Negativity Bias
Today I am grateful for the sounds I can hear, like the crack of a baseball bat and our neighbor's lawn mower. I am also grateful to learn more about how I tick on a mental level.
"Negativity bias" is the tendency of human brains to default to negative, unpleasant experiences. Evolutionarily speaking, that probably served us well when life was "nasty, brutish, and short" and all
about "survival of the fittest." As Rick Hanson puts it in his book Buddha's Brain, our brains are like velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.
Of course, we learn valuable lessons from negative experiences and from pain. For example, anger spurs people to want to right injustices, both those of an individual nature as well as those on a cultural or societal level. But being prone to focusing our mind power on more negatives than positives can leave us with more pessimistic perceptions.
This idea of a negative slant to how I perceived myself and the world around me are confirmed by my memories of adolescence and early adulthood. There was much good in my life, but I spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on what wasn't going well. I wasn't good enough, pretty enough, noticeable enough. Add alcohol, depressant that it is, and the negative slant got really skewed.
Dr. Hanson doesn't suggest ignoring or suppressing negative experiences. They will continue to happen. He suggests fostering the positive experiences. That takes time and effort. Retraining our brains is not an overnight matter.
Enter habitual gratitude practice. It has made all the difference in downsizing this negativity bias.
"Negativity bias" is the tendency of human brains to default to negative, unpleasant experiences. Evolutionarily speaking, that probably served us well when life was "nasty, brutish, and short" and all
about "survival of the fittest." As Rick Hanson puts it in his book Buddha's Brain, our brains are like velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.
Of course, we learn valuable lessons from negative experiences and from pain. For example, anger spurs people to want to right injustices, both those of an individual nature as well as those on a cultural or societal level. But being prone to focusing our mind power on more negatives than positives can leave us with more pessimistic perceptions.
This idea of a negative slant to how I perceived myself and the world around me are confirmed by my memories of adolescence and early adulthood. There was much good in my life, but I spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on what wasn't going well. I wasn't good enough, pretty enough, noticeable enough. Add alcohol, depressant that it is, and the negative slant got really skewed.
Dr. Hanson doesn't suggest ignoring or suppressing negative experiences. They will continue to happen. He suggests fostering the positive experiences. That takes time and effort. Retraining our brains is not an overnight matter.
Enter habitual gratitude practice. It has made all the difference in downsizing this negativity bias.
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