What is the ‘Negativity Bias’?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

It was Sunday afternoon. We were out walking in a park by our house.

“Did you ever get stitches, Mommy?” my 7-year-old son asked me.

“Yes, I fell and split open my chin on the metal playground equipment when I was four. It feels like it was yesterday,” I told him. “I will never forget walking into the school principal’s office, my hand cupped under my chin. My mother rushed from work to pick me up and take me to the ER for stitches.”

My mind started replaying the incident scene by scene. The next thing I knew, I was having flashbacks of other injuries and traumatic experiences from my childhood and teenage years. 

I quickly realized that I had more negative than positive memories in my brain’s storehouse. Or perhaps they were just stronger, drowning out the positive. I know that I had a lot of positive experiences in my life, but for some reason, I couldn’t remember them well.

Why is that? Why can I remember the painful experiences, the hard times, and the stinging words so well?

From the Beginning

Apparently, I’m not the only one in the world dealing with negative thoughts and memories. It seems to have been a part of human nature from the beginning of time.

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, psychologist and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center of UC Berkeley, our brain makes “three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities).” As a result, the “Negativity Bias” developed.

Dr. Hanson describes the “Negativity Bias” as our natural “tendency to react to negative stimuli more intensely than positive.” 

The U.S. National Library of Medicine defines it as “the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.”

We can look at the brain to understand what happens physiologically.

Imagine that you are exposed to two equally intense situations (same noise level, same brightness, same everything). The only difference between the two experiences is that one is positive and one is negative. 

The brain reacts differently in the two situations. In the negative experience, the brain actually produces more neural activity. That’s why we remember it more. That’s why it sticks.

Dr. Hanson paints a powerful visual image to help us understand what is happening in these two very different experiences.

“The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”

Our negative experiences are registered by specialized circuits in the brain that immediately trap them into our emotional memory. Positive experiences, on the other hand, pass through standard memory systems. As a result, the only way to store them in our long-term memory is to hold them in our awareness for several seconds. 

That’s why the negative sticks so well and the positive doesn’t. That’s why we remember traumatic experiences more. That’s why we can still remember those cruel words spoken to us by a classmate in childhood or a family member more than 30 years ago.

Photo by Andreas Weiland on Unsplash

How Do We Overcome our ‘Negativity Bias’?

There are some steps that we can take to “rewire” our brains into counteracting the negative with the positive.

1. Practice mindfulness— This keeps us grounded in the present rather than the past or future, which tend to be filled with either negative memories or fearful thoughts about what lies ahead.

2.  Go on a “Low-Bad Diet.” — In their book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How to Overcome It, Roy Baumeister, social psychologist, and John Tierney recommend that we not bombard ourselves with bad news. If there’s a bad plane crash, natural disaster, terrorist attack, or a global pandemic, only allow yourself to listen to news media in small doses. 

3. Declutter Our Minds — Get the negative out of our heads by talking to a good friend, debriefing with a trained professional, or seeking counseling if needed. 

4. Surround Ourselves with Positive Stimuli — Fill your life with positive people, happy music, beautiful nature and creation, dancing, fun, new hobbies, vacation, and other positive stimuli.

5. Practice gratitude — Capture the positive, hold that awareness, and let it sink in by writing it down in a gratitude journal.

6. Process the positive experiences — Talk about them and write about them. Consider debriefing the positive experiences in life, not just the negative, traumatic ones. Doing so enlarges the positive neural pathways, making them easier to recall and enjoy again.

7. Replace negative self-talk with positive self-dialogue.

“The single most important underlying factor is….how we talk to ourselves about our experiences.”

— Kenneth Yeager, PhD, Director of STAR (Stress, Trauma, and Resilience) Program

8. Break negative thought patterns—Grant Brenner, MD, Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, encourages us to recognize when negative patterns start to invade and practice doing something positive each and every time—even something very small—to break the pattern. 

We can fight the negativity with something positive like going on a short walk, chewing a piece of mint gum, jotting down a few lines in a gratitude journal, calling a trusted friend, or turning on some joyful music . . . 

Photo by Chris Buckwald on Unsplash

A Bit of Hope

Baumeister and Tierney remind us that overcoming our natural tendency towards negativity—the “Negativity Bias”—is no easy task. However, they inspire hope. 

“Bad is stronger than good, but good can prevail.”

“Yes, I can still remember the stitches,” I told my son as we continued walking in the park. “I can also remember the nice doctors and nurses who helped me, the yummy grape popsicle they gave me, and my mom who took good care of me. I also have a lot of fun memories from my elementary school playground. Let me tell you about some of them . . .”

Guest author, Marci Renée, along with her French husband and four boys, is a global nomad who has traveled to more than 30 countries and has lived in the United States, France, Morocco, and Spain. She loves to travel, speak foreign languages, experience different cultures, eat ethnic foods, meet people from faraway lands, and of course, write and tell stories. She is a published author of children's picture books, memoirs, short stories, and poetry.

You can find Marci and her books on her website.

"The Cultural Story-Weaver," at www.culturalstoryweaver.com