Why do i focus on the negative

When your brain perceives the potential for rejection, judgment, or failure, your brain does what it knows how to do best. It focuses on the negative, trying to keep you safe. In fact, not only does this pattern of focusing on the negative not work anymore, it actually makes things worse! It leads to all sorts of unpleasant stuff, including anxiety, stress, fear, depression, and discouragement. You can change this pattern. You can train your brain to see things differently.

With some intentionality and practice, you can totally train your brain to see the good. In fact, this is practically the whole premise of Dr. Allison Answers! This is why I talk about gratitude so often. In line with the predictions, they found that those who underwent the short CBM training elicited a smaller ERN compared to the control participants. And an actual change in brain state through a single session of CBM is particularly encouraging when you consider the fact that cognitive-behavioral therapies CBT have not been shown to elicit such neural changes.

One important implication of this work is that CBM is capable of altering brain activity in people from a non-clinical population. A majority of prior research has looked at people with anxiety-related psychopathologies. Here the findings suggest that everyone can benefit from CBM, and that even the mild form of anxiety can and should be kept in check in order to achieve optimal performance. In fact, new CBM apps and games are now becoming widely available to the lay public.

An online program called MindHabits includes a number of games that get users to find the smile in an array of faces. Similarly, a new app called Happy Faces is giving user-friendly CBM training with various types of stimuli.

A bonus feature with their app is it offers personalized training where you can include your own pictures as part of the game stimuli. So keep this in mind for next time you have to give a presentation.

And know that the smiles—and all the other good things—are there. You just need to train your brain to find them. But the kids learned faster when they were losing marbles than gaining marbles. There was also a nice field study with teachers, where they were given a bonus if enough of their kids improved or reached grade-level-appropriate scores at the end of the year.

The others were told they would get their bonus at the end of the year if students advanced. The result? Students learn better when the teacher might be punished by having money taken away, instead of rewarded by getting money in the end. Both are good, but eliminating the negative should get priority. Why would you be a great husband or wife? JS: Is there a good way to provide criticism, given how much we hate receiving it?

JT: One of the big mistakes people have learned is that, when giving criticism, you should start off saying a lot of good things about the other person, then throw in some criticism, and wrap it up with some nice words.

But most people would rather just get the bad news out of the way. Also, once you give people the bad news, they respond so strongly to criticism that the brain basically forgets the first part—people will walk out of the evaluation focusing on that criticism, with all the good stuff forgotten. JT: This is something that interested me in my media career—just seeing how eagerly we journalists will turn anything into bad news. Focusing on those shared concerns is the easiest way to reach a mass audience.

Social media often gets a bad rap, but, in fact, people on social media tend to share stories that are more positive than mass media. JS: You mentioned manipulation earlier. Do you ever worry that helping people understand the power of the negativity bias could lead them to misuse it in a way?

JT: I do think that the negativity effect is used for bad purposes all the time. RB: OK, the original Pollyanna movie was not a critical success. But the idea of taking a positive attitude is very appealing, which is probably why it was a commercial success.