Yesterday I saw a fascinating interview with Arthur Brooks who is known for his work on happiness and recently wrote a book with Oprah Winfrey. In the interview Brooks made a fascinating distinction between cultivating a negativity bias, compared to a positivity bias.
A negativity bias means we pay more attention to the negative side of things rather than the positive. The problem, observed Brooks, is we often shrug off positive aspects of our lives and think, “that’s nice.” And to keep us alive, our brains are wired to pay more attention to the negative. For example, a person might frown at us on the street and we think, “is that a threat? The problem is when we cultivate a negativity bias we can start to think that everything‘s bad and that’s incredibly unrealistic.
Brooks went onto make the point if we think about it, we have many more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic; many more reasons to be grateful than resentful. What we need to do in our lives is choose a positivity bias, rather than negative.
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