Toxic Positivity

Optimism is generally thought to be desirable and useful and there is ample evidence that shows the benefits of optimism (see for example Gallagher, Lopez and Pressman 2013; Andersson 1996; Rasmussen and Wallio 2008) for health and well-being. However, there is evidence that optimism can have drawbacks in some circumstances. Phenomena such as unrealistic optimism (Weinstein 1980), optimism bias, and illusion of invulnerability (Shepperd, Klein, Waters and Weinstein 2013) are among these potential problems with optimism and can have some harmful effects. More recently, some people have gone one step further and have begun considering the possibility that optimism, when taken to the extreme, can become toxic and harm in ways that are far more serious than the kinds of drawbacks previously identified. This kind of optimism has been termed toxic positivity (TP).

Some might find the very concept of TP exceptionally counterintuitive because placing the word toxic next to positivity can seem to amount to something of an oxymoron. But why is this the case? Regularly we encounter (often platitudinous) messages in a variety of settings and mediums that encourage us to take an optimistic outlook on life regardless of circumstance. These messages communicate that positivity is “both a goal and an obligation” (Goodman 2022) and this message becomes internalised.

Positivity as a goal and obligation is not a new idea, but has a long history that, according to Marianna Alessandri (2024), dates back as far as Plato and his allegory of the cave. This allegory (very roughly) tells the story of prisoners who are stuck in a cave. They are constrained in such a way that all they can see are shadows cast on a cave wall by puppets that imitate what is in the world. This makes the prisoners think that the shadows are reality. However, one day a prisoner escapes from the cave and comes into the sunlight where he sees the real world. In this allegory, the sun represents all that is good, true and beautiful. This is the origin of what Alessandri (2024) calls the “Light Metaphor” which holds that all that is light (positive) is good and all that is dark (negative) is bad.

The Light Metaphor is still prevalent and has been firmly cemented in our social imagination with the rise of self-help literature that insists that positive thinking is a cure-all solution to life’s ills (Goodman 2022). This sort of thinking really gained traction in the modern world with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby’s New Thought Movement and publications like Norman Vincent Peale’s (1952) The Power of Positive Thinking. The view that positivity ought to be the default position has become so internalised that often the very experience of a negative emotion is enough to make us think that there is something wrong with us, even though the experience of negative emotion is a normal part of the human experience (Goodman 2022). In encountering overly optimistic responses to our appropriate negative emotions, we might become victims of TP.

TP, in my view, is “the phenomenon of people being positive and optimistic to a degree that is unreasonable in a given situation, and as such makes others feel as if their own (less than positive) feelings are invalid or in some way wrong, thus having the potential to cause harm to the victim” (de Rijk 2025). For example, if you have lost a loved one and express your grief to a friend and your friend responds by telling you that your loved one is in a better place, so you should not be sad, you may have experienced TP.

There are at least four salient features of TP (de Rijk 2025):

1. Appropriate emotion – usually, one becomes vulnerable to TP when one expresses an appropriate negative emotion which becomes the target of TP.
2. Unreasonableness – in most cases of TP, the perpetrator is placing an unreasonable expectation on the victim to maintain optimism given the circumstance.
3. Dismissal – the perpetrator, at a minimum, does not take the victim seriously in their expression of emotion and may even ignore it or try to explain it away.
4. Potential harm – including (but not limited to) emotional suppression, gaslighting and mental health effects.

The harms that might arise from TP give us enough reason to take this phenomenon seriously, but there is a further (but connected) reason that warrants giving special attention to this phenomenon. This reason is, quite simply, that TP often masquerades as something good. This is the case because we have been socialised not to question anything that appears positive. Indeed, if one were to ask the one who responded in a toxically positive way why they offered such a response (rather than, say, just acknowledging that a person is hurting) they would likely say something about just wanting to make the person feel better, or trying to help the person. This shows that TP is often well-intentioned, although much of the time a toxically positive response might be understood as a perfunctory “socially acceptable” response rather than something that one carries out fully intentionally. In any case, this is part of what makes TP so dangerous—it usually flies under the radar as something good. The consequence of TP being perceived as something good is that by the time it is identified as problematic, much of the damage that it can do has already been done.

But what might we do about this? One suggestion is to be more mindful of our responses to people expressing appropriate negative emotions. Take a pause before offering a perfunctory response and consider the effect that your words might have on someone who is already vulnerable. While optimism is not inherently bad, there can be cases where it does more harm than good and, in these cases, we should strive to avoid these harms if at all possible.

Works cited:

Alessandri, M. (2024). Night vision: Seeing ourselves through dark moods. Princeton University Press.

Andersson, G. (1996). The benefits of optimism: A meta-analytic review of the Life Orientation Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 21(5), 719-725.

de Rijk, S. J. (2025). Toxic Positivity and Epistemic Injustice. Episteme, 1-17.

Gallagher, M. W., Lopez, S. J., and Pressman, S. D. (2013). Optimism is universal: Exploring the presence and benefits of optimism in a representative sample of the world. Journal of Personality, 81(5), 429-440.

Goodman, W. (2022). Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy. Hatchette: UK.

Peale, N. V. (1952). The Power of Positive Thinking. Prentice Hall

Rasmussen, H. N., and Wallio, S. C. (2008). The health benefits of optimism. In Lopez, S.J. (Ed.), Positive Psychology: Exploring the Best in People (p. 131-151). Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Shepperd, J. A., Klein, W. M., Waters, E. A., and Weinstein, N. D. (2013). Taking stock of unrealistic optimism. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(4), 395-411.

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of personality and social psychology, 39(5), 806-820.

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