Becoming Mr. Brightside

Our minds are programmed to focus on the negative. But you don’t have to surrender to the barrage of bad sh*t in your life

- Joshua St. Clair

Humans are hardwired for negativity. We dwell on the bad. We assume the worst. We’re way more likely to remember that one time our boss told us we were sloppy than the 10 times she told us we were great. And as much as we try to look on the bright side of half-empty (-full!) glasses, we’re just not built that way. The human brain developed millennia ago, when danger roamed the savanna, ready to ambush and kill us at any moment, and that led to what Roy Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, has dubbed the “negativity bias” that still governs how we think.

The only trouble is that for all the times it might keep us alive, negativity bias also has a way of causing us a ton of unnecessary stress. “The negativity bias gives us a warped view of the world,” says John Tierney, who worked with Baumeister to coauthor the upcoming book The Power of Bad. We focus only on what’s going wrong (in the present) and assume that it will keep going wrong (in the future). We despair, lose hope and conclude that things won’t change. As if that weren’t already bad enough, Twitter, Instagram and other feeds hit us with crisis after crisis. But there’s some hope: through their research, Baumeister and Tierney have found real solutions that can help us fight our instincts and keep us out of a daily emotional funnel cloud.

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