Positive Psychology at Work:

Positive Psychology is Not Positive Thinking

This distinction is important, but unfortunately there is a certain amount of confusion about these two ideas. We shall first examine positive thinking to enable it to be distinguished from positive psychology, before going on to consider positive psychology in its own right. Positive thinking has a history all of its own, brilliantly traced by Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This book traces the origin of positive thinking to a particular human malaise prevalent in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, which took the form of unexplained fatigue and mysterious physical symptoms. It occurred at the time when a Calvinist doctrine of joyless, work-oriented, fearful, sin-avoidant living was in the ascendant. While this religious perspective and its accompanying prescriptions of hard work and sobriety contributed to, and supported, the work ethic that helped make the US the country it is, it also reduced the amount of positive emotions in life, such as hope, joy, passion, interest and happiness. From our perspective we might suspect this malaise to have been a form of depression.

The recommended cure was frequently complete bed rest without stimulation – no reading, no company, bland food and in a darkened room. With the benefit of hindsight we might question the wisdom of such a prescription. At the time few did until Phineas Quimby came ...