Right now, somewhere on your phone, there is an endless supply of reasons to feel hopeless.

It never runs out. That’s by design. Open any app, and the feed simply keeps going, one piece of bad news after another, until the sheer volume starts to feel like proof. Proof that nothing is working. Proof that caring is pointless. Proof that the world is exactly as dark as the feed suggests.

Here’s what’s easy to miss in those moments: the feed is true. The bad things happening are real. But it is also true, at the exact same moment, that you are capable of creating something good and sending it out into the world. Both of those things can happen simultaneously. The feed shows you one. It’s worth learning how to see the other.

That choice, which true thing you let yourself see, has a name.

What Attentional Positivity Is

Picture a sink full of dirty dishes after a good dinner with people you love.

One honest way to see it: ugh, I have to wash all of this.

Also, honest: these are your dishes, from a meal you got to share with people you care about. You get to feel the warm, soapy water on your skin. You get to watch the sink go from full to empty. Both descriptions are completely true. Nothing about the second one denies the first.

That’s attentional positivity: choosing, on purpose, to rest your attention on the other true thing, the one underneath the chore.

Stated plainly: attentional positivity is the practice of deliberately directing your attention toward what’s also true and good in a moment, rather than letting your mind settle on whatever feels most negative by default.

The word matters here. Not intentional positivity, attentional. Intentional only tells you the choice was deliberate. Attentional tells you what’s actually happening: your attention is not a passive recorder. It’s a spotlight you can move. Most of the time, it moves on its own, toward whatever feels most urgent, most threatening, most negative, because negative information kept your ancestors alive in a way positive information never had to.

But it can also be directed. On purpose. By you.

Choosing, Not Denying

Toxic positivity insists there’s only one allowed version of events: the good one. It tells you the bad thing isn’t really bad, that you should just be grateful, that negative feelings are a problem to be corrected. It denies half of what’s true and punishes you for simply noticing it.

Attentional positivity does the opposite. It starts by admitting both things are real. The dishes are work. The doomscroll is full of genuine cruelty. Some nights are hard, and some grief doesn’t go anywhere. None of that gets erased.

What changes is where you choose to rest, once you’ve let both truths exist. You’re not told to pretend the hard thing isn’t there. You’re just no longer required to stare at it the whole time.

The Psychology of Reframing

Psychologist James Gross’s process model of emotion regulation identifies attentional deployment, deliberately directing focus within a situation, as one of the core ways humans regulate what they feel. Where you point your attention changes which emotion shows up, a documented way of reframing what you pay attention to, not just a feeling. It’s the same mechanism operating whether you’re aware of it or not.

Most of the time, it runs on autopilot, pulled toward whatever feels most urgent or threatening. Attentional positivity is simply learning to take the wheel sometimes, on purpose, toward the thing that’s equally true and worth more of your attention.

The “I Have To” to “I Get To” Reframe

If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve probably already met one small version of it. Swapping “I have to” for “I get to” is one of the most repeated small reframes in gratitude practice, and it works for exactly this reason. “I have to drive my kid to practice” and “I get to drive my kid to practice” describe the same afternoon. One version centers the obligation. The other centers on the facts that you have a kid, a car, and somewhere worth going.

That swap is attentional positivity in miniature, one sentence, applied to one moment. This is the bigger idea underneath it: the same move works on almost anything, once you know to look for it. It runs on the same logic as behavioral activation: you don’t wait to feel grateful before you act grateful. You direct your attention first, and the feeling tends to follow.

Where to Practice It

It looks like noticing, mid-scroll, that the feed showing you the worst of humanity exists in the same world where you’re about to write something kind to a stranger.

It looks like a hard day at work that was also, factually, a day you got to use your mind, solve a real problem, and go home to people who were glad to see you.

It looks like grief that’s real, sitting right next to the fact that you got to love someone enough for their absence to hurt this much.

Each one is simply noticing that more than one true thing is available and deliberately choosing which one gets your attention.

How to Stop Doomscrolling Without Losing Hope

There’s a reason the feed feels endless. Hopelessness is efficient. If you believe nothing you do matters, you stop trying, and a person who’s stopped trying is easy to keep on the feed.

But the hopeless framing isn’t more true than the other one. It’s just louder, and it’s been engineered that way. Right now, somewhere, someone is writing something true and kind and sending it out to a stranger they’ll never meet, hoping it lands at the right moment. That’s also real. That’s also happening. You get to decide which one you let yourself see, and which one you choose to add to.

Attentional positivity isn’t about ignoring what’s broken. It’s about refusing to let the broken thing be the only thing you’re allowed to notice.

This is not a suggestion to look away. The bad things are real, and they stay real whether or not you look at them. Things are bad. Things can get worse, and they will get worse if the rest of us, the good, hard-working, kind people, give up and stop pushing back. That is the actual danger, not the badness itself, but what happens to good people once they decide nothing they do matters.

There is a reason the feed wants you paralyzed. Hopelessness keeps people scrolling. Fear keeps people from pushing back. A person convinced that nothing changes anything is someone who stops trying to change anything, and that is exactly the outcome the algorithm is built to produce.

So keep the badness in the back of your mind. Know it. Don’t pretend it away. And right alongside it, build something. Bring light into the same dark world, on purpose, because you noticed it needed some. Imagine what happens if enough people decide to do that at the same time. At some point, the light overwhelms the dark. Not because the dark isn’t real. Because more people finally showed up holding something bright.

That choice, to keep showing up anyway, is one of the most profoundly human things you can do.

The Next Time You Reach for Your Phone

It’ll probably be soon. Maybe before you’ve even finished reading this.

The feed will be exactly as endless as it was an hour ago. That hasn’t changed and isn’t going to. What can change is the half-second before you start scrolling, the same half-second where your attention is still yours to point somewhere.

Before you scroll, name one true thing the feed won’t show you. Something you made, something you’re building, someone you love, someone who loves you back. It’s there. It was true this whole time, sitting right next to everything the feed wants you to see instead.

Same facts. Different attention. Same phone, same feed, same world. Just, for one half-second, a different place to look.

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