Positive thinking?

My moment is an insight. I believed in the power of positive thinking until January 14, 2014. Until that day, I often advised people to ‘keep believing’ or to keep seeing ‘the positive’. I never said ‘chakka’, but it was often close to it.

On that 14th of January, the book Smile or Die: how positive thinking fooled America and the world by the American sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich turned my world upside down. In her book, Ehrenreich searches for a scientific basis for positive thinking. And she doesn’t find it. There is no conclusive evidence that positive thinking and success, or positive thinking and health, have any correlation. There are some small-scale studies that would suggest that positive thinking has some influence, but these have been rejected in dozens of other studies.

Regardless of this theory, I’ve found that it’s downright dangerous to advise people to think positively. Think about it: anyone who tells someone else that he or she should think positively because it ‘helps’ them to find happiness or achieve success, is also implicitly saying that someone who is not happy or successful should have done his best with positive thinking. Don’t have a job? That depends on your mindset. There is no such thing as bad luck. All mischief is your own fault. So think a little more positively!

I got this insight from Olympic swimming champion and ex-cancer patient Maarten van der Weijden. I read about him on the internet after I finished Ehrenreich’s book. Van der Weijden was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001. After four rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, he was declared cured. Barely 8 years later, he won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. The fairy tale seemed complete: a healthy boy gets cancer, gets cured and wins gold. What a hero! I’m sure that man will think very positively.

The opposite is true. Van der Weijden denounces the idea that positive thinking has cured him of cancer. He even calls it an insult to all cancer patients who have fought so hard to survive, but nevertheless did not make it: ‘The illusion that you have a better chance of surviving cancer by thinking positively, by fighting, is so horrible to me for the patients who don’t make it. As if they wouldn’t have tried enough. Almost everyone sees me as the boy who conquered cancer – it’s very hard for me to get that out. Whereas: I lay down and surrendered to the doctors, the only thing you can do’.

I still give that attention to the people around me who need my attention. But never again the advice to think positively. I hope you will follow my example.
Richard Engelfriet.

Engelfriet is an entrepreneur and author of As simple as it can be.

This blog was published on http://www.mijnmoment.com/1263-richard-engelfriet