Managing Negativity Bias So It Isn't Overwhelming

I'm Guilty of Feeding Into Negativity Bias

When I was planning on what to write about for this post, I was thinking about writing on decision-making because that’s what’s coming down the road for me. However, when I got on here to write, my computer wasn’t connecting to the internet. Immediately I thought, “great, just one more thing.”

“Just one more thing,” was a phrase heard often at my house growing up, along with; “if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Indeed, that’s how life often feels. When problems start arising, they seem to keep piling up, or if you manage to get ahead of one, another is just behind it.

Well, as soon as the thought developed, I knew I’d have to re-direct with my internal therapist voice. It was not just one more thing. This is life and life can’t always go exactly how we expect or plan. However, it does actually go how we expect more often than it doesn’t.

Think about it. Day to day, how many regular tasks go off the rails? I can’t think of many. I head to the bathroom first thing after I get up and, though there are many things that could go horribly wrong on the way, I make it there and complete the morning routine like clockwork without interruption. I find clothes fairly easily and dress just as easily. The coffee pot keeps running morning after morning, the drive to work remains predictable and relatively smooth, and even in a profession that can sometimes present major hiccups, I keep coasting through the work day.

My point: very few things are actually going wrong in the grand scheme of my day to day life. So why do I, and you, and so many people I’ve worked with, return to the mindset that each hiccup is, “just one more thing?”

Negativity Bias

I suspect part of it lies in how we’re wired. As humans evolved, they had to learn to survive and survival was tough in early human times. Evolutionarily speaking, it made more sense to remember and watch for the threats (wild animals) than to put mental energy into what was not a threat (the beauty of flowers). Like the appendix to bodily function, we’ve evolved beyond the strict need of this thinking pattern that focuses so heavily on threats.

Most of these issues that pile up and become overwhelming are not strictly threats in the sense of what early humans may have faced. Instead, they are challenges we have the ability to overcome, such as unplugging the router and shutting down the computer to fix the temporary internet issue. Even when they are more difficult to face, such as a job loss or change, most of what we fixate on is not a life-threatening situation, but yet our brain hones in on it as though it is because evolution tells it to.

Yes, I think this evolution-based negativity bias has a great deal to do with how we think about our misfortunes. The other part of this issue comes from whether or not we choose to do something about the negativity bias. Because I know it is there and I work to help make others aware of it regularly, I know it can be changed by the power of perspective.

I want to pause and say I’m not invalidating anything I said in my last post or how you feel when things are going wrong. True, I have not been doing well lately. Sleep has been poor and stress has been high. And it’s still okay for me not to be okay and it’s okay for anyone going through something to no be okay.

Changing Perspective

That having been said, back to the power of perspective.

The mind is powerful tool, it can make us believe intensely unreal things. Logically, it can also do the opposite. How we think about an issue leads to how we feel about it, not the other way around. Then based on those thoughts and subsequent feelings, we act accordingly.

I was tempted when I thought, “just one more thing,” to start listing out all that’s been going off the rails recently, leading me into feeling pity and sadness. If I’d done that, I probably would have taken a nap, neglected this blog and my other paying work, then had negative thoughts about myself later for not doing my writing, leading to more sadness and some new guilt…and so on. Instead, I reminded myself it’s not just one more thing. It’s just a fluke that’s happening now, it is fixable, and it is not the universe piling up inconveniences against me.

Thus, I sat down to write this. I did fix the internet connection, with the help of my husband’s suggestions, and I’m not ruminating on all the things I haven’t gotten the opportunity to fix yet. I’m choosing a perspective that doesn’t feed into the negativity bias and you can, too.

It’s hard to do when all you seem to want to do is pile every rotten mishap onto the last to create a heap of unrelated garbage. You went from having single pieces of trash, easily tossed in the bin, to a landfill molding the individual pieces into an insurmountable blob. Bottom line, it gets way harder to sort through the landfill blob than deal with each piece on its own.

I’d like to follow up on this with more tips and tricks on changing thoughts to manage feelings. If that’s something you’d be interested, leave a comment or use the check boxes below!

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