassion provides us with the opportunity to treat ourselves with the same kindness that we would to a friend who is hurting.

Acceptance of our reality whilst acknowledging that this is hard is another form of authenticity and self-compassion. As is building curiosity and awareness over judgement, working with understanding and listening to our anxiety and other emotions, instead of telling ourselves to simply stop feeling what we feel.

Moving Toward Compassionate Positivity: Practical Steps

Set internal boundaries against forced positivity. Take time through walking, pausing, journalling, or talking with others to listen to your inner instincts and what feels genuinely right for you. Interrupt your own harsh inner critic when it demands constant happiness, and work on building yourself up in a manageable way.

Unfollow or set boundaries around influencers or those in your life who make you feel guilty for having normal human emotions. Seek out role models who show vulnerability and honesty.

Attempt to catch the word "should," understanding that this word could be toxic and in relation to what others or society expects of us, rather than what we are needing.

Notice a toxic phrase. Gently say to yourself, "This is an unrealistic standard, and not within my capacity, needs, or reality."

Allow emotional permission to feel entirely okay to feel sad or anxious, and to move slowly with this towards actual healing.

Use "and" or "yet" statements. Combine your current pain with your mandatory hope, allowing real and difficult emotions whilst understanding that small steps will mean change for the better. Aim for feeling physically and emotionally comfortable and safe, building the courage and strength to work towards a more meaningful life.

Tune out the outside noise. Take steps today by muting social media accounts that make you feel guilty about your mood. Set boundaries with certain people in your life, and make time to go within.

Mentally wish others well on their journey, and recognise that their path is their path. Then quietly turn your attention back to your own grounded reality. The more you learn to trust yourself, the less emotional outside noise you will hear.

Check in with yourself. Ask yourself if you are being honest, or feeling the need to lie to yourself or others. Look at whether there is guilt involved. Are you allowing room for your own capacity based on what is going on in all areas of your life?

Redefine what success looks like and embrace the ordinary everyday things in life. Each person walks in their own lane, and to each of us, this will look different. For some, a simple warm cup of tea or walk in the forest will be enough. For others, running a marathon or building an empire, and everything in between. I like to think about staying in my own lane and encouraging others to do the same.

Shame Into Self-Compassion

It is completely natural to feel a deep sense of shame and discomfort when our internal reality does not match the glossy, perfect external reality everyone else seems to be projecting. However, finding quiet moments to understand what really matters and what we truly need individually can support us in turning that shame into self-compassion, peace, and productivity.

Stepping back onto our own personal path and learning to understand and grow this path is the ultimate freedom towards an authentic and meaningful life.

Hayley Bilski is a social worker with over 20 years of experience and founder of Mindspace Therapy Practice in Sydney, Australia. She works in person and online using Nature-Focused, Compassion-Based, Acceptance and Commitment, and Cognitive Behavioural therapeutic approaches. She is passionate about guiding people towards being the best version of themselves and working through challenges with greater self-compassion. Connect with Hayley at Mindspace Therapy Practice.

Ask Before Encouraging

What it is: When someone we care about is struggling, our reflex is to fix, advise, or point to a silver lining. Well-intentioned as it is, that can feel dismissive. "Ask Before Encouraging" means checking what kind of support someone wants first: "Do you want me to just listen, help you brainstorm, or offer some encouragement?"

Why it works: Matching your response to what someone actually needs prevents miscommunication. It also takes the pressure off you to guess the "right" thing to say.

How to practice it:

Step 1: Resist the immediate fix. When someone comes to you with something difficult, pause before jumping to reassurance or solutions.

Step 2: Ask the question. "Do you want me to listen, help you think through it, or give you some encouragement?"

Step 3: Follow their answer.

Step 4: Give what they're asking for. Don't slip into reassurance when they asked for listening. Don't offer solutions when they asked for encouragement. Meet them where they are.

Step 5: Check in if they're unsure. If they're unsure, listening is usually the safest place to start.

When to use it: When someone shares something hard and you're unsure how to help, in relationships where you tend to jump to fixing, or when your encouragement isn't landing.

Letting Your Feelings Happen Gets You Past Them Faster

Read the Study

The Research: A study examined how suppressing versus accepting emotions affected people with anxiety and mood disorders. Sixty participants either suppressed or accepted their reactions while watching an emotion-provoking film.

Both groups felt similar distress during the film, but afterward diverged: the acceptance group recovered faster, showed less negative emotion, and had heart rates drop more quickly, while the suppression group's heart rates stayed elevated longer. Suppressing didn't reduce distress and slowed recovery.

Why It Matters: Suppression often creates the illusion of control: allowing someone to function in the moment, while keeping the sympathetic nervous system heightened in the background.

Trying to actively push down emotional distress doesn't neutralize it; it simply prolongs physiological arousal. Acceptance lowers heart-rate reactivity by removing the secondary exertion of fighting the primary emotion.

Try It Today: Next time a difficult feeling shows up, name it out loud: "I'm feeling anxious right now." Sit with it for thirty seconds without trying to change it. You'll likely find it doesn't consume you, and letting it be there moves it through faster than fighting it did.

I can carry hope today without predicting the future. Real hope isn't guaranteeing an outcome; it's trusting that the effort and care I bring right now are worthwhile on their own terms.

Recall a time you stayed committed to a hard path not because the outcome was guaranteed, but because the work aligned with your values. Appreciate your capacity to keep going when the horizon was unclear.

You don't need artificial confidence about the outcome to stay committed to your present. You can hold uncertainty about the future while staying grounded in why you're acting today.

Name one uncertain situation you're navigating. Set aside how it resolves and ask: does this work matter to me today, regardless of outcome? Write your answer down.

Evening Reset: Notice, Write, Settle

Picture climbing a steep mountain trail wrapped in low cloud cover. You can't see the summit above or the valley floor below, only the single stone step directly in front of you. Placing your boot firmly on that next stone requires no knowledge of how many miles remain until the ridge. The mountain doesn't need to reveal its peak for the climb to be real and purposeful. Tonight, consider where you've been pausing your ascent because the peak remains out of view.

Spend three minutes writing: Where have I delayed feeling hopeful until I had proof that things would work out? What changes if I measure hope by the purpose behind my actions rather than the predictability of the result?

Close your notebook and reflect on these three points:

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." — Václav Havel

Hope doesn't require a good outcome. It requires the certainty that what you're living through makes sense. That's enough to keep walking.

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Coming Tuesday: When your anxiety spiral is about family, learn to separate your activated nervous system from their responsibility, so you can regulate without making the visit about managing their reaction to you.

Researched and edited by Natasha. Designed with love by Kaye.

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*The Daily Wellness shares educational content only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice and diagnosis. Please consult a licensed provider for personalized care.