The Power of Negative Thinking

By OLIVER BURKEMAN
Published: August 4, 2012
From  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/

LAST month, in San Jose, Calif., 21 people were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called Unleash the Power Within, starring the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. If you’re anything like me, a cynical retort might suggest itself: What, exactly, did they expect would happen? In fact, there’s a simple secret to “firewalking”: coal is a poor conductor of heat to surrounding surfaces, including human flesh, so with quick, light steps, you’ll usually be fine.

But Mr. Robbins and his acolytes have little time for physics. To them, it’s all a matter of mind-set: cultivate the belief that success is guaranteed, and anything is possible. One singed but undeterred participant told The San Jose Mercury News: “I wasn’t at my peak state.” What if all this positivity is part of the problem? What if we’re trying too hard to think positive and might do better to reconsider our relationship to “negative” emotions and situations?

Consider the technique of positive visualization, a staple not only of Robbins-style seminars but also of corporate team-building retreats and business best sellers. According to research by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues, visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it. She rendered her experimental participants dehydrated, then asked some of them to picture a refreshing glass of water. The water-visualizers experienced a marked decline in energy levels, compared with those participants who engaged in negative or neutral fantasies. Imagining their goal seemed to deprive the water-visualizers of their get-up-and-go, as if they’d already achieved their objective.

Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!” “My life is filled with joy!” Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not.

Even goal setting, the ubiquitous motivational technique of managers everywhere, isn’t an undisputed boon. Fixating too vigorously on goals can distort an organization’s overall mission in a desperate effort to meet some overly narrow target, and research by several business-school professors suggests that employees consumed with goals are likelier to cut ethical corners.

Though much of this research is new, the essential insight isn’t. Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty. The Stoics recommended “the premeditation of evils,” or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope. Besides, they noted, imagining that you might lose the relationships and possessions you currently enjoy increases your gratitude for having them now. Positive thinking, by contrast, always leans into the future, ignoring present pleasures.

Buddhist meditation, too, is arguably all about learning to resist the urge to think positively — to let emotions and sensations arise and pass, regardless of their content. It might even have helped those agonized firewalkers. Very brief training in meditation, according to a 2009 article in The Journal of Pain, brought significant reductions in pain — not by ignoring unpleasant sensations, or refusing to feel them, but by turning nonjudgmentally toward them.

From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure” from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.

The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises. The psychological evidence, backed by ancient wisdom, certainly suggests that it is not the recipe for success that it purports to be.

Mr. Robbins reportedly encourages firewalkers to think of the hot coals as “cool moss.” Here’s a better idea: think of them as hot coals. And as a San Jose fire captain, himself a wise philosopher, told The Mercury News: “We discourage people from walking over hot coals.”

Oliver Burkeman is the author of the forthcoming book “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.”

By OLIVER BURKEMAN

Published: August 4, 2012

From  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/

How Our Personalities Are Linked With Our Thoughts

The Huffington Post  |  By Amanda L. Chan 

Posted: 04/12/2012 5:45 pm Updated: 04/12/2012 5:50 pm

Article from Huffington Post

What kinds of memories do you tend to recall? Are many of them happy? Sad? Do you dwell on them?

A new study in the journal Emotion shows just how our personalities are linked with the sorts of thoughts we have, and the best ways to deal when we are stuck on negative memories.

Researchers found that men and women who are extroverted are more likely to look back at positive things that have happened in their lives, moreso than negative things.

"Our findings provide initial evidence that extraversion, typically associated with being assertive and experiencing excitement and positive affect, also contributes to remembering more positive personal experiences and to maintaining a positive state," the researchers wrote in the study.

Men and women with what experts call "neuroticism" -- when a person dwells on negative memories -- have more negative thinking experiences, though. The researchers found that women with neuroticism are more likely to "return to the same negative memories again and again," known as rumination, the release said, which can be linked with depression.

Men with neuroticism, on the other hand, tend to remember a greater quantity of negative memories than positive ones, compared with men who are less neurotic, according to the study.

"Depressed people recollect those negative memories and as a result they feel sad," study researcher Florin Dolcos, of the University of Alberta, said in a statement. "And as a result of feeling sad, the tendency is to have more negative memories recollected. It's a kind of a vicious circle."

The study included 71 people -- 38 women and 33 men. None of the study participants were diagnosed with depression or any other kind of emotional disorder.

Researchers also examined the strategies people used to cope with their negative memories. Some people tried to suppress whatever memory was causing them emotional pain. Others, by contrast, turned to reappraisal: a mechanism in which a person tries to convince him or herself that a bad situation really wasn't all that bad -- or that there was good that came out of it.

The researchers found that men who tried to reappraise their bad memories were also the ones who remembered more positive memories overall than others. However, suppressing bad memories didn't really seem to make any difference in how men recalled positive or negative memories.

Women who suppressed their bad memories were more likely to remember those bad memories in the first place, and were also more likely to suffer a bad mood after thinking about those memories, the researchers found. However, researchers did not find that reappraisal resulted in fewer bad memories recalled by the women.

Overall, the researchers said the takeaway is that certain coping methods seem to work better than others in terms of what to do when you're conjuring up past bad memories: Channel your outgoing side, don't let yourself ruminate and dwell on negative thoughts, and instead focus on positive memories.

Article from Huffington Post

Getting Positive About Being Negative

Bob Goldman 

Article from Townhall Finance

Do you know what's wrong with the world today? People who think there's something wrong with the world today. Am I right, or am I right? What we need is a lot less doom and gloom and a lot more boom and zoom. And you can quote me on that.

One person who understands positivity is Dale Carnegie. The famous author of best-selling books such as "How To Win Friends and Influence People," and "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" is a widely respected master of motivation, even though he happens to be dead. Now that's positive.

Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc. is the name of the firm that carries on the great man's good work, and I feel positive about being on their email list. Positive and proud, because every time I am feeling a little low, in pops an e-poke in the ribs, reminding me that total happiness and sweet success is only a seminar away.

The latest email that I hauled out of my inbox perfectly proves the point. Like all sensitive souls, I've been engulfed in a huge cloud of despair ever since "Spartacus: Vengeance" ended its season, and I realized that the only bloody battles I'd see on a regular basis would occur when scavengers from IT attacked the remains of executive lunch platters left in the break room. But that cloud gave way to sunny skies when I learned about a three-hour, live online program -- "Overcoming Workplace Negativity with Enthusiasm."

According to my personal email invitation, this program "will show you how to use Dale Carnegie's proven ways to prevent the naysayers, whiners and downers from robbing you and your group of the energy to succeed."

Of course, if you are the kind of sicko who thinks that the naysayers, whiners and downers are the only honest and interesting people in your company, you may need a second, more intense seminar -- one that can turn you into a workplace automaton who never questions authority, never has a negative thought, and lives to follow the directives of upper management. In other words, a person very much like your supervisor.

Such is the power of positive thinking that it can also teach you "specific techniques for dealing with that burned-out feeling so you can lead with confidence and enthusiasm."

This portion of the program might be useful for some insane workaholic types, who never don't come in late, don't take three-hour lunches, and refuse to slip out the back stairs well before the closing whistle, but it is probably of limited benefit to you. Let's face it -- the only way you'll get "that burned-out feeling" about your work is if you actually did some work, and as we both know, that ain't gonna happen.

Carnegie kindly provides an outline for the program, and I'm sure you'll find the syllabus irresistible, starting with topic No. 1, in which participants "assess their own attitudes in relation to the workplace around them." This is a very valuable exercise. If your time at work has left you numb and dumb, this is an excellent opportunity to discover all sorts of new reasons to hate your job.

Once you learn to "identify sources of negativity," which is topic No. 2, you will be more than ready for topic No. 3 -- "Use principles to gain cooperation from negative people."

I'm not exactly sure what principle will work at your work, but you might try the first law of thermodynamics, which deals with energy consumption and explains why it is that even though you accomplish almost nothing in the morning, you still require a two-hour nap in the coat closet every afternoon. (Also applicable is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the disorder in the universe always increases. This explains why when one awful manager leaves the company, the person who comes in to replace them is always much worse.)

You can safely skip topic No. 4, which covers how to "use a process to disagree agreeably." What process could be more agreeable than one of your workplace tantrums, where you hold your breath until you turn red while you kick your feet and beat your desk with your tiny fists?

The fifth and final topic is "Identify solutions for specific workplace negativity problems," but that doesn't really require a three-hour online seminar.

All that has to happen to solve the negativity problem in your company is that you have to quit.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company, but he finally wised up and opened Bob Goldman Financial Planning in Sausalito, California. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@funnybusiness.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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Article from Townhall Finance