The Positive Performance
The best part about the stories we tell ourselves is that they are only stories… You can tell another story, and it can change your life...
Have you ever been told to “think positive!”? Look on the bright side? Good vibes, man. Reframe the negative. Just flip it. Smile with your toothbrush in the mirror. Manifest. Practice gratitude.
Struggling? Be positive. Find the silver lining.
Why is it so difficult then? If you’re not positive or optimistic, does it mean your mental health is poor? Or, the opposite – if you’re a positive person* does it mean your mental health is A-OK?
What is mental health?
Mental health is not an emotion.
It’s also not optimism or positivity.
According to the World Health Organization, mental health is “a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, demonstrate their competence and productivity, exercise their cognitive and emotional capabilities, contribute to their community, and realize their own potential.”
Okay, now read that again, and notice the images that appear in your mind. (Remember, the human brain doesn’t really speak in words.)
If you look up mental health on any search engine or even LinkedIn these days, or if you peek up from your phone for a moment to notice a billboard on the train or the highway, you might see representations of mental health that is the super fit executive-types that appear calm and worry-free in a moment of relaxation (or intoxication) and seem to have all their shit figured out. Or, you’ll see therapists or things on addiction. Or, you’ll see a neurodivergent teenager lost in the screen under the sheets.
Now back to your brain.
What does well-being even mean?
What did you see? Do these everyday images of peak or poor “mental health” show you what your brain needs to see to be able to choose a different story?
What does “coping with the stresses of life” look like for you? Maybe you imagine a superhero in a cape or a grandparent or someone lifting something heavy.
How about “competence and productivity”? My sister has always been a fantastic sketch artist. She would draw dozens of characters a week and colour them and give them names and all sorts of back stories. She has a learning disability and was on the educational tracks that today’s autistic and neurodivergent kids would be lucky to be on. But she’s one of the (few) people who pumps out quality work when she’s fully focused on her strengths and her purpose.
“Cognitive and emotional capabilities.” Let’s forget about the “skills” we need for our jobs. What about thinking through everyday problems? Cutting coupons for weekly grocery, alternate routes for traffic jams, coordinating a busy household for kids’ activities. Recognising when you feel frustrated or anxious or ecstatic about something and not having those emotions interfere with getting something done or making a healthy decision or having a much-needed conversation with a partner.
“Contribute to the community.” Ooh, good one. I’m sure you can think of many activities that you or your family have been involved in to help your community. It could be through your work, paying it forward, helping a neighbour, volunteering.
What images do you see?
And finally, “realizing their own potential”. What images do you see? How about purpose or passion?
None of these are about feelings. And none of these are about pushing feelings away or avoiding them or numbing them or reducing them. It’s about being as human as possible and using our brain for all the cool, creative things we are capable of doing.
And yet... Are we doing it? Why are we choosing other stories?
It could be that we just don’t have the cognitive reserve leftover. It takes energy to change those stories, whether they are “positive” or “negative” or “pessimistic” or “optimistic”. They still take energy.
Or, it could be our natural tendency to stay in the familiar and the comfortable.
What is the cost?
Research on emotional suppression consistently shows that the physiological arousal tied to a negative emotion continues, and in some cases amplifies, when its cognitive expression is blocked (Gross & Levenson, 1997). You push the experience toward a positive interpretation rather than process it directly. If suppression is chosen, the story changes about what you are telling yourself about the experience, but it does not change what the experience is doing to the body.
Neuroimaging research is consistent on this point: adaptive responding to negative emotional events is a key ingredient of wellbeing. Not the suppression of them. Not their replacement with positive content. Responding to them directly, through the prefrontal-amygdala regulatory circuit that is only trained when it is actually engaged (Lee et al., 2012).
So where did we get the idea that the opposite of this was the answer?
Positive psychology
It can be desirable to take an optimist view. To focus on the “good”. To identify as a resilient person, that you can handle the hard things, water off a duck’s back. But if it prevents you from objectively facing and accepting difficulties or stressors that pile up, that is the flag here. Conflation of positivity with a feeling of happiness or mental health is a common and highly consequential misconception.
Positive psychology as a movement made a number of sweeping claims since the 1990s. The most widely cited was the Losada ratio, that 2.9 positive emotions to every 1 negative emotion was the mathematical threshold between flourishing and languishing. It was published in a leading journal, cited hundreds of times, and became the foundation for countless coaching frameworks and wellbeing programmes.
In 2013, the underlying mathematics were formally retracted (Brown, Sokal & Friedman, 2013; Fredrickson & Losada, 2013). The equations had been misapplied and bore no relationship to the data they were meant to describe. There is no such thing as “optimal” positivity ratio.
Memory of events that cause “negative” emotions versus positive is a very different cognitive distortion, rooted in science. This matters because this framework shaped how an entire generation of people were taught to think of their own mental health.
Optimism
Dispositional optimism is a genuine personality trait. It is the generalized expectancy that good outcomes will occur (Scheier & Carver, 1985). It is moderately heritable, relatively stable across the lifespan, and it does have real benefits. What you think, matters. Optimistic people tend to make different choices. They use more approach-oriented, forward-looking coping strategies, persevere longer in the face of setbacks, and are less prone to depressive symptoms under chronic distress (Nes & Segerstrom, 2006). Optimism can be great!
Resilience, on the other hand, is not a trait. It is a dynamic capacity, defined as the ability to adapt successfully in the face of adversity and return to your functional baseline. Research is consistent that this recovery is an active, biological process. It involves specific neural circuits, stress response systems, and regulatory mechanisms (Kuehn, Calvert & James, 2025).
This is interesting because a person can score high on dispositional optimism and have low actual resilience capacity (It can be trained!).
If the optimism is operating as a cognitive filter, shaping perception before honest evaluation occurs, it can reduce the very engagement with difficulty that building resilience depends on.
Recent research on this might interest you even more – optimism predicts better mental health outcomes when it influences how a person interprets challenges. For example, when setbacks are appraised as opportunities for growth rather than threats to identity. But when measured in the moment against actual daily stressors, dispositional optimism does not reliably predict the coping strategies people use (Hammond et al., 2025). The trait and the behaviour are loosely coupled than the self-help framing suggests.
Expecting good outcomes is not the same as being equipped to process “bad” ones.
What’s going on up there?
Optimism bias, the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events happening to you, is driven by the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and its interaction with the amygdala (Sharot, 2011). When imagining “positive” future events, these regions show strong connectivity. When imagining “negative” ones, the connectivity is restricted. The brain is structurally inclined to filter toward the positive.
Some degree of this is the default state of a healthy brain. But it becomes a problem when it operates as a substitute for accurate assessment. Unrealistic optimism specifically, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others than to you (Maksim et al., 2024), correlates with underuse of preventive healthcare, poorer financial planning, and a consistent tendency to delay addressing problems until they are significantly worse, like health …
Neuroimaging work on resilience tells a different story about what protection actually looks like in the brain. Resilient individuals show lower amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli and tighter functional coupling between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. A 2025 meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies identified the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral amygdalae as the structures most consistently conferring psychological resilience against psychopathology (Kuehn, Calvert & James, 2025). These are not the structures of positive thinking. They are the structures of attentional control and affective regulation under load (aka - core features of cognitive performance and cognitive mastery).
Recovery from adversity at the neural level is a function of how quickly and completely the brain returns to baseline following a stressor. That recovery is mechanistically defined by the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to exert inhibitory control over the amygdala. Individual differences in the strength and efficiency of this circuit determine individual differences in resilience (Lee et al., 2012). And that circuit is trained through direct engagement with difficult emotional material, not through filtering it out in advance.
Gather around, kids – it’s story time
Okay, one more thing about the neuroscience.
The brain does not passively experience your world. It runs predictive models, continuously updated from memory and experience (Menon, 2023). It filters what we perceive and focus on and how we interpret it. A habitual stance of positivity, developed over years, becomes one of these automatic models. It feels like identity. It can also become the frame through which new information is processed. This is how learned patterns operate. It’s how stories sink in. Which is great, unless you don’t know it’s a story.
Awareness is the mechanism that changes this. When an automatic narrative is surfaced and examined deliberately, it moves from fast subcortical processing into slower prefrontal processing, where it can be evaluated against current evidence rather than past conditioning. That is basic cognitive processing. Not therapy. It’s the first step toward updating a model that may no longer be accurate.
So should I be more pessimistic?
No, just be accurate.
Looking at a situation clearly, without the pressure to spin it positive or catastrophise it negative, is less cognitively expensive than either extreme. It also produces better information. You see what is actually happening. You can assess what requires a response and what does not. Your threat detection system is calibrated rather than suppressed.
This is what mental strength looks like from a neuroscience perspective: not the absence of negative emotion, but the capacity to encounter difficult information, process it accurately through prefrontal engagement, and respond without being destabilised. The prefrontal-amygdala circuit strengthens with use. Accuracy, practised consistently, builds the cognitive reserve that an automatic positivity default can not.
You can be a natural optimist and have poor mental health. You can be genuinely positive and be running a significant deficit in how you are actually functioning. The WHO’s current definition of mental health is functional: the capacity to cope with the stresses of life, exercise cognitive and emotional capabilities, and realise potential. It says nothing about how you feel. It describes what you can do.
Ask not: “am I positive enough”?
Ask: “Is my current read of this situation accurate? Is this sense of being fine the result of clear assessment, or a reflex I have not examined?”
Those are not pessimistic questions. They are the questions a well-regulated human brain asks. The habit of asking them, regularly and honestly, is closer to genuine mental health than any ratio of positive to negative emotions ever could be.
Positivity, when it is real, is an outcome of that process. Not the evidence of it.
And remember, the most useful thing you can do with a story is know that you are telling one.
When you’re ready to face your fears, send us a message here.
*Read more on identity
About the authors:
Sara L. Farwell, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist, certified nutrition coach and physical fitness instructor, and mentor to professionals and students. She studies and writes about physiology, energy, recovery, and the mind-body axis for sustainable performance and change.
Maciej D. Zatonski, MD, PhD is a double board-certified physician, author, husband, and parent. He is an executive leadership coach specialising in cognitive performance, decision-making, and resilience under pressure in complex, demanding environments.
References:
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