How timely that you posted this topic on the forum; I actually just started reading a book entitled “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking” The title is a bit cutting (probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek for marketing purposes), but the text itself is fairly light-hearted.

It does however propose a very interesting paradigm shift about the positive thinking school of psychology – although it can sometimes be seen to produce short term results, it doesn’t do much in terms of helping cultivate longer term resiliency when it comes to facing the harsh realities of life’s ups and downs.

The author, Oliver Burkeman, looks to the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics as well as Buddhism to demonstrate how actually sitting with and exploring worse case scenarios might be more fruitful towards our psychological development and growth and motivate us to action.

What really speaks to me about the book and your blog post highlights the problem that I see, is this whole notion of cycles – our minds our conditioned to constantly be evaluating everything around us either positive and negative and because it’s a cycle, when you’re down you have to work at bringing yourself up and when you’re up, chances are you will eventually drop down. Like riding a sine wave, the higher the ups, the lower the downs and the more effort you have to exert to bring yourself up from the downs.

My question is (and this is what has lead me to Buddhism in the first place), how do you break free of the cycle? How do you stop that constant evaluating and judging of everything and everyone around you, exerting energy looking for happiness and trying to stay positive, but simply be and exist and face reality objectively?

I don’t have a solution for it (that would probably be enlightenment), but it is an idea that’s definitely worth exploring further.