The Whack-a-Mole Problem: What "Being Positive" Actually Costs You

Let me tell you what "being positive" actually means because I'm fairly certain most of us were sold a counterfeit version somewhere along the way, and we've been paying for it ever since.

The version most people learned goes something like this: a bad feeling shows up, you slap a smile over it, remind yourself to "focus on the good," and muscle through. You pivot to gratitude. You reframe. You choose joy.

And if it's not working, you're probably just not trying hard enough.

I've sat across from hundreds of people who believed that. Smart, self-aware, genuinely motivated people who were absolutely exhausted from the effort of staying positive and quietly ashamed that it wasn't working better.

Here's what I want to tell every single one of them: the strategy was the problem. Not you.

The game nobody told you you were playing

You've played whack-a-mole, right?

Little plastic moles pop up at random intervals, you hammer them back down as fast as you can, and for a brief shining moment it feels like you're winning. The game rewards speed and vigilance. It punishes hesitation. And it never, ever runs out of moles.

That's exactly what we're doing when we try to "stay positive" by suppressing difficult feelings and thoughts. We're not eliminating the moles. We're just exhausting ourselves reacting to them, one after another, faster and faster until the game ends and we're standing there sweaty and vaguely defeated, with nothing to show for it except a sore wrist and a growing suspicion that something isn't right.

The moles, for the record, are still there.

This is not a metaphor I invented to be clever. It's what the research on emotional suppression has been telling us for decades. When we push difficult emotions down rather than processing them, they don't dissolve. They go underground. And they tend to resurface - louder, more disruptive, often at the worst possible time - because that's what unprocessed experiences do. They wait.

The clinical term for the persistent attempt to avoid uncomfortable internal experiences is experiential avoidance, and it's one of the most well-documented contributors to anxiety, depression, and burnout that we know of. In other words: the thing we were taught would help us feel better is one of the things most reliably making us feel worse.

What genuine positivity actually requires

Real optimism, the durable, functional kind that holds up under actual pressure, is built on a foundation of honest acknowledgment, not the avoidance of difficulty.

That's not a comfortable thing to hear, especially if you've been working hard at the hammering strategy. But it's also genuinely good news, because it means the answer isn't to try harder at something that doesn't work. It means we get to stop.

Clearing the board, which is what real processing looks like, involves a few things that the "think positive" crowd tends to skip entirely.

It means naming the hard thing accurately. Not softening it into something more palatable, not catastrophizing it into something unmanageable, but calling it what it actually is. This is harder than it sounds. We're often remarkably creative in our efforts to avoid sitting with an uncomfortable truth.

It means letting the feeling complete its arc. Emotions are, at their core, information. They're your nervous system's way of flagging something worth your attention. Grief is telling you that something mattered. Anger is often pointing at a boundary that's been violated, or an injustice that deserves to be named. Fear is scanning for threat. When we cut these experiences short before they've delivered their message, we don't get the information and we don't get the relief that comes on the other side of actually feeling something all the way through.

It means processing the difficult event rather than routing around it. This is where narrative therapy earns its keep. The stories we tell about what happened to us, the meaning we make of hard experiences, have enormous influence over how those experiences continue to affect us. Avoidance keeps the story frozen. Engagement lets it evolve.

And then, after all of that, it means choosing how to move forward. That choice, made from a place of honest acknowledgment rather than denial, is where genuine optimism actually lives.

The difference, in plain language

Here are two people facing the same genuinely difficult situation.

The first person says "everything's fine", or works very hard to feel that way, because sitting with the discomfort feels like giving up, or being weak, or inviting more of it in. They stay busy. They reframe aggressively. They remind themselves that other people have it worse. They hammer the moles.

The second person says "this is genuinely hard." They let it be hard for a minute. They figure out what the hard thing is actually asking of them. They grieve what's worth grieving and get appropriately angry about what deserves anger. And then, from that cleared and honest place, they decide what comes next.

The first person is performing optimism. The second person has earned it.

One of those approaches builds resilience - the actual neurological capacity to tolerate difficulty and recover from it. The other one depletes it, slowly, until the performance becomes impossible to sustain.

A note about what this is not saying

This is not an argument for wallowing. It's not suggesting that you should marinate indefinitely in every negative thought and feeling you've ever had, or that difficulty deserves unlimited airtime in your inner life.

It's also not saying that mindset, perspective, and intentional thought patterns don't matter - they absolutely do, and cognitive behavioral approaches have an enormous evidence base for good reason.

What it is saying is that those tools work best when they're applied to emotions that have been acknowledged and processed, not ones that have been stuffed down and are now pushing back from underground. You can't reframe your way out of something you've never allowed yourself to fully feel.

The sequence matters. Acknowledgment first. Then, if you want to, optimism.

So what do you do with this?

If you've been running the whack-a-mole strategy for a long time, the idea of stopping can feel genuinely frightening. What if I feel it and it's too much? What if acknowledging the hard thing makes it more real?

These are reasonable fears, and they deserve a reasonable response: you don't have to do this alone, and you don't have to do it all at once.

Start small. The next time a difficult feeling shows up, try staying with it for sixty seconds before you reach for the hammer. Name it - out loud or on paper if that helps. Ask it what it's trying to tell you. You might be surprised how much information was waiting right there, just underneath the noise of all that hammering.

And if you've been carrying something heavy for a long time and you're ready to actually set it down instead of just adjusting your grip - that's what coaching is for.

The board doesn't have to stay full. It really doesn't.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to hear what it brought up - drop a comment below. And if you know someone who's been white-knuckling their way through "staying positive," feel free to share it with them.

I work with adults navigating burnout, emotional overwhelm, late-diagnosed ADHD and autism, and the particular exhaustion of being a person who tries very hard. If you're curious about coaching, drop me an email..

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