You don't have to be a prisoner of "mental Pollyannaism."
Especially today, when so many people believe that positive thinking and positive belief patterns make it easy to get what they want—and that these desires will somehow fall into their laps without any effort—the Mental Contrasting Technique both critiques this mindset and offers a more realistic perspective.
Mental Contrasting is a framework that suggests positive thoughts only become meaningful when they are coupled with action. It is the view that the reflections of the thoughts and dreams we visualize in our minds only gain value when we address the real-world factors surrounding them.
As you can see around you, there is a constant production of aphorisms and arguments based on the strategy of "always think positive" and dismissing any non-positive thought as "negative." While this can have some benefits for psychological well-being, when this "positivity dream" becomes uncontrolled and goes too far, it creates individuals who are fragile when faced with the real world. Thinking positively is, of course, not a bad thing; it is very important and valuable. But becoming addicted to it or overdoing it reaches a breaking point where you detach from reality.
The Mental Contrasting Technique advises that as you work toward your dreams and goals, you must also apply "positive actions" that act as companions to your positive thoughts. Studies show that focusing only on positive results—the "Pollyanna" style of strategy—ironically ends up wasting people's energy and causes the lack of effort they’ve built up to crumble when they finally hit an obstacle.
True positive thinking is only possible through true hard work. The right way to use it is to take action and keep a good mindset while you are taking that action. When you think positively and well, you gain a wonderful strength. This strength helps you succeed because it makes the obstacles, troubles, and difficulties in your path feel smaller within your inner world. That is, until you stop working and stop producing!
Let’s look at the steps of the Mental Contrasting Technique simply:
- Identify the goal or dream you want to achieve.
- Visualize the most positive result of achieving this goal and feel the best emotions you would experience when it happens.
- Then, identify the biggest obstacle in your current reality that stands in the way of your goal and visualize it in detail in your mind.
By imagining every obstacle you encounter on this journey in detail, you allow your mind to find positive and productive solutions to overcome them.
Mental Contrasting shows that it fully activates a person’s expectations of success, building a mental commitment that triggers important drives like perseverance. If a person lacks mental commitment to a goal, that commitment won't just appear no matter how positively they think. Pop culture's advice on "subconscious themes" should be evaluated from this perspective. If you commit to an issue, you can engage both your subconscious and conscious mind. But just thinking positively leaves a person standing still instead of setting them on the path.
So, what are the dangers of staying stuck in just "thinking positive"? When a person enters a "waiting mode," thinking everything will happen easily, their capacity to fight drops to the floor at the very first minor obstacle they face. In this sense, waiting for the "amazing power" of positive thinking without taking action actually ruins your behavior. This leads to internal disappointment and social sadness, like not liking oneself.
Mental Contrasting is a commitment-building technique. If you build commitment toward a goal, things like your comfort zone, defense mechanisms, reluctance, and the natural "disease" of procrastination will not emerge to stop you. By using Mental Contrasting to shape your thought processes around your goals, you feel strong in every sense.
(For the summary of the scientific perspective, I have paraphrased the excerpt from the National Library of Medicine provided above in the previous section).
The best strategy for creating the inner commitment and "spark" to produce realistic solutions on your path to your goals is to stay positive while remaining in harmony with the real world. If you disconnect from reality by staying "positive," how can you expect the results to come from the real world? In this sense, as long as no scientific article or research supports the claim that everything will fix itself just by wanting and waiting, scientific thinking methods are always more accurate.
I hope you research this technique further and analyze how to apply it in your own life. I have tried to explain the foundations and the "why" of the concept without getting too bogged down in the deep details. I hope this was helpful. Thank you.