Behold the Stars

Do You Have a Negativity Bias?* March 8, 2008

Of course you do. Human beings are thinking machines. It is estimated that the average person has about 60,000 thoughts each day. They bubble up spontaneously, one after another, without end. To see them in action, try to sit quietly for five minutes without thinking of anything. You can’t do it. Thoughts keep intruding on your quiet time.

What is interesting is that it is estimated that about 95% of those are the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. That means that most of the time our brains are chugging along thinking about things that have nothing to do with what we’re doing at any given moment. In other words, thoughts regarding our daily activities are merely intrusions into this ocean of self chatter.

It gets worse. It is also estimated that roughly 80% of thoughts in that ocean are negative. Let’s do the math: 60,000 thoughts X 80%=48,000 negative thoughts a day. Admitting that this is a rough estimate of a rough average, we’re still talking about a lot of negative thoughts for most of us. We are not only swimming in a sea of thoughts, but a sea of negative ones. Specialists call these “automatic negative thoughts,” or ANTs.

Now for the bad part: we’re junkies for the bad stuff. Our brains are “Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity,” says brain researcher Dr. Rich Hanson. According to Dr. John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, our brains respond more intensely to negative or disturbing thoughts than to positive, comforting ones. In a study, he measured different levels of brain activity in subjects viewing images inspiring positive feelings, images involving negative or disturbing images, or images inspiring neutral feelings. Activity was much higher when subjects viewed the negative or disturbing images than when viewing positive or neutral images.

So we are hardwired to focus on the negative, right? Not so, says Dr. Richard Davidson of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. New ways of thinking produce new neural pathways and shrink older, unused pathways. This explains why it gets easier to focus on the positive aspects of our lives the more we practice. We’re training our emotional pathways the way an athlete trains his body. That is good news.

Start your training today. Do 25 repetitions with your gratitude journal followed by 15 repetitions with your success journal. Add intermittent episodes of smelling the roses throughout the day, and pretty soon you’ll be a lean, mean happy machine.

Make a great day.

* This post is based on a summary of information taken from Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out, by Marci Shimoff and Carol Kline.

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