Studies show that persistent negative thoughts are bad for your health. But the path to health isn’t to merely force oneself to stop thinking negative thoughts.
The study I am referring to comes from the University College London, titled “Repetitive negative thinking linked to dementia risk.” An ironic title, if there ever were one; after all, if there is one thing a person with persistent negative thoughts doesn’t need, it’s something new to worry about.
Yet that is precisely what the article published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia offers to its negatively-minded readers. “Taken alongside other studies, which link depression and anxiety with dementia risk, we expect that chronic negative thinking patterns over a long period of time could increase the risk of dementia,” lead author Dr Natalie Marchant (UCL Psychiatry) explains. “We do not think the evidence suggests that short-term setbacks would increase one’s risk of dementia.”
Her conclusion was that medical professionals need “to develop strategies to lower people’s risk of dementia by helping them to reduce their negative thinking patterns.”
That seems nice in theory, but the reality of treating negative thought patterns is much more complicated. Take me, for instance: I am on the autism spectrum, which means that I am neurologically prone to obsessive thoughts. Despite years of therapy to deal with the persistent negative thinking that this invariably produces, nothing is going to change the way my brain is wired. My body is simply programmed to dwell, and arguing that there are “strategies” which can change that is a bit like saying there are “strategies” which could help me change the color of my eyes.
When you scratch beneath the surface, the problem is more than a merely medical one. After all, while my brain is programmed to dwell, it is not necessarily programmed to dwell on the bad things. The reason I do that is, when you are autistic in a neurotypical society, you are regularly mistreated. It is more difficult to obtain and hold down a job, you are more likely to be bullied and you are even at a greater risk of being sexually abused. When the rest of the world is able to communicate proficiently because their neurology provides them with certain social skills, and you cannot likewise do so, you are bound to be identified as “different” and “weird,” with the consequent mistreatment being accordingly justified.
A lifetime of this makes you angry. It make you depressed. It makes you feel bitter and desperate. And all of these thoughts — pain about the past, discomfort in the present and fear of the future — are persistent and negative. Yet they aren’t a problem with you, or even with your condition. They are a problem caused by society and how it mistreats you because you are different.
This is why the whole positive psychology movement is particularly sinister. The underlying premise is that if you simply change the way you think, you will be healthier and you’ll see better things in your life. Yet you can’t reason with a physical structure; you can’t will away a neurochemical imbalance. What’s more, as author Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her 2009 book “Bright-Sided,” the basic flaw in the idea that you can force yourself to be rid of negative thoughts through positivity is that “it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant e