Your brain is wired for negative thoughts. Here’s how to change it.

Okay, so you got a new sweater. It looks great and you're getting tons of compliments. But then just one person says something snarky about it and even though you got all that praise you, can't help but stew over the negative comment. Why is that? Why does our mind seem to dwell on the negative? "A lot of my research focuses on how people tend to get stuck in particular ways of thinking and what enables them to get unstuck." Alison Ledgerwood is a psychology professor at UC Davis. "I get to study how humans think and how we could maybe think better." We all know the expression about seeing a glass as half-full or half-empty. It isn't just what you see but how you see it. And the way describe that glass to people can really change how they feel about it. Alison wanted to know what happens when you try to switch your way of thinking from the positive frame to the negative frame — or vice versa. Her research team brought two groups of people into the lab and told them about a new surgical procedure. Group one was told that the procedure has a 70% success rate. For group two, they framed it as a 30 percent failure rate. "It's the same exact procedure and they're giving you the exact same information, but one doctor is focusing on the part of the class that's full and the other doctor is focusing on the part of the class that's empty." So, no surprise: People like the procedure when it's described in positive terms and they don't like it when you focus on the failure rate, but then the researchers pointed it out to the first group that you could also think of the procedure as failing 30% of the time. Suddenly people didn't like it anymore. And when they tried a similar thing with group two, pointing out that the procedure had a 70% success rate, people didn't change their mind. "And over and over again in studies like that we find that people seem to get stuck in the negative way of thinking about it and it's hard for them to flip and focus on the positive." So once you frame something negatively, it really sticks. "It makes sense from an evolutionary or functional perspective that our minds are built to look for negative information in the environment and to hold on to it once we find it." Imagine your prehistoric ancestors. You don't want to forget that there might be a predator lurking around. "In many situations, we want our minds to be grabbed by the negative information so that we can fix problems when they're there." But then there are other situations, where we want to get over some small imperfection or a bit of bad news, when it's not helpful to fixate on the negative. What do we do then? "what I really take away from this research for my own life is that it's difficult to see the upside and that it takes work, literally, that we have to put effort into looking at the bright side of things. So we can't assume that our mind is just going to do that automatically and that it's very easy to just keep tilting back towards the negatives." And this is something you can counteract with practice. Like, spending a few minutes each day thinking about the things you're grateful for. Doing this regularly can help it become a habit. And it turns out that this negative bias can change over time. Remember when you were younger and any bad experience felt like the end of the world? "So this kind of pervasive negativity bias starts to diminish and so in our research we've we find that the stickiness of a negative frame seems to disappear entirely by the time people are in their seventies. They seem to flow back and forth between negatives and positives much more easily." So maybe that's something we can all be grateful for — that there are actually some good things about getting older. How do you get out of negative ways of thinking? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to check out our other video all about the teenage brain. Remembering all the things you did as a teenager might make you cringe but neuroscientists are learning that some of the most puzzling teenage behavior may actually serve an evolutionary purpose.

Channel: Fig. 1 by University of California

Views: 530,646

Keywords: university of california, fig 1, education, uc davis, negative thoughts, negative, positive, positive thinking, psychology, negative frame, insults, compliments, evolution, alison ledgerwood, negative framing

Id: 3ThUrVXz9j0

Length: 4min 3sec (243 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019