The Antidote

The Antidote will explain everything that’s wrong with positivity-based self-help advice and what you should do instead to feel, live, and be happier.

Common sense suggests the best way to get something is to try really hard at it. The psychology of happiness, however, turns this seemingly obvious truth on its head.

The mind is a very noisy place, with all manner of thoughts and judgments coming and going at any given time. When you dedicate a lot of mental effort to scanning your mental landscape for negative thoughts in order to root them out, paradoxically, the opposite happens. Instead of losing them, you’ll enlarge those very negative thoughts!

Plenty of empirical evidence supports this idea, such as the “don’t think of a pink elephant” effect. For instance, research participants who are given instructions to try not to feel sad about some fictional, unhappy event end up feeling worse than a control group who’s given no instructions at all. Grief seems to last longer in those who actively avoid going through it.

And people who repeat positive affirmations – you know, those peppy little mantras – take a happiness hit when they inevitably notice that they’ve failed to live up to them.

How would you feel if you were asked to do something weird, like getting up on a crowded train and announcing the name of next stop? Certainly, people would glare, toss their newspapers at you, or even yell at you to shut up. You’d feel hesitant, even terrified, to go through with it.

But, as Burkeman and others who’ve attempted “self-humiliation” exercises tend to learn, nothing particularly bad happens at all. The imagined worst-case scenario wasn’t accurate, they didn’t feel terribly humiliated, and the feeling of self-consciousness was bearable.

Our modern-day cult of positivity often urges individuals to engage in “positive visualization,” imagining things going right. This is supposed to make us feel happy, motivated, and brave. Unfortunately, positive visualization fails to deliver. Experiments suggest that simply imagining an achievement is too psychologically satisfying — it causes people to relax prior to meeting their goal in reality.

Imagining the worst-case scenario instead counterbalances our tendency towards “hedonic adaptation.” It can help keep us from growing greedy and complacent. Plus, every time you look on the bright side and predict a good outcome, you subtly reinforce to yourself that life would truly be terrible if things didn’t go that way.

But, as the self-humiliators learned, we are often wrong about how bad things will really get, and even more so about how it would feel if they did. Also, with a little perspective, it’s usually easy to see things could always actually be worse.