Overcoming Negativity Bias & Toilet Rats

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what's real and what's not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important.

And sometimes?

Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even though they (or others) have also said 100 positive things.

You're an author. You get a glowing review but there's one line in there that says, "I didn't like the mom character." That's all you focus on.

This happens in real life, too. Your husband might tell you that you're beautiful 100 times a day, but that one time that he says, "Baby, maybe don't wear your sweater inside out?" Well, that's what you focus on.

Or, let's say, in news. There are hundreds of lovely, beautiful things that happen in a community--even a small community--every week or month? But instead, we write about the one potentially scandalous thing a person or a board does. And when we read the news, we often gravitate toward the tragedy, the crime story, the corruption story. And that's important to write about and share, but that's not all there is.

Negativity is not all there is.

As Tasha Seegmiller wrote back in 2016, "The reality of reality is that we are programmed with a psychological and physiological predisposition toward negativity bias. Daniel Kahneman explains that “The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.”

"That bad review that you got? It’s going to linger longer than the good. Your fear of someone hating your book before it even comes out? Not all the way your fault."

We are programmed to be predisposed toward the negative. But we can lean away from that once we know it's there, sort of retrain ourselves toward the positive.

One of the ways to do that is a gratitude journal. Do not snark and look away. Writing down the good facts of your life not only trains your brain to see that good things have happened, but it also becomes a record that all is not poop.

As Alex Philippe writes,

"According to Winifred Gallagher in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, we literally don’t see as many things in our peripheral vision when we have negative emotions as when we have positive ones.

"And studies like the swimming rat experiment show how negativity can kill our perseverance: when a rat sees no way to escape, it will fight much less for its survival.

So, try it. Write something your grateful for. There's got to be one thing, right? Maybe tomorrow you can think of another.

Our random thought comes from here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don't think about all the "bad dog" moments. Think about all the treats you can get.

COOL EXERCISE

These are from a piece in Positive Psychology by Alicia Nortje, Ph.D. They are a direct quote.

1. "In the last week, what did you do that you are grateful for?
2. "In the last week, what did someone else do that you are grateful for?
3. "In the last week, what did you learn you are grateful for?"

PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Georgia Review

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Online submissions for non-subscribers are charged, but there is no fee for mailed submissions.

Details are here. Deadline: 14 May 2024 Length: Up to 9,000 words for prose, 6-10 pages of poetry Pay: $50/printed page of prose and $4/line of poetry, up to $800; $150 for reviews published on GR2.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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