“Try to be positive” is probably the worst advice I have ever been given while going through a hard time.

I know it sounds good.
I know it seems right.

But I believe that this “being positive” everything attitude is making us missing the intensity of our reality.

And it doesn’t help.

Because whatever we feel,
we feel it for a reason.

And when we just “try to be positive”, we really just prevent ourselves from understanding what’s happening.

It’s a way to run away from what’s here and now.

I believe the right tool we should master is called self-awareness.

And “trying to be positive” when we really go through a shit day is not helping us to become more self-aware.

To be more practical, here are a few things that work for me when I go through a shit day:

– Writing down my thoughts, and asking myself questions about what I feel and what could make me feel better (when I feel bad and I don’t know why)

– Closing my eyes, taking a deep breathe, and asking myself questions such as: “what would it look like if it was easy?” Or “what would someone who successfully did this before would do?” (when I feel stuck with a challenge)

– Or just accepting that I feel bad, cancelling everything I planned in my day, and doing random things I love: having a head massage, watching a movie, writing a post, ordering comfort food, going to a random place

Sometimes, in rare occasions, none of this works, and I just end up accepting that this is the low part of the cycle.

It happens, and it’s fine.

What makes “feeling bad” a bad thing, is that we think it’s not normal, and that we should not feel bad.

So we focus on removing the bad feeling.

We “try to be positive”.

But, really, we should just either identify what we could do differently to get a different result, or accept that bad days happen, period.

There is some sort of accepted social pressure about the idea that we should always try to be happy, positive and joyful.

Just fuck this.

What makes us human beings is our ability to feel such a wide range of emotions, and live our life with an incredible intensity.

Each emotion has its role to play.
Each emotion tells us something.

I firmly believe that accepting those emotions and learning from them, as signals, is leading us way further in life than trying to reject those we don’t like by “trying to be positive” for the sake of it.

Let’s stop trying to be more positive.
Let’s try to be more real instead.