As a little girl, I loved to play all day. I would play and play and play, and sometimes, everything would go right. I’d get to have my favorite lunch, Chef Boyardee, spend some time at the pool, and go outside with my dogs. Then, near the very end of my day, something bad might happen. Let’s say a friend might no longer come to hang out. Little Mandy would conclude, “Today was such a bad day.”
My parents tried to remind me that one bad thing did not mean I had a bad day, but it took a while for me to understand this. For me, I had to learn that a bad end to my day did not mean I had a bad day.
Maybe that should seem more obvious, especially on days when so many other good things happened. Unfortunately though, like me, many humans tend to have a self-defeating cognitive pattern: Negativity bias.
This is the tendency to give more attention to negative things/occurrences, rather than the positive ones. Essentially, we’re more likely to assume or remember the bad things, even if they equal the positive in number or significance. Scientists believe that this habit has cause. Like usual, that cause stems from our ancestors.
As humanity developed, they had to deal with noticing and remembering threats. They did not have millenniums of written texts or at-home-lessons to teach them about how to survive. Thus, it became crucial to have a negativity bias, since it protected our early ancestors from dangers. If they did not have this bias and forgot or neglected certain threats, it could have resulted in the end of their life and in the end of the lives that would stem from them.
So, we can give a special nod to their attention to these details. However, we need to recognize that most negative things have a different significance now. We don’t need to focus our entire day on the fact that we stubbed our toe in the morning. It probably won’t effect our lifeline or the future of humanity. We can still recognize the pain, because ouch, but we need to learn how to put our negative bias in perspective of everything else.
How do we do that? It starts with self-awareness.
I believe that in most cases, our own thoughts and actions can impact our life more than anyone else’s. Yet, it can become easy to think and do things without evaluating how they effect us. I mean, how natural does it come to stop oneself during an inward rant and question, “Why am I doing this? Thinking this? Feeling this?”
These type of questions can just feel awkward and unnerving. The answers to these questions, though, can help bring us to a better sense of self-awareness. When we begin to focus on the bad, we can pause ourselves and look at the scene that’s playing out. Then, through the previous questions, we can identify why the scene looks that way and we can change it.
Notice, though, that I never mention the tendency will disappear. That might not happen. However, over the course of life, we can get better at enabling ourselves to live how we want. We can choose to remember the good things or focus on the bad.
If we choose to look to the good, change will come. It may come slowly (like years in the making slowly), so be patient with yourself. In the end, as you put forth this effort, you can feel satisfied knowing that you will look back and remember how much good you experienced in life.
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