Psychologist Gascón critiques toxic optimism, arguing privilege blinds 'if you want, you can' believers

Lorena Gascón, a psychologist with more than 660,000 Instagram followers, has built her platform on speaking about mental health the way you'd talk to a friend over coffee. Her latest book, "How to Survive Life's Bullshit," opens with a metaphor about mochi—the Japanese rice cakes that are pounded repeatedly with a wooden mallet to achieve their perfect consistency. The dough cracks under the blows but adapts, becoming resilient. We are that dough, Gascón argues. We can be fractured and still become something dignified and whole.

But what irritates her most is what she calls toxic optimism—the relentless cheerfulness that insists on seeing rainbows and unicorns instead of facing hard truths. The path to a full life, she insists, is not paved only with laughter. It runs through frowns and tears too. The problem with extreme positive thinking is that it pressures people to suppress emotions they actually need to feel: sadness, anger, grief. When we cannot express these feelings in the moment, they emerge later as anxiety or physical illness. "What we are not able to externalize at the right time comes out later as anxiety or diarrhea," she says flatly.

Healthy optimism, by contrast, means acknowledging someone's actual circumstances and validating what they feel. It might even mean staying silent instead of offering unsolicited advice. Toxic positivity does the opposite—it tries to help without considering the person's real situation, offering sugary messages designed to make the discomfort stop, often because the optimist finds the suffering annoying rather than because they genuinely care. The distinction matters because toxic positivity has become a tool of a larger ideology. Many experts argue that positive thinking legitimizes neoliberal narratives that place all responsibility on the individual. If you fail, the logic goes, it is because you did not try hard enough. The environment, your childhood, your family's resources—none of that matters. "When I hear the phrase 'if you want, you can,' I feel as though we were all born at thirty or forty years old, untouched by everything we lived through as children or the environment we grew up in," Gascón responds.

She points to concrete examples. Some people had mothers who loved them; others did not. That alone creates a vast difference. It is not the same to attend a public university as it is to have parents wealthy enough to pay for an expensive master's degree at a business school and then send you abroad for a year to perfect your English. Gascón attended public school. Those who say "if you want, you can" have had privileges they cannot see or will not acknowledge. The phrase erases the role of luck, family stability, and inherited advantage in shaping a life.

Yet Gascón does not argue that we are helpless. We cannot choose our disasters, but we can choose how we navigate them. The key is having resources—tools for managing difficult situations. Some people are born into families that teach them emotional regulation and resilience from childhood. Others must develop these resources later, often through therapy. Equally important is genuine human connection. She uses another metaphor: resources are like a surfboard you ride on, while the people who truly care about you are like boats circling nearby, ready to pull you out of the water if you fall.

When two people close to her were diagnosed with cancer, Gascón did what she recommends: she cried and told them they could count on her. She did not tell them to look on the bright side or find meaning in their suffering. She did not insist they stay positive. She simply showed up. What helped them most was that their treatments worked. What she recommends to others is transmitting presence and, above all, respecting the timeline of the person who is suffering. Many cancer patients are pushed toward optimism with phrases like "find the good in this" or "everything happens for a reason" or "look what you can learn." Therapists agree these phrases tend to worsen the person's state. Nobody teaches us to sit with our own pain or with someone else's. The sugary clichés—"it's not that bad, you should be over it by now" or "if you really want to, you'll be able to"—accomplish mainly one thing: they silence the person listening and force them to repress what they feel. It is stronger to cry or rage than to swallow it and lose touch with what you actually need.

The extreme positive thinking popularized by books like "The Secret," which promised that imagining good things repeatedly could attract success and wealth, has taken deep root. Gascón attributes this partly to cognitive biases that make us believe our thoughts have power, that wishing for something makes it more likely to happen. Psychology calls this magical thinking—the illusion that we control what happens to us. Accepting that life is chaos and much of it escapes our control is far more frustrating. Still, she adds, a positive attitude can help you focus better on solutions. The irony is that if positive thinking could attract good things, it would logically attract bad things too. When your television breaks, your heater stops working, and you get a flat tire all at once, did you not think kindly enough about them? She laughs at the absurdity. When someone suffers a loss, Gascón says, it is like being a croquette that has lost its breading. You are still a croquette, but inside you know you have lost something that made you feel like yourself. The filling does not matter—chicken, squid ink, even vegetarian—the point is that loss is a loss of identity. There is no single recipe for grieving well because each person is their own world. Some need to talk about it; others find refuge in work or curl up in bed. But there are healthier ways and less healthy ones. Sharing the loss with someone who loves you is probably the most sound approach. The worst response is to drink heavily, isolate yourself for months, tell no one, and live in the past.