The Devil's Advocate

94

Stop thinking positive

Ever since The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale hit the bookshelves in 1952, we’ve been swamped by self-help books. Not only does ‘positive thinking’ not work, it’s actively detrimental.

There is a self-fulfilling truth that people who believe themselves to be lucky genuinely are. Researchers tested this by putting an advert in a newspaper saying, ‘If you spot this, claim your reward!’ Of the test subjects who read the paper, only those who’d rated themselves as ‘lucky’ claimed their reward.

The problem, as experimenters have found, is that forcing people with low self-esteem to try to think positively actually made them feel worse.

If I said to you, ‘For the next 20 minutes, don’t think about ...