Fighting Negativity

I thought I would write today about how people think. 


Why does the failure seem to stick in our mind so much longer than a success? 


I think genetically in our instincts evolution has made us remember the negative experiences more than the positive, successful experiences .  It was then when the situations we stayed in were different.  I believe it was then when the life of a living organism was more dependent on the external factors rather than his/her/its own.

Just imagine we are living in the forest and we tend to take a path which leads us to a lion den or a pond with snakes and crocodiles. the evolution through natural selection would only take those who would remember this negative path so as not to take it .  I believe with this the brain wiring for hard wired for us to take cognizance of negative thoughts more than the happy safer thoughts.

We all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things. The same glass, the saying goes can be seen as half full or half empty. And there’s a lot of research in the social sciences showing that depending on how you describe the glass to people as half full or half empty, it changes how they feel about it.

So if you describe the glass as half full, this is called gained brain because you’re focusing on what’s gained. Then people like it. But if you describe the same glass as half empty, a lost frame, then people don’t like it.

What I take away from this writing is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency to tilt towards the negative. It’s pretty easy to go from good to bad but far harder to shift from bad to good. We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things. And this matters.

On a more personal level what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the upside. Literally this takes work. This takes effort. And you can practice it. You can train your mind to do this better. There is research  showing that just writing for a few minutes each day about things that you’re grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well being and even your health.

We can also rehearse good news and share it with others. We tend to think great that misery loves company that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions, that we will feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was. And so we talk. And we talk. And we talk about the boss who’s driving us crazy and the friend who never called us back and meeting at work where every little thing that could go wrong did. But we forget to talk about the good stuff.

I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside. We can be more aware that bad tends to stick. One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even and bad times to propagate itself, right? Somebody snaps at you and you snap back and you snap at the next guy too. But what if the next time somebody snapped at you you forgave them. What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress who left her an extra large tip. Our minds may be built to look for negative information and to hold onto it. But we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it and start to see that the glass may be a little more full than we initially thought.