Reclaim Positivity
Positivity is always available. Sometimes you just need to reclaim it.
For the first time in a long time, my depression has been dominating my experience.
Over the past four or five days, I have been feeling more down than up, more negative than positive.
I can think of several reasons why I am feeling this way:
- The sky has been grey for three straight days
- The temperature has been anywhere from 10-20 degrees cooler than normal for this time of year
- It’s been raining on and off, making any outdoor activity undesirable
- I’ve given too much attention to current political idiocy
- Ongoing COVID concerns and new lessening restrictions
- Difficulties in keeping up with my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health habits and practices
- Ongoing financial concerns
Of the above 7 items contributing to my depression, there are exactly 2 I have any control over: consumption of media and my wellness practices.
Recognizing this, I need to pause, reflect, and make choices and decisions about where my focus is and continues to be. Because I know full-well that keeping my focus on the 5 things outside of my control will just increase the negativity.
If, on the other hand, I release those in whatever way I can – mediation, distraction, and general mindfulness of my thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions – I can reclaim positivity.
But one important caveat needs to be made clear regarding this.
This is not toxic positivity
Disregarding the 5 things presently messing with my headspace in favor of finding and/or creating positivity does NOT involve pretending they don’t exist. If I look out my window the grey and damp are there before me. If I open the window, I get to add the cold. Open a browser tab to CNN and I’ll be staring at the political nightmare and COVID concerns. These are not going anywhere.
I can’t just pretend they aren’t there. Okay, to be fair, I can – but to what end? Pretending these things don’t exist doesn’t do jack shit about them. I know they’re there. If I don’t desire them impacting my mindset/headspace/psyche, it’s on me to choose to focus on them – or acknowledge them but focus on other things.
Like things in my control. My wellbeing being first among them – and my ability to not seek out further information about the politics and COVID being second.
Toxic positivity is positivity at the cost of all else. You put on the rose-colored glasses, skip merrily through the tulips, and put on blinders to everything else in the Universe. Maybe that will create a temporary euphoric bliss. But in time, it will fade because it’s not a practice of true mindfulness.
Positivity is mindful because TRUE positivity is a choice. It’s deciding to move away from negativity and seek to find and/or create positivity to control your life experience. It can’t ignore negativity and pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s because true positivity needs negativity to exist in the first place.
This is not selfish, but it’s all about me
Additionally – this applies to me, and me alone. I can’t make you or anyone else share my perspective. I can present it to you and then you get to choose to accept it, reject it, or alter it to fit how you perceive the Universe.
This is where toxic positivity frequently occurs. Because there is this notion that you can apply positivity to make other people better. But you can’t. You have no power over anyone but yourself.
Even when someone lets you have some modicum of control over them and their actions – you are not inside their head just as they are not inside of yours. Hence why someone who stubbornly believes something – no matter how untrue, ludicrous, or completely batshit insane it is – can’t be swayed to your opinion and your way of thinking. Toxic positivity implies they can – but they can’t.
When I am talking about my effort to reclaim positivity – it’s a completely personal, individual matter. Specifically, I’m acting for myself. Thus, from a certain point of view, this is selfish.
Except that it’s not. Why? Because true selfishness involves knowingly, intentionally harming others for your own good or gain. The simplest example of this is having 8 slices of pizza and 4 friends sharing it – and taking 3 or more slices for yourself. That is what true selfishness looks like – you know and don’t care that your actions will cause hurt and/or harm.
Positivity in its true form is utterly individual on multiple levels. And it’s a choice.
I can reclaim positivity or stay negative and depressed
I have suffered from depression for a long time. To help me cope with it, I take an antidepressant. I’m unashamed to admit that I’ve been in therapy multiple times – and if the antidepressant, mindfulness, meditation, and other practices I apply prove ineffective I will go back.
With the tools I am currently employing to work with my depression, recognizing what is making me feel negative is important. If I don’t recognize it, I can’t do anything about it.
Recognition is the first step. Then I must acknowledge it. Many people, after recognition, move to denial. I have that choice, too – I can recognize and then acknowledge that time spent on social media is making me unhappy – or deny it.
Denying it means I am setting myself up to continue to find the negativity. Acknowledging it, however, means I can now make a different choice and decide instead to reclaim positivity.
Ergo, recognizing that I am allowing myself to spend too much time on social media – to reclaim positivity, I am going to limit my time there. For a while, I was setting a 5-minute timer every time I opened Facebook – and I wasn’t leaving the tab open in a browser. I’ve gotten lax about that – so back to the timer – and I will add a self-imposed restriction of 3-times a day to that.
This will be placed on my daily routine spreadsheet and tracked. That provides me necessary accountability.
This method to reclaim positivity works for me – but it might not work for you. The point is that positivity is a choice. You decide to stay in a state of negativity – or reclaim positivity when it’s missing or otherwise impacting your life experience.
And if you choose poorly today, remember that you can choose better tomorrow.
Choosing to reclaim positivity isn’t hard
It begins with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
Knowing that everyone experiences negativity – and it’s utterly necessary to our lives – you can choose to seek and/or find what works for you to reclaim positivity. When you decide to recognize, acknowledge, and then release negativity and reclaim positivity that ultimately empowers you.
When you feel empowered, your mindfulness increases, you become more aware overall, and that gets reflected and spreads to more people. This creates a feedback loop of awareness and positivity. A feedback loop we can all take part in.
Then, we build more positive feelings and discover further reasons to feel positivity and gratitude. That can be the impetus to improve numerous aspects of our lives for the better, help overcome the overwhelming negativity of any current situation, and generate yet more positivity and gratitude.
You, me, and everybody are worthy and deserving of all the good we desire.
An attitude of gratitude is an attitude of pure positivity. That positivity can generate even greater positive energies – and that is always worthwhile.
This is the three-hundred and eighty-second entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
Please visit here to explore all of my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.
Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.
Follow me here!
