Your brain is not designed to make you happy; it's made to keep you alive. And in order
to do that, it's got some built-in biases, including a negativity bias that literally
filters what you see, what you pay attention to, what you notice in your life. And this is why
you might feel like everything is getting worse all the time. This bias fuels depression and
anxiety, and this thinking pattern might make you see the glass as half empty. So in this
video you'll learn how to catch yourself in the negativity bias and how to interrupt that
story so that you can be healthier and happier. [Music] Okay. This is an oldie but a goodie. Check
out this YouTube video. This is an awareness test. How many passes does
the team in white make? Go! The answer is 13. But did you see the moonwalking bear? Go! It's easy to miss something you're not looking
for. Now, there are always thousands of pieces of information that your brain could process
at any one time, but it uses attention to choose what to focus on. Your brain is literally
processing sensory stimuli, internal sensations, thoughts, and feelings all at once, but you don't
notice the vast majority of the things around you because you have selective attention. Like right
now you're hopefully paying attention to me, but there's a million things you could put your
attention on. So shift your attention to your breathing. Now shift your attention to the way
your shirt feels on your body. Now to the roof of your mouth. What does that feel like? Now notice
any sounds. Now pay attention to the source of light in your room. Now all of these things
were here all the time, but you didn't notice them or you weren't noticing them because your
attention was hopefully here. Now, trouble abounds everywhere, but goodness abounds everywhere too.
Your assumptions create your reality. What you pay attention to you get more of. Your brain
literally makes more neural pathway ways about the things you pay attention to. So if you notice
a lot of dangerous or anxiety-provoking things, it's going to make more pathways for stressful,
dangerous, or anxiety-provoking things. But your brain also has a built-in feature, a built-in
bias meant to keep you alive. So let's take a look. Let's just check this out. What do you
notice? What stands out to you? Write it in the comments. Now I'm going to change the picture. Now
what do you notice? If you're like most people, the spiders also stood out to you in the second
picture, even though the flower was brighter and more detailed than in the previous picture. So why
is that? Your brain has a built-in feature called negativity bias. It's a cognitive phenomenon
where people tend to pay more attention to, remember more vividly, and be influenced more
strongly by negative information compared to positive or neutral information. This bias
is believed to have evolutionary roots, where our ancestors needed to be hyper aware of
potential threats and dangers in their environment for survival. So let's say, for example, that your
ancestor was in an open field with 100 delicious watermelons and one saber-tooth tiger. Which
one would they focus on? In order to survive you had to selectively filter out the positive
opportunities and pay attention to dangers. This is called negativity bias or risk-aversion bias.
Your brain is not designed to make you happy; your brain is designed to keep you alive long
enough to reproduce. Focusing on negative stimuli helps us respond quickly to avoid harm or
dangerous situations. However, in modern times, this bias can lead to a skewed perception
of reality and an increased sensitivity to negative events or news. You can notice this
mental filter when people say things like, "Kids these days are worse than ever." Okay,
people have literally been saying this since Aristotle, at least. It's like our brain is wired
to notice how bad things are. Um people might say, "Everyone is so mean" or "He never takes out the
trash" or "Nobody likes me." I mean, which which YouTube comments do you think stand out? The
dozens of positive ones or the one really nasty one? Okay. Here's another one: "This world is
going downhill fast. Everything is awful." Well, no. Now that you know about negativity bias,
which is our mental filter, which news stories do you think most people click on? "Everything
Seems Fine in These 10,000 Cities" or "Holy Cow, There's Flooding in This One City"? After learning
to watch for this, you will see it all over the news. So for example, in the last year in my
state, we saw a series of stories like this: "Utah Is in a Terrible Drought." "Utah's Terrible
Drought Continues." "Utah's Gonna Dry Up and Everyone's Gonna Die." Right? Like "Utah's in This
Terrible Drought" over and over again. And then in the middle of the summer there was a story that
ran like this: "Utah Just Got a Ton of Rain, but It Probably Won't Do Much Good in This Terrible
Drought," and then um "Pray for Snow," and then Utah just got a ton of snow. "Oh, Wow, the Snow
Continues." "Utah's Having a Record-Breaking Snow Year." Okay. "Uh-Oh, Look at the Collapsed
Roofs in This One Place." Oh yeah, we're not in a drought anymore, Utah just got a ton more
snow, um but now let's worry about flooding. "Everything's Going to Be Destroyed by Flooding."
"Everyone Needs to Worry About Flooding." "Look, This One Street Was Destroyed by Flooding." Okay,
now it's summer. It's really hot. Let's talk about how awful the heat is again. Okay, now I I do want
to say, some of you are probably going to comment right now, "But what about climate change?" I I
get it about climate change. But if the news media actually cared about climate change, they would
run educational stories about how to limit your emissions or advocate with your congressman or
how to decrease commercialism, right? But instead, the news focuses on the sensational stories
because they know about this negative bias in your brain and they know they can make you
look, which means click, which means they make more money by running frightening stories. A story
about, "Hey, let's change out your lawn mower to an electric one" is just not going to make them as
much money as "Holy cow, check out this one place where something bad is happening!" You can tell I
get a little bit worked up about this, and I do it because our media consumption feeds our negativity
bias. They profit off of our negativity bias, and our negativity bias feeds depression and anxiety.
And then they get to make money by running stories about the anxiety epidemic. Right? The thing is,
most of us don't even notice it. That's how a bias works. If you believe that every single aspect
of the world today is worse than in the past, may I remind you about polio, small pox, um people
dying from tooth infections because dentistry and antibiotics weren't available. I'm not not saying
that there aren't bad things happening now; I just believe that it's negativity bias that says things
are worse than they've ever been. Back to my main idea. Negativity bias doesn't just impact our
emotions; it also messes with our relationships, politics, and our decision-making. People might
find it challenging to let go of any negative experiences. We might ruminate on them more
often, and we might feel the emotional impact of negative events more intensely compared
to positive ones. Also, if we feel bad, it's easy to look for reasons that we feel
bad. So this is called emotional reasoning, and we're going to talk more about this in another
video. But PMS is a good example of this, right? Your body starts to feel like crap, and all of a
sudden you're scanning, you're looking for reasons why you feel this way, and pretty pretty soon you
believe that the real problem is your husband, right? He didn't put out the trash or something.
And this is important, right, because anxiety literally sensitizes our brain to be more anxious.
When we feel anxious, we're more likely to scan for danger and notice things that we perceive as
threatening, and then we'll feel more anxious, and the spiral continues. So we have to be aware
of this mental filter, this negativity bias if we want to manage anxiety. Chronic anxiety or trauma
also makes our brain more vigilant to threats. So this seems kind of unfair. The more anxious you
are, the more likely you'll see threats everywhere and feel more anxious. Now, this also might be
a learned habit. In addition to our biological predisposition to it, it might be a learned habit
that you use to protect yourself. So for example, let's say your parent was abusive or critical
or unpredictable. Let's say that three days a week they were neutral, one day a week they were
scary, and two days a week they were super nice. If each time they were nice, if you really dwelled
on that and that's all you focused on, the next time they were scary it would hurt more. So you
filter out the memories of them being nice. You focus on safety and self- protection. You minimize
memories of of them being nice, and you highlight the negative, and this keeps you from feeling too
vulnerable and hurt. It's a protective mechanism that kept you safe as a child, but it isn't
working so well as an adult. Mental filtering literally changes your memory. You literally won't
remember positive things that happened. Mental filtering directly impacts how you feel. If if
you don't want to feel sad and mad and bad all the time, you have to take intentional action to see
the positive. The habitual way we think is like ruts in a road, and to get out of those ruts we
have to work hard to change direction. And and the hardest part about this is because this is a bias,
we don't notice that we're doing it. We think this is just how the world is, and we believe this
filtered perspective. Mental filtering is a lesser evolved defense mechanism. It works a
little, it might keep you alive, but it makes you miserable a lot. So if it feels like reality,
how will you know that you're doing it? It can be hard to break the negativity bias cycle, but you
can do it. And here's how: first thing you need to do is learn to notice your patterns. Because
by definition we don't notice our own biases, you'll probably need to ask the people around you
or a therapist for insight on this. What kind of situations trigger this for you? You've got to
get an outside perspective because we really do believe what we think. It's literally hard to
see it differently. And it might also be helpful to check a list of common mental filters in the
workbook to see if you can recognize any of them in yourself. And then the second thing I would say
is take breaks from negative information sources, and I'm going to leave it at that. Okay. Third:
slow it down. Get good at cognitive defusion. So if you think, "Everything is awful" or "The worst
is going to happen," you could could say something like, "Oh, thank you, mind, for that thought.
Thanks for trying to keep me safe. I'm also interested in being happy, so I'm going to scan
for some other information too." Right? You can observe your thoughts without judgment. You don't
have to believe them or buy them. Okay. The next: challenge your thoughts. So once you notice
the filter and you can start seeing yourself just noticing the negative, you can question
the validity of your thoughts, and you can ask yourself, "Oh, am I focusing on one negative
aspect while ignoring positive aspects?" Or "Is there evidence to support this filtered thought?"
Or "Hmm, I wonder if there's evidence to challenge this thought?" Like what other information is
there? "Oh, maybe my husband does take out the trash 9 out of 10 days" or "Maybe my husband's
really helpful in all these other things that he does." Right? We can challenge this negativity
bias by looking for alternative stories here. Because we have a built-in bias to focus on
negativity, this is one one of the reasons why gratitude practice can be so powerful. If
you're consistently fear-based or negative, try gratitude journaling each night. When you
ask your brain the question, "What is there to be grateful for?" it starts searching. And what you
look for, you will find. What you pay attention to you get more of. That's how your brain works.
That's how neuroplasticity works. Trouble does abound everywhere, but goodness abounds everywhere
too. So which one will you choose to focus your attention on? In the long run, you can train your
brain to redirect its attention toward a more helpful approach. It's not like our goal is to
just be happy all the time, or toxic positivity, like "Everything's fine!" Instead, our goal
is to see the world more clearly, to honestly address problems, and to remember that goodness
and love and safety also abound. By working with a therapist, challenging your own thoughts and the
bias from the media, and using gratitude practice, you really can learn how to create an internal
sense of safety and stop seeing danger everywhere. This is one way that we break the anxiety cycle.
And for those of you on YouTube, this is day 19 of my online course Break the Anxiety Cycle in
30 Days. You can watch the main videos here or access the full course with the workbook,
Q&A's, and more videos at the link in the description.
