Do you know that positive thinking can actually make you feel worse?

Good news for pessimists. You haven’t been living the wrong thing all along.

Repeating positive statements to yourself doesn’t appear to help people with low self-esteem, according to a new study. Researchers asked students to repeat statements like “I am a lovable person” to themselves, then measured their mood. Those with low self-esteem typically wound up feeling worse, the Washington Post reports.

The results fly in the face of self-help orthodoxy. “From at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, the media have advocated saying favorable things to oneself,” the researchers wrote. “At this moment thousands of people across North America are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves.”

Apparently true, at least in my own case.

Keep repeating the phrase “I am having a good fortune!” over and over again while the fact remains that you have just been fired, now broke, and having three children to send to school does not necessarily heighten your self-esteem… On the contrary, you worsen it.

(because such paradoxical phrases makes you realise how UNLUCKY you actually are).

If you still don’t get it, try watching the paradox of positive-thinking in Yes-Man movie.

Ah, and the above “fired and broke” thingy doesn’t have anything to do with my own life… I was just citing an example.

Albeit a very similar one.