You're in a bad mood.

Everything is going wrong, and you can’t seem to catch a break.

You’ve been jilted by a promising romantic partner; the recruiter with the enticing job has gone silent; your dream vacation is now on hold; a client fired you; your stylist fucked up your haircut; and three months ago your loving, nuzzling, sweet-natured tween woke up hating you.

You’re in a terrible, no good, very bad mood. Your reasons are legitimate.

If things weren’t bad enough, a stranger on the street commands you to “Smile.” An acquaintance invites you over on one condition: “Good vibes only!” They mean well (you think). They always mean well, but somehow their well-intentions leave you lonelier.

You confide to a friend that you worry you’re unemployable; that you’ll never get another job and they tell you to stop being so negative.

Across your internet feed, one post after another: “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”; “Don’t worry, be happy!” “It could be worse. You could have cancer.”

Each one feels more dismissive than the last.

This relentless campaign to make happiness happen is known as Toxic Positivity, a coping mechanism for people who struggle to feel negative emotions. Toxic positivity rejects all difficult emotions in favor of a cheerful and often falsely optimistic facade. It takes positive thinking to an overgeneralized extreme. While stressing positivity, it also denies human emotions, robbing people from what they actually need: to talk honestly about their situation.

Some people who practice Toxic Positivity falsely believe negative emotions are wrong because they feel bad.

Instead of feeling what they feel, they opt out, cultivating positivity by a manic insistence on looking at the bright side. Worse, they expect others to follow suit. They don’t just dislike their negative feelings; they don’t like anyone’s, so they wind up “bright siding” those bent on facing their own realities.

The truth is that negative emotions aren’t bad. They’re essential and often valuable.

When someone “bright sides” you, they might mean well, but by dismissing your need to talk, they are silencing you. True growth comes from feeling discomfort and distress, processing it, and learning valuable lessons. When someone tells you to feel something else, they’re asking you to remain in place at the expense of growing, learning, and changing.

Real love requires allowing people to feel their feelings without demanding they change for our comfort. Just as it’s not loving to remove the obstacles from a child’s life without teaching them how to manage their discomfort, It’s not loving to tell someone to feel differently than they do.

When we avoid suffering, we avoid growing. When someone demands happiness at all times, they are not living in reality; they are living in avoidance, and there is nothing more emotionally damaging to a person than not facing what’s real.

What you feel: good, bad, and ugly, expresses your authenticity and genuine self. If someone wants to know you, they must be comfortable with the full spectrum of your emotions.

People in pain need empathy. Those who offer false reassurance are doing so because they’re uncomfortable with negative emotions. They may not realize this; they may be unable to see how an insistence on living life their way, on their bright terms, is a passive aggressive move meant to control these terms, all because they fear what they insist they’re above: hard emotions.

This behavior creates distance between families, friends and neighbors.

Telling distressed friends everything will be fine sends the message that how they feel isn’t okay. Denying a distressed person’s reality leaves them feeling alone and disconnected. It stops them from communicating.

Emotional pain is deep. Toxic positivity is shallow.

It’s false to reassure someone who’s genuinely suffering with platitudes. It creates disconnection and prevents real bonds from forming. When we’re suffering, we need our loved ones to sit with us and accept our pain as valid, even when it feels unpleasant.

People who bright side others aren’t necessarily bad people. They simply don’t know what to say, or they feel uncomfortable and want that feeling inside them to disappear. The unpleasant feelings often do go away because the bright-sider shuts the other person down.

People who practice Toxic Positivity deny themselves the chance to feel the full spectrum of their emotions and deprive themselves of opportunities to connect deeply with others by authentically supporting them and allowing themselves to grow and change.

The irony of toxic positivity is that it’s negative.

Genuinely positive people don’t force themselves or others to have a consistently positive outlook. They don’t mastermind reality, insisting that others bend to accommodate their discomfort. They allow for actual feelings, and work to find optimism in the face of their hardship.

Wondering whether you’re inadvertently pushing people away by enforcing toxic positivity on yourself or others?

Below are the questions to ask yourself, and some advice on how to work break this bad habit.