How Toxic Positivity Leads to More Suffering | Mahmoud Khedr | TEDxMenloCollege

Just imagine you had a really horrible day, okay, you wake up in the morning at 6:20, you close your eyes, you open them again, it's 9:45, you're already late for wherever you need to go, you get on the train. , it's super slow. leave by taking uber five minutes later the tire goes flat an hour later you finally reach your destination before entering the building a bird lands on your shirt look at it, you clean it, you only make it worse you walk slippery, you fall on your face and break your leg finally accompanies you to the hospital someone who is very kind to do so and on the way you complain you are venting about your day and that person tells you how do we stop stop, stop, stop, just be positive, you know, if you are positive, the negativity will disappear.

How many of you think that's helpful? Let me see, okay, and that's a problem. I've seen it everywhere, social media, Instagram and real life conversations. What I've seen on t-shirts and on people walking down the street I initially thought, yeah, yeah, good vibes, just positive vibes, but now I'm so sick of it. I'm here to tell you that

positivity

can be

toxic

after starting a boarding business. The youth mental health crisis I came to question everything I thought I knew about mental health. One of my main takeaways is that our language is very important and, in fact, is one of the biggest problems in America today, that we have no idea how to talk about.

Mental Health Growing up like many of you, I had my share of struggle, from bullying, to racism, to discrimination, and finally, struggles, financial struggles, and then college, adulthood, juggling jobs, internships, clubs, and trying to balance all of that, you know, it hurt, my mental health took a turn for the worse and I was never able to address it throughout the whole process. I was very, very desperate for connection and help and at my lowest point after the failure of my first company and the accumulation of all those challenges that I never addressed, I completely burned out.

I was so devastated. and I had no idea what was happening I started to question my self-worth I started having suicidal thoughts and those thoughts turned into attempts I tried to end my life twice but failed both times the third time, even though I had a much

more

concrete plan. I remember returning from school New York Subway returning home entering my house climbing the stairs almost to my room and my mother grabs my shoulder and turns me around with tears streaming down her face and her voice trembling and she tells me Mahmoud I saw your note, what is this supposed to mean? and she had seen the suicide note that I had written and these are some lines from that note.

I'm tired of being tired. I'd rather be dead. I don't want to. Attention, I swear, I don't want to be a burden on other people. I don't want to be a burden on anyone. That's why I don't like talking to people. I'm very sorry. You can imagine how uncomfortable it was for my mother. She asked me about my grade before it was released. I was supposed to die at that moment I thought she completely ruined my plan my mother kept asking me questions but I was so angry I was embarrassed. She was asking me why she's being so intrusive, so I blocked her, backed off for months, so she finally stopped asking about two weeks ago.

She was organizing this talk and I found the words to be able to explain to her why I said mom, you know? During my deepest

suffering

, I was always instructed to be positive to look at the Brightside to remember that there are children at home who are starving. Anything less than complete gratitude hinted at least to me that I am being ungrateful and that I am spoiled being positive as I came to understand meant completely avoiding the problem and focusing only on the good and I will tell you

more

about my mother later, but when my high school classmates called me a terrorist I chose to be positive when my family was struggling financially I chose being positive when I got fired from my first job I chose to be positive and when I couldn't physically move due to my mental illness I did everything I could to be positive, I believed it to the point that I started telling any of my friends Anyone who would listen to me and wouldn't come up to me, one of my friends would come up to me and say, "Hey, my mood has been feeling really low, oh, just be positive, okay, trust me, this mentality has been working for me." for years, it will work for you or they come to me and say, “Hey, Mom would have been really working at my job lately and she would have gotten upset.

I bet you see this circle right here, this is my zone of good vibes, okay, I don't want negativity inside that and that really hurts, it hurts people, although the disconcerting thing was that all the time, while I was erecting this facade positive, I started doing drugs smiling all day, going around the city giving inspiring talks to people, but I was crying myself to sleep, I was posting on social media The media talks about

positivity

, but I was thinking that I didn't deserve to live, so why is the disconnect right? It's because at the most fundamental level the standard that society is setting for us to be positive all the time is literally not human nature I thought it was. show us the opposite, we know that millions of people throughout the United States and around the world are

suffering

in silence according to the World Health Organization, today depression is the leading cause of disability, one in four people suffers from a mental illness and 50% of These mental illnesses begin at age 14, right when children start going to high school, can you imagine that for a second, when you are 14 years old, you go through one of your greatest emotional challenges and You go out, you try to talk to someone, what do they say to you? you, it's just a phase, you don't know what struggle is, you have no idea, be positive, just get over this and that really hurts people and that's why I started my organization Flora Mind which so far has over 500 young people's skills to manage their mental health. health and being able to thrive and one of the most important concepts that we teach young people is that mental health is a continuum and this is a very good representation of that continuum.

It shows us that mental illness is not mental health, it is not black and white. From healthy to sick, covering all emotions, helps to understand our social, emotional and psychological well-being, and when we should seek professional help. You see if more of us understood we wouldn't have many of the problems. we are having today and the research backs it up from dr. Susan David, a Harvard psychologist, researched more than 70,000 people and found that a third of us judge ourselves for having so-called bad emotions, such as anger, pain, or just being sad, or we actively try to let go of those. feelings now that we don't.

We don't just do it ourselves, we do it to the people we love, to the people who come up to us and talk to us, so when positivity is taken to the extreme it is

toxic

and psychologists are starting to call that toxic positivity, for example. What toxic positivity is is the drive for a state of mind in which we only experience and share positive emotions. It is a tendency to react to one's own or others' suffering with reductive statements of positivity and it is actually very bad for us for a few reasons: first, it instantly shuts down the emotional conversation that is super unique The opportunity for you to seek help or for someone else to seek help is gone and that is why people under NASA can help: studies published in Motivation and Emotion show that those who recognize and validate their emotions progress much better than those who live in denial.

Second, divide emotions. in good and bad and it demonizes the bad emotions that we just talked about, like sadness, anger or even pain, and that directly contributes to Sigma or mental health throughout the country and the truth is that there is no emotion good or bad that each emotion has. a function a function that tells us what is happening in our bodies, what is happening in our environment and how we should react to them. However, it is very important to know that emotions, their data, are not directives, so while you can recognize them, you do not.

We always have to choose to react to them and lastly that is the unrealistic expectation that we need to be happy all the time which is literally not possible by living in a false positive emotional state, we cannot experience real positive emotions and it is So. very similar to physical health, as a man, imagine you broke your hand, God forbid and instead of taking you to the hospital I will tell you, just be happy, yeah, it's not going to work and that's why language matters, language validates our experiences or denies them, it goes away. us feeling appreciated or neglected happy or sad toxic positivity ultimately prevents people from seeking help help that can not only improve their lives but also save someone's life inspired by psychotherapist Whitney Hawkins here are some answers that I give you that you can use below Every time you feel like you're going to give off toxic positivity or see someone else doing it, so instead of just being positive, we'll do it, we'll do it, it's never great to feel like there's something we can do today and that you don't do I don't enjoy it instead of stopping being so negative.

You can say that it is quite normal to be angry in this situation. I'm here for you instead of seeing the good in everything you can say. I don't even know what to say now, but. I'm so glad you told me and any of these answers for almost any conversation, if you stand up and just give that person a hug and tell them you hear them and show them it's going to last a lot longer than a lot of other statements. that will probably hurt them when I was at my lowest point feeling overwhelming shame for not being able to be positive all the time what I wanted to hear more than anything else was my mood I hear you I see you've been going through some really difficult things lately and I am here to help you, it is okay to feel bad when unpleasant things happen and I am willing to listen to anything you tell me, that is empathy, empathy, putting yourself in someone else's shoes and showing them that you are caring for them at that moment you listen to them and do what You do the best you can to give them what they need and that's what really saved my life.

I realized this recently talking to dr. New Earth and Menlo College that my mother constantly asked me those questions, even though I thought they were very annoying at the time, she actually showed me that she cared, she was validating my experience, she was showing me that someone really understood what it was like at that moment . I was once a suicidal kid, I was depressed and she didn't stop for a while, but I'm glad we could talk about it now and I thank my mom recently because she saved my life today. I have come a long way to heal and that is thanks to being able to seek help for my friends and family, my stronger faith, and being able to better understand my mental health.

Today I am better and that is the message I want to convey. and I hope that you leave today and understand that the truth is that it is very important to feel because without feeling we are not really experiencing life. You can have such a big impact by being so thoughtful and intentional with the words we use. We know that when positivity is taken to the extreme it can cause more harm than good and that is why if I could redesign that phrase or idea of ​​only good vibes or only positive vibes, I would say that all vibes are welcome, thank you, thank you.