Oliver Burkeman (@oliverburkeman) is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking; he joins us to explain why it’s healthier to accentuate — rather than ignore — the negative.
The Cheat Sheet:
- How does a pessimistic skeptic of positive thinking culture find himself pumped up with 12,000 other people at a motivational seminar in Texas?
- How can the avoidance of negative thinking make us unhappy?
- Are the tenets of the Ironic Process Theory slowly driving you insane?
- Negative Visualization: a healthier way to worry with purpose.
- Affirmations often go beyond just being silly — they can actually be harmful.
- And so much more…
About Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman is a British author and journalist who spent years writing for The Guardian, where he also interviewed Jerry Seinfeld. He wrote The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, a skeptical look at the self-help industry. He also wrote the Sunday Times bestseller 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and, more recently, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. He writes an email newsletter and shares his work at oliverburkeman.com.
Key takeaways
- Every choice about time, work, parenting or relationships has a downside, so you’re really just choosing which downside to take on.
- Perfectionism, people pleasing and imposter syndrome all demand that you feel ready before you act, and that keeps you from starting.
- Decision hunting means going looking for small, real decisions in an area where you’re stuck, so you build momentum one step at a time.
- Letting the first attempt be imperfect leads to action, and action is how quality shows up later.
- The reverse golden rule asks you not to treat yourself in ways you’d never treat other people.
- Other people’s feelings are one more factor to weigh in a decision, not an emergency you have to prevent at all toll.
If Oliver’s point about moving from knowing to doing hit home, that gap is a big part of what we work on in the X-Factor Accelerator, a 90-day program with weekly group coaching.
If someone tells you that, no matter what, you must avoid thinking about a purple poodle under a peach-colored parasol, it suddenly becomes all you can think about. In the same way, a person who has resolved to always ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts — there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at this endeavor. Yet this very scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.
On this episode of The Art of Charm, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and author Oliver Burkeman joins us to explain why trying to avoid negativity is a big part of what is making us unhappy. That said, we hope you find listening to this episode to be a positive experience.
More About This Show
As well-intentioned and efficacious as the best self-help gurus might be, it’s hard to deny the motivational marketplace is saturated with generous portions of substance-free hoopla. For every genuine beacon of inspiration who devotes themselves to improving the lives of others, there are dozens of unqualified charlatans in the game purely for the benefit of self-interest dispensing nothing but placebo positivity. But is there a legitimate benefit to this placebo? Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, had to find out more about this phenomenon.
“I decided I wanted to write this thing,” says Oliver. “And I had some sense of what I thought was wrong with positive thinking culture, but I needed to experience it up close at the sort of height of it. So I went to this thing called Get Motivated! — which has an exclamation point in the name — in a basketball stadium in San Antonio in Texas. This is kind of a weird setting for anybody to be in, but it’s so against everything that I am as a kind of slightly pessimistic, slightly reticent, downbeat Brit…to be in this room with 11-12,000 people leaping out of our chairs on an instruction from the people on the stage and fireworks going off around the place and huge, pumping music as we were told to express how motivated we were.
“But I kind of got into it, weirdly, which I think happens at these huge events. You catch the atmosphere. It was an all-day thing, so there were a whole lot of veteran self-help people on the stage and a few celebrity guests. The keynote speaker was former president George Bush, which was kind of weird to see him doing his post-presidential thing. The person I write about in the book is a guy called Dr. Robert Schuller, who actually passed away in the last few months. But he was a real veteran of the self-help industry and he really put forward this message that if you want to succeed, all you need to do is eliminate the word ‘impossible’ from your vocabulary.
“And that was really the whole ethos of the day. You just decide to be incredibly successful…and there’s an implication there as well that if you don’t do that, things are going to go wrong because you’re not thinking positively enough. But it was a strange experience because I probably did go in there a little bit cynical — certainly skeptical. But as the months went past afterwards, I discovered research and talked to people who broadly supported my skepticism. But in the moment in that huge arena setting, it’s pretty hard not to be part of the thing.”
But is positive thinking on this level actually counterintuitive? It turns out that when we try to exude positivity at the exclusion of all negativity, we open ourselves to the very negativity we’re attempting to avoid. In fact, trying to avoid negativity is a big part of what is making us unhappy — not only because it raises our expectations and devastates us when we don’t succeed, but because trying not to think about something is a surefire way to ensure that we do think about it. Psychologists even have a term for this: Ironic Process Theory.
And then there’s the problem of comparing ourselves to others. It’s something we all do — even when we’re trying to force ourselves into a state of overall positivity. “We compare ourselves with other people,” says Oliver. “We have access to our own insides, and we don’t have access to anybody else’s insides. So if somebody’s coming across as confident, we take that as meaning they’re confident. If we’re coming across as confident but inside we’re telling ourselves all these negative messages or we’re feeling bad or scared, we think we’re doing less well than them because we can’t hear the voice in their head.
“So all of this stuff is there to begin with. And then if you start putting all this effort into getting the right mindset and feeling motivated, I think it just adds another hurdle…you want to take some action, but instead of just getting yourself to take the action, you tell yourself you have to feel like taking the action. That’s a higher bar to reach — to say ‘I’ve got to get my mind exactly right; then I can do this thing.'”
Coming to terms with the way you really feel — maybe that you’re not all that motivated to do something, but you’re going to power through it anyway — is more honest and a better use of time than trying to pump yourself up with some false sense of positivity.
Listen to this episode of The Art of Charm in its entirety to learn more about the joy of uncertainty, how the subprime mortgage crisis of the mid-2000s is indicative of positivity run amok, why The Secret is the self-help book Oliver likes “beating up on the most,” why being able to endure more negative emotions serves us better on the road to happiness than blind positivity, how this all relates to the fixed vs. growth mindsets we’ve talked about on the show before with Dr. Carol Dweck, how visualizing success can actually reduce motivation, the power of negative visualization, and lots more.
THANKS, OLIVER BURKEMAN!
If you enjoyed this session with Oliver Burkeman, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out at Twitter:
Click here to thank Oliver Burkeman at Twitter!
Resources from this episode:
- The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
- Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian
- Oliver Burkeman at Twitter
- Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich
- The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
- Dr. Carol Dweck | The Motivated Mindset (Episode 445)
- Dr. Gabriele Oettingen | Rethinking Positive Thinking (Bonus)
- Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
You’ll also like:
- The Art of Charm Challenge (click here or text 38470 in the US)
- The Art of Charm Bootcamps
- Best of The Art of Charm Podcast
- The Art of Charm Toolbox
- The Art of Charm Toolbox for Women
- Find out more about the team who makes The Art of Charm podcast here!
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Best quotes from Oliver Burkeman
“There’s no option that comes with no downside. So, all you’re really ever doing is choosing which downside to incur.”
Oliver Burkeman, 0:00
“The perfectionism is the thing that gets in the way of doing things in the most absorbing and meaningful way.”
Oliver Burkeman, 5:30
“You’re free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.”
Oliver Burkeman, 15:00
“What matters is zero to one. What matters is that it exists in the world in some form.”
Oliver Burkeman, 27:00
“Other people’s emotions are one more thing to be weighed in the balance.”
Oliver Burkeman, 45:00
FAQ
Who is Oliver Burkeman?
Oliver Burkeman is a British author and former Guardian journalist. He wrote The Antidote, 4,000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and he also writes an email newsletter.
What is The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking about?
It’s Oliver’s book on why relentlessly chasing positivity can backfire. It looks at the self-help industry and what happens when we try to avoid every negative thought.
What is decision hunting?
Oliver describes it as going looking for decisions instead of waiting for them to arrive. Pick a small, real decision in an area where you’re stuck, like choosing a website platform, and you close off some options and move forward.
What is the reverse golden rule?
Oliver borrows it from philosopher Ido Landau. It says not to treat yourself in ways you’d never treat other people, which is a simpler ask than full-on self-love.
How does perfectionism lead to procrastination?
Oliver says that as long as you never launch, you get to keep a beautiful fantasy of how great the work will be. The moment you do something real, it won’t be perfect, so he suggests accepting an imperfect first version.
Related reading
- Why imposter syndrome is normal and how to reframe it
- Overcoming the fear of other people's opinions
- Overcoming nice guy syndrome
- Authentic confidence
Curious what it looks like to practice confidence, presence and connection with a team behind you? Start with a 1:1 onboarding call with Johnny and take a look at the X-Factor Accelerator.
