Toxic Positivity at Work | When Stress Relief Becomes Burnout

That sinking feeling when your manager posts a “helpful” reminder in the team chat isn’t always a sign that you’re being “too sensitive.” Sometimes, it’s your nervous system recognising a pattern you’ve been conditioned to ignore.

 I’m Cheryl Paris, and today I’m addressing a modern workplace issue that lurks behind the facade of professionalism: toxic positivity, which may seem sensible on paper but feels like quiet supervision in your body.

We’ll discuss the small moments that accumulate into work stress, workplace anxiety, and an increased risk of burnout. This includes missing information, limited ownership, ideas that travel upward without your acknowledgement, and the pressure to remain calm, grateful, and relentlessly constructive.

 I’ll explain how the phrase “assume positive intent” can serve as a conversation stopper, how high-achieving women often find themselves acting both as detectives and suspects, and what I refer to as the "umbrella manager dynamic," where praise is shared while placing blame is deflected.

Then, we’ll get practical. You’ll learn some simple tools to help you communicate more accurately without needing to be overly positive. These include a three-column note format (facts, meaning, clarification), a brief factual log to prevent late-night rumination, and concise one-sentence replies that don’t require apologies or elaborate defences. 

We will conclude with three guiding principles for clearer communication and setting boundaries: integrity, simplicity, and control.

If this resonated with you and provides language for something you’ve been struggling to articulate, please subscribe, share this episode with someone who would benefit, and leave a review so that more people can discover the show.

What pattern at work are you finally ready to identify?

The contents of this podcast are for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. If you have a specific health concern or condition, please consult a qualified Healthcare professional for more details. Check out herguru dot uk forward slash disclaimers

Transcript

Welcome And Why Truth Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:21

This great story teaches us something about being healing. I'm Cheryl Paris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Hi, I just wanted to welcome all new listeners to the podcast. Yes, I know I'm a bit weird, but I just want to say thank you for being here, and I particularly want to do a warm welcome to a listener that I've noticed from Walnut Creek, California. Hope you guys are all doing okay over there. Now, what I want to talk to you about today is I want you to imagine this. Now, I know some of these episodes are a bit far out and a bit well, you could even say controversial, the way that I talk about work stress and work anxiety and burnout, but the thing is, the way that I see it is I'm interested in truth. I'm not interested in fluffiness or trying to gaslight anyone. Look, we all experience life in different ways, and the way that I see it, we experience how we feel about things in different ways. So I would hope that even though I might be talking about some uncomfortable truths, the thing is you get you get where I'm coming from, and that's the whole point of the podcast. To for you to understand and get where I'm coming from. So maybe some of the insights that you might hear on the podcast might make you think about things in a different way, the way that you're experiencing things from a different point of view. And to me, that might mean that you take different actions or no actions, but whatever you do, you're still decisive when it comes to dealing with your own work stress or anxiety, or the or you may feel that you're on the way to burnout, and something you hear might just make you think, actually, I need to maybe do things a bit differently. So, where does that get us? To me, toxic positivity at work is not always someone chirping, look on the bright side while your life quietly catches a fire. No, sometimes it is harm being

Toxic Positivity That Feels Like Supervision

SPEAKER_00 3:25

created or quietly being enabled, followed by the expectation that you should remain cheerful, grateful, reasonable and relentlessly solution focused. Is that not positivity? Is it not obedience with I don't know, homage to a scented candle? And this aversion is difficult to spot because it really arrives wearing a villain's cape. It arrives looking helpful, sensible, professional. It arrives in tiny ordinary moments that sound almost petty when you try to explain them. You know, a message in the team chat, a forgotten update, somebody just checking in, something you've already handed in, nothing dramatic, nothing that would need a documentary to be written about, just another tiny thing to make Monday morning feel like your hostage to Outlook. Imagine this: a message has been sent to you, you know it is there, and you are dealing with it, and then your manager posts in the team chat to announce the message exists. Or paper that may look perfectly helpful in your body, it feels like everyone, please notice that I am supervising this person. Your stomach drops, your face feels hot, and before you've even decided what happened, you are already composing a reply to prove that you are competent, attentive, and definitely not the problem. Then comes the internal cross-examination. Why am I bothering? They are only reminding me. Am I being oser sensitive? Surely a more confident person would just let it go. You may already have noticed how quickly a capable woman audits her own reactions before she audits the patterns around her, before we question the behavior, we put our own nervous system in the witness box. And one reminder may be exactly that. One reminder. But perhaps it's not just one reminder. Perhaps information about your work is repeatedly not passed to you. Somebody steps into your case without telling you, an idea you traveled through into another room comes back wearing someone else's name, the information goes missing, the ownership goes wandering, and your confidence is expected to remain beautifully house-trained. There is a strange kind of workplace plumbing in these situations. Ideas travel up and become leadership. Mistakes travel down and become performance concerns. If an idea lands well, it becomes something we we have to be developing. If it doesn't, it becomes evidence that you're struggling. It goes up in the lift, blame comes down the stairs, and somewhere arrives out of breath at your desk. You know, so for so many hybrid cheaving women, there's this unspoken bargain underneath it all. If I am competent, useful, calm, and easy, I will be safe from criticism. And when work begins to feel unsafe, you might not question that bargain. You increase your payments, you check more, explain more, smile more, rescue more, and sleep less. When competency stops buying safety, we often try to pay with even more competency. Then the polished advice arrives. Be resilient, stay constructive, assume positive intent. Don't take it personally. Now, all of those ideas can be useful in a healthy workplace, but they become a problem when they are used to close an inquiry rather than to support one. Sometimes assume positive intent is like a little velvet blanket being thrown over a bin fire, and when your mind keeps minimizing each individual moment, your nervous system though keeps noticing the pattern. It is not responding only to today's message, it's responding to the accumulative uncertainty. Will I be copied in? Will I receive the information I need? Will I be blamed for not knowing when nobody told me? So you check the chats and you rehearse conversations, you read the email again, you prepare

Your Nervous System Tracks The Pattern

SPEAKER_00 8:53

for the meeting before the meeting and replay it afterwards when you would quite like to be asleep. The nervous system is an excellent pattern detector and a terrible writer of polite meeting notes. Then comes the double bind. Your work is questioned, information is controlled, and if you become anxious, angry, or defenses, the situation shifts to your tone, your resilience, or your ability to cope. I think of this as the umbrella manager. Healthy support says we share the shelter, we share the pressure, we share responsibility when the weather turns. The unhealthy version says I will stand under your labour when praise arrives,

The Umbrella Manager Double Bind

SPEAKER_00 9:51

but push you into the rain when blame appears. You can stand under my umbrella, but you do not get to use me as the umbrella. One message, one meeting, one miss update might each be explained, but what happens when the same person repeatedly loses information, ownership, credit, and even the right to react? If the incident is small but the pattern is expensive, perhaps your reaction isn't really the problem at all. So if being more positive is not the answer, what is actually happening underneath all of this? You know, one public reminder, thinking of a recent friend who contacted me who's saying that they are having issues at work, and one of the things she said to me, one public reminder, one miss update, or one borrowed idea may be explainable, but the psychological impact that grows when the same uncertainty keeps returning again and again, and this is not about proving somebody's motives. You never know what people's motives are unless they tell you a lot of the time they don't even know themselves why they behave in the way they do. You don't have to prove a grand conspiracy before you're allowed to notice a pattern. Think of a slightly uneven floor. One tile may look harmless, but when each of the tiles on the floor keeps shifting in the same direction, your body learns to do something quickly, to walk carefully. The first difficulty is that the words and the impact can point in completely opposite directions. Good intentions may exist, impact still deserves attention. A positive label doesn't magically turn a corrosive impact into support. It's like I don't know, opening a jar marked honey and tasting vinegar. After a while, you begin to wonder whether you can trust your own tongue. And when it doesn't feel safe to question the label, what do you do? You turn the investigation inwards and say, perhaps I misunderstood, perhaps they forgot, perhaps I'm being sensitive, perhaps I should be grateful because there is no single dramatic incident your mind keeps reopening the case. High achieving people are often very, very skilled at finding alternative explanations because we want to think the best of people. But when the evidence is foggy, the conscientious person often becomes both detective and suspect. Meanwhile, your nervous system is trying to predict what happens next, it learns through repetition, it notices the message, may not always be public. So it starts scanning. That's what you do. Your nervous system is not being dramatic, it's trying to stop the weather surprising you again. You know, the hidden bargain sounds something like this. If I anticipate everything, deliver beautifully, stay pleasant, and never need too much. Perhaps no one will criticize me. The thing is, and the way that I see it, the problem comes when the bargain is no longer being honoured. And instead of questioning the bargain, you assume you you haven't paid enough. Uncertainty then creates anxiety, work anxiety creates more checking, explaining, smiling. All that extra effort makes you easier to rely on and rather inconveniently easier to overlook. Then exhaustion makes every small incident harder to absorb. You did not create someone else's behavior, you didn't build the trap, but exhaustion can make the same exit harder to see. It is rather like walking faster on a downward escalator. Enormous effort, but very little arrival, and the impressive cardio, no one else requests. Many women have learned that credibility requires a calm face, a reasonable tone, and no inconvenient reactions. Anger is treated as aggression, anxiety as you're not capable anymore, and a boundary that you created for your own self-preservation is treated as negativity. So you edit your emotional responses before you've even understood what it is you're replying to. But being professional is about how you choose to respond, it's not proof that nothing is allowed to affect you, and this is where I think positivity becomes toxic, not because optimism is bad, optimism, good intention, and solution focus thinking can all be very, very useful in the right context. The trouble begins when positivity becomes the entry requirement for being heard. You may raise the concern only if nobody else feels accused or uncomfortable or responsible. You're expected to present distress in I don't know, gift wrapping. Positivity becomes toxic when it's used to make reality more presentable instead of more workable. So the goal, I think, is not to become more negative, is to it's actually to become more accurate. We've all heard that we should be calm in situation, and calm is not something you owe the person who unsettles you.

From Being Positive To Being Accurate

SPEAKER_00 16:43

I don't think it is support that you may offer your nervous system so it can separate what's happened with your fear of what it means and what needs to be clarified. Your reaction isn't is a normal response, it's information, it's not a verdict, and it's certainly not a character flaw. To me, calm is enough space to see what is actually there, like wiping the condensation from a window. The landscape hasn't changed, but the view becomes more useful to you. And perhaps there's a third position between staying silent and observing everything and marching into a meeting with a ten page file and the soundtrack to Erin Brockovich, steady, clear, proportional, noticing without diagnosing, speaking without over-explaining, protecting your self-trust through small pieces of evidence. Confidence doesn't have to arrive like a trapdoor beneath you opening up, it can work more like a dimmer switch, increasing at small doable amounts. And if that's true, if the answer is neither smiling harder nor exploding, what do you do instead? The reason I think we start small in these situations is not because what happened is small. We start small because our nervous system learns through experience. One manageable moment of

Small Repeatable Experiments For Clarity

SPEAKER_00 18:48

clarity teaches it more than some heroic speech that you've rehearsed at 2 03 in the morning and will never feel safe enough to deliver. Small doesn't mean insignificant, small means repeatable, like that dimmer switch, confidence as a dimmer switch. You know, in the ABGW method, we have growth. Growth is capacity building, not pressure. So like these experiments, not tests. There's to because to me, there's no gold star in choosing the hardest sentence, no failure in today's experiment if we simply notice what's happening without immediately trying to explain it away. Because what are we doing? We're trying to build evidence here. So your first experiment is three quiet columns. The first, what happened? A reminder about my task was posted in the team chat. Second, what meaning did I make of it? They think I'm incompetent. Three or thirdly, what do I need clarifying? Who owns his action and how should updates be shared? Facts, meaning, clarification. Facts, meaning, clarification. You can write those three lines in a private note. The aim is not to dismiss your interpretation, it's to stop facts and fears and meaning becoming almost like a giant knot. The second experiment is one factual note. A factual note is not about becoming some office spy, it's about giving your mind somewhere to put the event so it doesn't have to be rehearsed again in the evening, you know. So writing the date, what happened, who was there, what changed, describe the behaviour, four lines, that's all, and then you can stop. For example, Monday 1015, team chat reminders posted after I'd confirmed receipt, three colleagues were present. I replied that it was in hand. Now choose one sentence that does not require a brass band. Thanks. I have that in hand. That sentence is calm, factual, and complete. Notice the difficult bits, there is no apology, no paragraph explaining your childhood, no frantic proof that you're an excellent manager or employee. Just clarity. If information or ownership keeps wandering, try a clarifying question. Can you confirm who owns this action? Choose one sentence from the next likely situation for the next likely situation. If an idea travels up without your name, you might say, I'm pleased the approach I suggest is being taken forward. Can we agree how contributions will be credited or or recognized? That may not be today's experiment, it might be one for later. Growth includes choosing the safest, useful next step, not the most impressive one. Three ABGW compass points can help us here, I think. Integrity. Tell yourself the uncomfortable truth, simplicity, use clear language, control, choose the parts

Integrity Simplicity Control As A Compass

SPEAKER_00 23:08

that are yours. You can't control whether someone behaves beautifully, annoyingly. I know, but you can control whether you abandon your own observation to keep the atmosphere pleasant. You know, a compass doesn't remove the weather, it helps you keep your direction, right? So before you reply, ask yourself what is true, what is simple, and what is which part of this is mine? You know, you might end the day with one line. Today I noticed, chose, or said, then complete the sentence. One small pebble in your jar of proof. You don't have to send everything to your mind to rehearse, you don't need to become harder, louder, or less human. You can become steadier, clearer, and difficult to quietly misuse. Yes, I know I've said a lot in this, but if this episode gave you language for something difficult to explain, share it privately with one person who you might think might need these words. And what I want you to remember, because this is so so important,

Share The Words And Close

SPEAKER_00 24:42

every step you take, no matter how small it is, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust in your journey, and remember, progress is progress no matter the pace. Bye for now. I hope today's episode gave you something useful to carry into your week. Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace. Until next time, bye for now.