You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 169.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit,

from the inside out. We're challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink,

and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment,

just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking.

Now here's your host, Rachel Hart.

Hello everybody. We are talking about positive thinking today,

and the downsides of it, because you have probably heard me talk about this on the podcast before.

I really do believe there are some real downsides with this idea of, oh, just think positively.

And I decided that I wanted to talk to you guys about it today, because I was reading a story

in the New York Times about how to live with fear, how to live with fear and anxiety and worry

in the time of COVID-19. And this article was interviewing a woman named Kate Bauer or Bauer,

I don't know, I've never seen her name before. I hadn't heard of her, but she was amazing.

And she's a cancer survivor and she's a religious scholar. And she was asked this question

by the interviewer about the idea of just staying positive. And she said something that I thought

was so perfect and I really wanted to share it with you and then talk about it in depth, because she

said that the main problem, her idea that the main problem was staying positive was that it adds shame

to suffering by just requiring everyone to be prescriptively joyful. I thought that was so perfect,

adding shame to suffering. We don't realize that this happens. We sometimes think that we're just

in our suffering and then there's more suffering, but we don't realize that we've actually added

to our suffering by telling ourselves that we shouldn't feel this way. That really is something

that if you can learn how not to add shame to your suffering, you will be amazed at how much

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