I remember these moments from my teenage years where whatever I was dealing with felt so enormous that I’d be bereft of hope. I recall how intensely I felt that emotion of the moment―abject pain, deep angst, and the many hues in between. Then life continued on and while the emotions may not have been that strong, the internal posture was similar in its tendency to overemphasize the negative. There was always the next thing and then the one after…and then the next one to worry about. And not only was there always something to worry about, the thing that was worrying in the present moment seemed to color everything else in life with its brushstroke. We are sometimes told that life is a roller coaster with breathtaking highs and sudden drops but what we aren’t told is that those drops have a tendency to obstruct joy in the rest of our life. We also forget that a lot of our days are lived at the moderate-speed-completely-manageable ground level of experience. This means self-determination is possible for a big chunk of our life. Then why do the dips spill over to life’s highs and the moderate hums? Why do we color the whole canvas of our existence with the color of pain that we’re experiencing in the moment?
(To be clear: when I say pain, I don’t mean grief and trauma which are a whole different experience, I mean the less jarring dips we face).
While we may be a collection of body parts and lived experiences, we live in this unified animal which is hell-bent on protecting itself from harm in any shape. For our ancestors, being on high-alert for threats was a necessity because those who were more attuned to danger were more likely to survive…you know, they wanted to live! And this programming has been lovingly and evolutionarily handed down to us. It’s what scientists now call negativity bias. It means where something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person’s behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. It shows up in our modern lives as not just being more in touch with potential threats, it means that we remember trauma better than joy, insults better than praise, absorb and react more strongly to negative stimuli, ruminate on the rough parts of life; and all this takes space away from the positives. We feel the results of this bias in our relationships and in our decision-making because of how we perceive others and situations. Negative experiences impact our attention by becoming thought-magnets. They take over cognition as we think more about negative events to work out things in our minds. They also impact memory and learning which are direct consequences of attentional processing, i.e. the more attention is devoted to something, the more likely it will be learned and later remembered. In their famous work, Nobel Prize-winning researchers Kahneman and Tversky found that when making decisions, people consistently place greater weight on negative aspects of an event than they do on positive ones so that potential costs are more heavily considered than potential gains.
But worry not fellow humans…now that we know what we are up against, we can hack a solve.
When we are clutched by our negativity bias, it’s hard to intercept it via a long list of recommendations. And so, I’ve started employing the scientist archetype as a shorthand: curious, patient, open-minded, courageous, collected, and fact-based. So next time, say you have that injury that creates a thought bubble jumping drastically from this little injury to a disabled future, please think like a scientist and reframe. Perhaps the next 10 minutes are better spent on that physical therapy exercise that made you feel stronger, and not on feeding thoughts of an unlikely future of living out the rest of your days in a wheelchair.
And one more thing we’re not told―roller coasters have strong foundations and support beams; as do we. Our roller coaster of emotion sits on top of a very strong internal foundation.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”― Mark Twain
