Overcoming negativity

Spiralling into negativity is easy to do as we are wired to remember the negative over the positive. This possibly had something to do with our evolutionary ingrained survival instinct. If there was a danger out there we wanted to remember it, so it became embedded deep into our psyche. Then on a sunny day, rather than marvelling at the blooming flowers opening along the path, our cavemen ancestors would be on guard ready for the remembered threat.

There are a number of ways to overcome a negative mindset. Rick Hanson – neuropsychologist and author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom suggests that holding a negative and positive emotion in our mind at the same time is a great tool. But he also explains that positive events and good experiences need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from your short-term to your long-term memory. As mentioned negative moments get stored, whereas positive moments tend to go out of the mind quickly. To counterbalance the negative stored memories we need to build up the positive moments.

Hanson suggests that we feel the positive moment to cement the positive experience. For example if someone pays us a compliment, more often than not we shrug it off as it makes us uncomfortable. Instead we need to savour it and feel it, to make it an actual experience. Fully sense the positive moment, and feel it sink into you. These strategies will help the positive become embedded into your being and this can counter the negativity bias.

And we can hardly mention overcoming negativity without reference to writer and spiritualist Eckhart Tolle? Tolle states ‘The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.’ And our thoughts about a situation, more often than not, arise from past experiences. All situations are marked by the meaning we assign to them. Read that again and let it sink in….

‘All situations are marked by the meaning we assign to them’.

 A situation for one person may be benign, and for another, may trigger anxiety and panic based on past experience. Once we understand that the situation is not responsible for the reaction, rather how we are looking at the situation produces the reaction, we can approach life with awareness. This is such a powerful tool. The circumstance is not the problem; rather it’s our reaction to the circumstance that will determine how well we recover.

Another well-known Eckhart Tolle quote explains that we suffer from fear, anxiety and worry when we have our head stuck in the future – and regret, sadness, and depression, when we have it stuck in the past.

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

I had always believed that armed with endless wisdom from past experience I would propel myself into a hypothetical future and all would be well. Utter nonsense! We learn along the way that people will hurt us, people will lie to us, things won’t go our way, we will fail, we will feel lonely, sometimes miserable, etc. Now, that sounds so glum and very negative, however it’s not. I have wonderful memories from the past, but that’s what they are, memories. And the other memories, the not so great ones, will make me feel sadness and regret if I cradle them. If I’m not going to learn anything fruitful from the past, it should be let go.

When we wake in the morning and start to think about the problems in life, we are thinking in the past, because it’s a memory of something that happened. Each memory we possess has an emotion associated with it. So then the moment we feel that emotion, we are living in the past. Thoughts arise from the brain, and feelings from the body so then both our body and brain are reacting to the past. We then regress and feel what was felt in the past, and this drives our thoughts to remain there, where the problems were … in the past.

It’s a vicious circle, and I’m not going to lie – I find it exceptionally hard to ‘live’ in the present. We have to constantly work at it. But if you stick with it, beneficial outcomes are bountiful, and they appear in a very short space of time.

A now perspective

 Here is a little perspective. Next time you are dealing with something negative, and worrying about the future, imagine being told you have days to live, due to an aggressive kind of cancer (yup, I know, morbid).

Now think back to what you are upset about. Does that change your perspective? Keep imagining that scenario. Are you going to dwell on the past, knowing that you have limited time on earth … or are you going to agonise about the future? How are you going to spend your last days? Will it be in rumination or worry, or will it be spent focusing on the wonderful things in life here and now?