Shifting to a Positivity Bias...

Today I finally, after 10 years of living in Germany, got word that I will get my permanent residency. This was a looooong time in the making, and full of bureaucratic hurdles that only people living in this country can fully understand but finally the day has arrived! I was sitting in the waiting room at the Foreigners Office in Munich doing EFT tapping and directing my mind towards how good it will feel to have this little card in my hands. I came to this office many times in the past hoping and praying that THAT would be the day I got this card, but I didn’t. And I started to develop a story that it just wouldn’t happen for me.

The minds’ negative story telling function is so believable, isn’t it? And there is a reason for it. Probably most of us is familiar with the negativity bias - the psychological phenomenon that our minds attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. While this phenomenon was said to reserve a critical evolutionary purpose so we could stay safe and remember dangerous places, people and events to not repeat them, in modern times where we rarely encounter true situations or people that are imminently threatening to our survival. But we still have this bias we orient to.

Here are a few examples of how we see the negativity bias in our daily lives. We spend time with family or coworkers and even though there were compliments and positive energy directed your way, you focus on the slights or insults and run them in your mind. We usually dwell on unpleasant or traumatic events more than pleasant ones. We tend to focus our attention more quickly on negative rather than positive information… think the news for instance. Even when we experience numerous good events in one day, negativity bias can cause us to focus on the sole bad thing that happened.

We can even do this with our health! We may feel great in most aspects of our body, but then focus excessively on one thing which is not ideal, ignoring all the things which are! Stressing over the one or few bad things is at least as damaging as all of the positive things we think we are doing for our health, diet and physical body.

Knowing about the negativity bias is helpful but I don’t really believe the old adage that knowing something is half the work. I think changing negativity bias is A LOT more work than just being aware of existence. It requires daily vigilance that starts with watching our minds negative stories but continues with changing them.

Here are a few ideas I use to work with negativity bias:

Mindfulness or meditation: Watching your mind and thoughts, whether that is with a guided meditation or alone, is a great place to start to observe your feelings and thoughts more objectively.

Daily check in: How you chose to do this depends on what you like and will commit to doing. Like to sit in your kitchen or on the balcony in the sun at the beginning of the day, or take a walk after dinner alone? Whatever the scenario, every day do a “check in” to see your helpful and not helpful thought patterns for the day. I do this in my morning walk with my dog.

Reframing/nuerolinguistic reprogramming or cognitive behavioral therapy: Awareness of negative thoughts and negativity bias is a great place to start, but the next is to challenge those thoughts and replacing them with more useful ones . I use EFT tapping . IF that’s not your bag, Albert Ellis’s ABC (Antecedents, Behavior, Consequences) technique using cognitive behavioral therapy is a useful framework. Once you become aware of your behavior or its consequences (B and C in the model, respectively), then you can work backward to think about what led to them (A for antecedents).

Journaling: When you stop and take some time to focus on positive experiences or things you are grateful for, you are not only directing your mind to something it has a harder time focusing on, but you are also building up your store of positive mental images and feelings can help you address the imbalance that negativity bias predisposes us to.

Hope these help. And hope to see you on an event, in person or reach out if you are looking for 1:1 nutrition work.