How Toxic Positivity Impacts the Stress Response

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation on how toxic positivity and suppressing emotions impacts the stress response or the HPA axis. For those of you who've been with me for a while, I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Toxic positivity means being overly optimistic and failing to acknowledge what's actually going wrong. Because sometimes things are actually going wrong. Actually rarely is anything ever perfect. Emotional suppression means avoiding permanently feelings and or coping with distress. Now, it's occasionally helpful to use your distress tolerance skills to avoid dealing with feelings in the moment and because you know it wouldn't be appropriate to deal with it in the middle of a staff meeting, or it wouldn't be appropriate to deal with it when you are enraged. So using your distress tolerance skills until you can get into your wise mind is different than suppressing your emotions and never dealing with it. Toxic positivity teaches people to ignore or suppress their distress and only focus on the positive. Like math, for example. Toxic positivity with math might be saying that you need this and you can learn this and everybody's able to do it. And in reality, some people just have difficulty thinking in that way. So instead of using that toxic positivity, which ultimately, for those of us who aren't great at math, can lead to us feeling helpless and hopeless and dumb, for example, it's important to focus on what you can do, what your strengths are. Okay, so maybe math is not your strength. What what is your strength? Hiking is another one. Not everybody likes hiking, but some people do. If you don't like hiking, what else could you do instead? And just life in general. Toxic positivity means looking at all the things that are going well and ignoring all the things that aren't going so well. That's kind of like taking your health and saying, I'm going to focus on all the things that are going to are going well with my health. But I'm going to ignore the fact that my blood pressure is high or that I've got diabetes or I've got any of this other stuff going on. I'm just going to pretend it doesn't exist. That's not helpful and it's not healthy. So it's important to embrace the big picture, embrace all of it. Recognize what's going well as well as the areas that have some room for improvement. Since most emotions that are suppressed represent a reaction to a threat, then when you're suppressing these emotions, you may fail to develop a plan to feel safe and empowered. If you are just suppressing this fear that you have, you're not figuring out, how can I deal with it? What can I do to address the situation with the tools that I have in order to use my energy to move toward my rich and meaningful life? It also develops what I call emotional clutter and leakage. And you can think about that with whatever metaphor that you want. But when you aren't dealing with things, they're not going away. You're just shoving them into that closet or into that drawer, and eventually it's going to be really hard to close the drawer and every time you open it, things are going to fall out. That's not helpful either. It can make your inner child feel even more scared and out of control. Your inner child may have experienced traumas, but even if it didn't, as a child, you expected your caregiver to be able to cope with life on life's terms and help you cope with life. And we all have an inner child inside of us. We all have a part of us that feels vulnerable sometimes, and we rely on the grown up part of us to keep us safe. If you're suppressing your emotions, then you're unable to process the loss of things that are important. If you experience a loss and you go, okay, well, sucks, moving on, that might, might not be it for you. Now, everybody grieves differently, but it's important to reflect on losses that you experience. Even though it's painful, you know, what does that mean to you? And how can you integrate it? How can you grieve and move to acceptance? How can you integrate it into your future life? And when you're suppressing those emotions, you're often going to start feeling unsafe. If you're not dealing with the things that are causing you to feel anxious and afraid and hopeless and powerless, then those things are going to build up and eventually those voices or those memories are going to become much louder and more prominent than your feelings of safety and security. So this can lead you to view the world through those glasses that we've talked about before that are shaded with negativity, pessimism and anxiety. And when this happens, your HPA axis or your stress response system is always on. If you're not feeling safe, you're. Your stress response is on. And if you're almost never feeling safe, then your stress response is almost always on. And it's not meant to be that way. It needs time to shut down, to rebalance, to restore. Think about a factory. We use that analogy a lot. It needs time to recalibrate. So how can you address these things? Since we know that ongoing stress is going to make you feel more unsafe and contribute to stronger reactions to threats when you experience them, what can you do? The first technique is called hardiness and this was proposed four decades ago by Kabasa. But it represents commitment, control and challenge. So let's start with commitment. Being aware of all of the things in your rich and meaningful life, the things that are going well, as well as the things that need a little improvement. Improvement is important because those are the things that you want to commit your energy to. And by being aware of those things, it makes it easier to not feel like everything is always bad, which can give you a little bit of hope and courage to address the things that aren't going well with commitment. You want to embrace tragic optimism. And this can be the dialectics embracing the good with the bad, the things that are going well with the things that are that aren't going well, or even the things that aren't going well. But what can you get out of that? What's positive, if you will about it. For example, if you have an illness, nobody wants to have a chronic illness. But the positive could be the fact that you have tools and strategies in order to minimize the impact it has on your life. Yeah, it sucks that you have a chronic illness and, and you are able to mitigate it to a certain extent, which takes us to living. In the end. Another aspect of commitment is being committed to those things that are important and being willing to recognize that sometimes distress goes along with it. I can be afraid to do something and do it anyway. I can have pain. You know, we all have aches and pains and stuff and I can go to my kids recital or, or whatever the case may be. Now sometimes you can't do some things and that's okay. It's important to recognize your limits. But commitment is, is again really important at helping you see the bigger picture and get some balance in your life so you don't feel as powerless and hopeless. Control is the next thing and most of us really like control. It's important to use distress tolerance skills. Distress tolerance can help you control those emotions. Now you're not trying to get rid of them, you're not trying to wrangle with them. But when you use your distress tolerance, you stop feeling like your emotions are controlling you and you start to feeling able to acknowledge your emotions and interact with them, if you will. So instead of feeling like your emotions are just going to completely overwhelm you, you can develop a different sort of relationship where they're not scary, they're not pleasant, but they're not scary either. Starting to develop mindful awareness of what you can and cannot control is also important in toxic positivity. People think, hey, I can control everything, or it's not a big deal, I can control how I feel about that. And that may not be true. So being aware of what you can and cannot control and then changing the things you can and accepting the things you can't, being aware of your strengths and resources is another part of control. Knowing what you can control and the resources you have to make that possible can also help you with tragic optimism. It can help you move away from avoiding looking at the stuff that's scary and say, okay, I have these tools now, how can I use them to fix what's going on? So the benefit of hardiness is helping to process or fix or deal with those stressors. It doesn't immediately make them go away, but it helps you feel capable to handle them. And radical acceptance is another part of control, and that goes along with recognizing what you can't control. Radical acceptance means looking at a situation and instead of stewing in anger about it, just saying, okay, it is what it is, I'm angry about it, it sucks, and I can figure out what to do from here. And then the challenge part of hardiness is exploring what's going on with curiosity and hope you get a diagnosis of a chronic illness, for example, all right, again, not something that you wanted. Exploring it with curiosity and saying, all right, what tools are out there that I can learn to help me manage this, so I can continue to move toward my rich and meaningful life, so I can continue to use my energy to nurture all of those things that are important. And as you start seeing that, as you start getting curious and seeing that there are options, it helps you develop hope. Toxic positivity promotes an increase in stress related physical as well as mental health issues as a result of your stress response system getting out of whack. Your, your stress response system or your HPA axis is not calibrated correctly anymore, if you want to think about it that way. So developing tools in order to help you feel safer and more secure, acknowledging the good and the bad is really important to coping with life on life's terms.