Positive Thinking

New Thought and mental healing movements

An encyclopedia entry on the New Thought movement describes it as a loosely affiliated collection of religious communities with an idealist theology and an optimistic worldview, which emerged in the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The entry names Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849 to 1925) as the founder and lists Mary Baker Eddy, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802 to 1866) and his students, and the New England mental healing movement among its precursors.

The same entry states that New Thought teaches that mental states shape experience, and that adherents use prayer, visualization and affirmations as systematic exercises. It also notes that the movement has received little scholarly attention and that no critical history of it exists.

Twentieth-century popularizers

The encyclopedia entry identifies Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) as best-selling popularizations of New Thought idealism, and describes New Thought as a possible precursor of popular psychology and the self-help movement.

Britannica describes Peale (1898 to 1993) as an American religious leader who, after World War II, promoted spiritual renewal through sermons, broadcasts, columns and books. According to Britannica, he taught that a positive attitude and self-belief were as important as belief in God, and some Christian writers criticized his philosophy for neglecting sin, suffering and redemption.

Spread into healthcare and popular culture

A medical ethics essay presents the contemporary self-help industry of books and seminars as a continuation of New Thought, and says the idea has extended into healthcare as the claim that happy thoughts are essential for health. The essay is an argument by a single author, and its estimates of the size of the industry are his own.

The same essay summarizes the critic Barbara Ehrenreich's account of the culture of positive thinking around breast cancer, which she encountered as a patient. This page has not independently verified her book and relies on the essay's description of it.

How the term is used

The medical ethics essay glosses positive thinking as the view that people must keep positive thoughts and keep negative ones out of the mind, through imagining success, repeating affirmations and saying good things to oneself. The International New Thought Alliance declaration quoted in the encyclopedia entry states that mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become daily experience. The idea of manifestation has its own Machipedia page, Manifestation.

Optimism, positive psychology and cognitive restructuring

Researchers define dispositional optimism as a relatively stable tendency to expect good outcomes across important life domains, and as a cognitive construct about expectancies that also relates to motivation. This differs from a deliberate effort to think positive thoughts.

Positive psychology interventions are defined in one meta-analysis as interventions that aim at wellbeing through pathways consistent with positive psychology theory. Cognitive behavioral therapy, described by the National Institute of Mental Health, helps a person notice automatic thoughts that are inaccurate or harmful, question them, and change self-defeating patterns. Related pages include Psychotherapy and Mindfulness.

Affirmations and toxic positivity

Positive self-statements, often called affirmations, are short statements a person repeats about themselves. Toxic positivity is a contested label for pressure to maintain positivity at the expense of genuine emotional experience. A 2026 scoping review of 59 studies reported that the construct is underexplored, with limited empirical research, no standard definition and no validated measurement tools.

Religious teaching

Within New Thought, adherents describe a set of exercises that includes prayer, spiritual treatment, visualization, affirmations and, in some cases, denials. The encyclopedia entry says these are understood to bring a person's consciousness into line with a good, supreme Mind, so that adherents report improvement in their conditions.

Self-help and healthcare messaging

Outside religious settings, the ethics essay describes positive thinking as appearing in books, seminars, business culture and healthcare messaging, where patients may be told their prognosis will improve if they think positive thoughts. Machipedia has separate pages for Life Coaching, Gratitude, Journal Therapy, Hypnotherapy and Emotional Literacy, which are not covered by the sources on this page.

Success and well-being

Adherents of New Thought describe positive states of mind as the cause of positive conditions in life, and negative conditions as the result of negative states of consciousness. Britannica reports that Peale taught that religious faith and a positive attitude could improve a person's material life. The encyclopedia entry adds that adherents may report improvement in general and specific conditions of their lives, which is a report of experience and not a tested outcome.

Health claims

In healthcare, the ethics essay reports that enthusiasts claim cancer can result from stress or toxic attitudes and that positive thinking or visualization can prevent or reverse it. The essay names several authors making such claims and doubts them. These are claims by proponents, and Research and Evidence below describes what studies found.

Optimism and health outcomes

Scheier and Carver reviewed 30 years of research on dispositional optimism and physical health, and discuss behavioral, biological and social pathways that might explain the associations. A 2019 systematic review of 15 cohort studies (229,391 participants, mean follow-up 13.8 years) reported that optimism was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular events (relative risk 0.65) and all-cause mortality (relative risk 0.86), with high heterogeneity. These are observational associations in a measured trait, and the authors call for studies of interventions.

Positive self-statements and positive fantasies

In experiments reported by Wood and colleagues in 2009, participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive statement felt worse than those who did not, while those with high self-esteem felt somewhat better, to a limited degree. Oettingen and Mayer reported in four studies that positive expectations predicted effort and performance, while positive fantasies about a desired future predicted the reverse. Later work by Oettingen and colleagues describes mental contrasting, which sets a desired future against obstacles.

Positive psychology intervention reviews

A 2009 meta-analysis of 51 interventions reported mean effects of r = .29 on well-being and r = .31 on depressive symptoms. A 2019 reanalysis that accounted for small-sample bias found a small effect on well-being (about r = .10) and variable, mostly nonsignificant effects on depression. A 2021 meta-analysis of 347 studies reported small to medium effects on well-being (g = 0.39) and depression (g = -0.39), maintained at three months. Reviews therefore differ in magnitude.

Cancer outcomes and the dispute over claims

Coyne and Tennen argued in 2010 that claims about positive factors such as fighting spirit extending cancer survival do not fit available evidence, citing a systematic review of 12 studies that mostly found no prognostic value. Aspinwall and Tedeschi replied that researchers have not claimed that positive thinking can treat disease and that optimism relates to better outcomes in other major diseases, and psychosocial interventions may improve pain and quality of life in cancer.

Research on toxic positivity

The 2026 scoping review, which covered English-language academic and grey literature from 2011 to mid-2024, reported antecedents such as social media influence, societal expectations and misinterpretation of positive psychology traditions, and consequences at intrapersonal, interpersonal and sociocultural levels. Its authors describe the research base as limited. The sources reviewed here did not include individual studies by other named researchers on the topic.

Suppressing difficult emotions

The ethics essay argues that unrestricted positive thinking is not necessarily good for mental health and that sadness and stress are normal responses to adversity. The toxic positivity scoping review reports consequences at individual and interpersonal levels. No source reviewed here reports rates of harm from ordinary optimism or affirmation use in the general population.

Pressure and blame in serious illness

The ethics essay argues that patients with cancer may feel additional distress when they are pressured to stay positive and then feel they have failed. It also reports that some support groups have excluded members whose disease had spread, a practice the author considers unjust. Coyne and Tennen quote a systematic review's conclusion that people with cancer should not feel pressured into adopting particular coping styles to improve survival.

Delayed care and when to seek help

The ethics essay warns that extreme positive thinking may promote alternative medicine that substitutes for effective treatment. The National Institute of Mental Health advises talking to a health care provider if signs of depression persist, and lists the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States. Positive thinking does not replace medical or mental health care.