Countering the Negativity Bias

Hey friends, welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. So imagine you do a presentation at work, and then everyone on your team has a chance to give you feedback. If five of those people compliment your work and one person criticizes it, which one do you remember later? Which one could keep you up at night ruminating about it? So if you're like most people, the criticism gets highlighted in our mind because of what is known as the negativity bias. So this bias towards the negative is completely normal. As human beings evolved, it was vitally important to learn from negative experiences so that we could outwit predators and avoid dangerous.

So our brains register negative experiences really quickly and highlights them and stores them in memory. So, you know, this helped us remember how we could avoid future potential threats. Now we don't live in a world anymore where there's constant threats and dangers like the thousands of years gone by, but our brains still operate in the same way. And the problem with the negativity bias for us these days is that over the long term, we can develop a growing tendency to be pessimistic, stressed, and negative. So what can we do to counter this negativity bias? Neuropsychologist and author Rick Hanson teaches, that we can do this through the deliberate practice of taking in the good.

So you can begin to give this a try in three basic stages. First, it's important to deliberately look for, to be attentive to good experiences in your life each day. Now they can be really simple, just, you know, appreciating the beauty in the garden or the taste of your tea. And the second part of taking in the good is just, you know, when you do have a good experience in front of you really relish it. Stay with the experience for 10 to 20 seconds, if you can.

Open up to the body sensations, the feelings and all that's happening in that moment. Really drinking that good experience, letting it fill your body and mind. And then lastly, absorb the experience. Really take a moment to, uh, appreciate the fact that you had that experience and really have a sense of, um, taking it inside you and storing it in memory. So today and for the rest of this week, see if you can focus on taking in the good like this.

Maybe think now, you know, what are some good things in your life that you maybe don't usually notice? What's beautiful that you can appreciate, enjoy and savor as you go about your day today? And in today's meditation, we're going to take some time to really grow and cultivate our capacity to take in the good and therefore bring more lightness, happiness and contentment into your days.