Welcome to my September newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation on Substack, Medium, and Digitalmehmet
Curator’s Note: In the September newsletter “The Wellbeing Equation,” the author highlights key observances related to mental health, such as Suicide Prevention Month and Positive Thinking Day, emphasizing the complexities of self-care. The piece discusses the dual nature of positive thinking, portraying it as a powerful tool for improving well-being while cautioning against using it as a means to deny life’s difficulties. Using a case study of Jean, the author illustrates the importance of listening to one’s body and emotions rather than solely relying on optimistic thinking. The newsletter invites readers to consider their relationships with uncomfortable feelings and promotes a balanced approach to mental well-being. This newsletter, in essay form, was written by Dr. Bronce Rice, a distinguished psychologist and psychoanalyst.
September brings together several observances connected to our mental health and wellbeing, including Suicide Prevention Month, Self-Care Awareness Month, and Positive Thinking Day (September 13th). What these observances have in common is that they all touch on our wellbeing and help us think about it from different angles, each highlighting the complexities involved in caring for ourselves.
Taken together, these observances cover a wide range of human experience, from serious psychological distress to the role our outlook plays in our lives and how we care for ourselves over time. They also raise a complex question: how much can the way we think, in and of itself, impact our wellbeing during difficult periods in our lives? When we are going through a difficult period in our lives, grieving the loss of a loved one, stuck in a relationship we know is not good for us, or depressed and struggling to get out of bed, how much can thinking itself really do for us?
Certainly, as a psychoanalyst who focuses on conflict within the mind, I believe the way we think about our wellbeing and the struggles we face in our daily lives is important. So much so that I think our minds can at times move mountains. But there are also problems in life, many of them outside our control, where trying to think our way toward a better solution can produce the opposite effect. The harder we try to gain control through our thinking, the more we end up making a mountain out of a molehill.
For instance, if I’m anxious about an upcoming conversation with my father, changing how I think about what I can reasonably expect from the outcome can help me approach it in a healthier, more positive way. However, if my relationship with my father has historically been unhealthy, positive thinking will only take me so far. I believe positive thinking can be a powerful tool in life, but it has its limits and can become problematic when we expect it to cure everything that ails us.
I’m not exactly sure where I fall on the optimistic or pessimistic side of the spectrum, and I imagine, like most people, it depends on the day, the situation I’m in, or how much sleep I ended up getting the night before. I do believe hard work pays off — believe you me, or I wouldn’t be here. This is a strange space, as I spend much of my professional life listening, in person, to what is most personal and intimate in the lives of people seeking care, while here I share parts of what is most personal and intimate to me with people I will most likely never meet face to face.
I also believe life is difficult in ways I often find annoying and irksome and, at times, question how much I can really do to change my mindset about that. What I do know, however, is the importance of being intentional about where I focus my attention.
Why? Our attention is not evenly distributed. Our minds are built not only to notice and register negative information more readily than positive experiences, but also to give that information greater weight and remember it more readily afterward. Psychologists refer to this tendency as the negativity bias, a pattern with evolutionary roots in survival and threat detection.
Clearly, there is value in being able to recognize danger quickly, but there is also a price we pay when our minds become overly fixated on what is wrong in our lives. This is especially true when other parts of our lives are going well, and we pay them too little attention in our mental lives. This is where positive thinking can enter the picture — not by convincing ourselves that thinking positively will somehow make everything perfect, but by helping us see that a negative outcome is not the only possibility.
The problem is that, with the negativity bias, we often end up becoming a kind of narrator of the things in life we don’t have answers for. When information or details are missing in a situation that feels important to us, we can start filling in the gaps, telling ourselves what the situation means for us, and then responding to that story as though it were true. For example, in my case, if I send my book agent a new proposal and don’t hear back right away, I may start wondering whether I said something wrong, when in fact he may simply be busy or giving the proposal more careful consideration.
In more extreme forms, this bias can make it harder for us to notice when things are going well or when a better outcome is possible. Over time, this can affect how we experience our lives and how much of what happens to us feels meaningful and good in the first place. And when the positive aspects of life are no longer happening — or, more to the point, when we stop engaging with them and taking them in — we can find ourselves feeling less hopeful, more depressed, and less connected to what supports our wellbeing.
This is one reason I believe positive thinking can be so useful: helping us counter our mind’s natural tendency to dwell on what is wrong or what could go wrong in life. And doing so goes beyond merely helping us feel better in the moment. Research on optimism and positive psychological wellbeing has found associations with healthier behaviors, better cardiovascular health, and even a lower risk of premature death. This does not mean we can magically think our way into good health, but it does suggest that taking in the positive aspects of our lives can have meaningful effects on us physically and psychologically.
Modern ideas about positive thinking are based on the belief that deliberately changing one’s thoughts and expectations can improve one’s life. This idea grew out of nineteenth-century New Thought traditions, which emphasized the influence of the mind on health and life circumstances, and was later popularized by twentieth-century writers such as Norman Vincent Peale, a minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking.
Over time, related questions about optimism, happiness, and the role of our outlook in health and wellbeing also became the subject of empirical research, not only among psychologists but across medicine and other areas of health science. One important development was the emergence of positive psychology in the late 1990s, which brought greater attention to optimism, happiness, resilience, and the conditions that help people flourish. As this research became more visible, it also became part of a broader cultural emphasis on maintaining a positive outlook and finding ways to become happier.
Today, this emphasis is woven through much of our culture of self-improvement — one more happiness app to download, one more influencer podcast to follow, one more five-step program for better living to buy, and one more guru promising they’ve figured out how to get in touch with the flow of life itself — and they’ll give it to you for $49.95. Somewhere in all of this can’t-miss advice is the suggestion that if we are not happier or more positive, there must be a better way to go about our lives.
For some of us, this expectation can turn how positive or happy we feel into yet another thing to keep track of. Pushed far enough, it can also become another way of judging ourselves when we feel we are not measuring up to someone else’s standards about how we should go about life. The implication of that self-judgment, beyond feeling left out of the happiness club, is that someone else has figured out how to be happier and more positive in a way we haven’t.
I’m certainly not exempt from this broader emphasis on happiness and wellbeing. After all, I write a newsletter called The Wellbeing Equation and spend a fair amount of time exploring what can help us live happier and fuller lives. Because so much of my work centers on wellbeing, I’ve periodically wondered whether that focus can also create an expectation that we should be feeling better, happier, or more positive than we actually are.
JEAN
Jean, a woman in her early thirties, came to see me because she was stressed and anxious after taking a tenure-track position at the nearby university. Though it was her dream job, Jean had moved across the country away from her family and friends and was finding it difficult to manage the demands of her new position. Her workload was much more time-consuming than it had been at her previous university, and she found herself staying up late into the night worrying about whether she was good enough compared with the other professors in her department.
As Jean continued staying up later and later to get more work done, she became increasingly tired and found it harder to concentrate even during the earlier parts of her day. After a particularly stressful meeting with the dean of her department, Jean realized she needed more help managing her stress. She had become unusually agitated and openly irritated with him after he asked her to take on an additional teaching assignment when another professor went on unexpected maternity leave.
Following the meeting, Jean became increasingly worried that she had overreacted to the dean and that she needed to make a concerted effort to become a more positive and congenial colleague. She wrote the dean an apology letter and began reminding herself daily that this was her dream job. Whenever she became irritated by a stressor at work, she forced herself to respond more positively to the people around her. At first, Jean felt more composed and in greater control of the external stressors in her life. Her colleagues seemed to respond positively as well, engaging with her more frequently at work and helping her feel increasingly accepted within the department.
Yet as the semester wore on, Jean found herself taking on more responsibility, staying up later and later to keep up with her increased workload, and becoming increasingly exhausted. While Jean’s efforts to keep her mind on the positive side of life helped improve her relationships with colleagues, they did little to change the reality of how physically exhausted she continued to be.
Jean also found herself swallowing more and more of her irritation, particularly when another request landed on her desk, which added to her exhaustion and contributed to a newfound sense of depression. The more she attempted to suppress her emotions, the worse she felt internally, as she continued putting on her happy face and projecting, “I’m fine. I’m happy to be here. In fact, I like helping others and being super busy.”
As we continued to meet, Jean began asking for specific recommendations for books, apps, and other material on positive thinking that might help her feel more positive. The more suggestions I offered, the more literature she devoured, eventually bringing in books and articles of her own to show me. Eventually, when I suggested that perhaps there wasn’t a way to merely think her way out of her physical exhaustion, she looked at me with confusion in her eyes.
What Jean and I began exploring was whether feeling more positive had less to do with doubling down on her thoughts and more to do with listening to her body. I suggested it was worth considering whether she was understandably tired and exhausted, and whether her body felt all that positive no matter what she projected to the people around her. This meant looking not only at why she responded to her body in the way she did, but also at whether feeling more positive required a different kind of engagement altogether.
At work, Jean excelled at debating complex subject matter while also producing high-quality research quickly and efficiently. I suggested we put those same abilities to use in looking at the difference between positive thinking and the conditions that helped her feel more positive internally. Jean quickly understood that staying up too late wasn’t the answer, but she also wrestled with the worry that if she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to keep up with all of her work. I also helped her understand the connection between poor sleep and increased anxiety, and asked what the health and wellness literature suggested about other ways of managing her anxiety.
What I was asking Jean to do was use her intellectual curiosity as a researcher to investigate the “scientific evidence” behind her own wellbeing. That meant not only reading what the literature said, but paying attention to what happened when she put some of those ideas into practice for herself. Jean began slowly, trying to get to bed earlier once or twice a week. She then dabbled with yoga and meditation to see whether they helped ease some of her exhaustion and anxiety. What Jean began to notice was the reciprocal relationship between caring for herself physically and being able to think and feel more positively without having to fake it or pretend she felt better when she didn’t.
What I was helping Jean explore points toward an idea I’ve had about the self-care space. Too often, we focus on what we should be doing to take care of ourselves without paying enough attention to how we go about it to begin with. Part of this, I believe, is finding ways of caring for ourselves that we know are good for us and, when possible, are enjoyable to carry out as well.
Earlier, I described how the negativity bias can cause us to pay too much attention to what is going wrong in our lives. I certainly know this experience firsthand, particularly when my frustrations with the book publishing world begin to occupy more and more of my attention throughout the day. Still, like Jean, we can go too far in the other direction and become overly focused on staying positive. In doing so, we may purposefully ignore the very things in life that make it harder for us to feel better.
The problem is that when we work too hard to stay positive, we can end up ignoring or pushing away what feels uncomfortable before we understand what is causing us to feel this way. Positivity culture can reinforce this by turning the difficult feelings that are part and parcel of life into evidence that something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. It can also leave us believing that uncomfortable feelings are not simply difficult to have, but that they shouldn’t be there in the first place and that we should get rid of them altogether.
In Closing,
At its most constructive, positive thinking can help us stay engaged with the parts of life we find meaningful and enjoy rather than focusing solely on what feels painful or wrong to us. Its usefulness begins to diminish, however, when we use it as a coping mechanism to deny or ignore the difficult aspects of life. At that point, what begins as a way of countering our tendency to focus too heavily on the negative becomes an overcorrection of its own.
Most of us want to feel more positive, understandably. But in trying to feel better, we can make it harder to spend time with ourselves when we’re sad, lonely, or simply need some quiet time with our more difficult emotions.
Who in your life can you be sad or unhappy around without feeling you have to pretend to feel otherwise?
This is a question I’ll be exploring in my October newsletter.
If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.
👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.
👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter, The Wellbeing Equation, HERE and spread the word by hitting the Restack button ♻️ to share with your community.
👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.
References
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
Rozanski, A., Bavishi, C., Kubzansky, L. D., & Cohen, R. (2019). Association of optimism with cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 2(9), e1912200.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.
Alvaro, P. K., Roberts, R. M., & Harris, J. K. (2013). A systematic review assessing bidirectionality between sleep disturbances, anxiety, and depression. Sleep, 36(7), 1059–1068.
Premlal, D., & Jose K., A. (2026). Conceptualising toxic positivity — definition, dimensions, antecedents and consequences: A scoping review of the literature. Cognition and Emotion. Published online July 30, 2026.
Leave a Reply