THUNAIHow To Overcome the Bias inherent in our survival brain?
Please read What is Negativity Bias in the Thunai article here.
- Self-Awareness and Challenging Negative Self-Talk:By checking on yourself throughout the day, you can recognize any helpful and unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. Then you can start challenging them and replacing them with more useful ones.
- Ask yourself What were you thinking before experiencing anger, resentment, or frustration? Was it negativity bias in action?How can you replace those thoughts with more positive ones?
- The ABC technique – once you become aware of your Behaviors (B) and its Consequences (C), then you can work backward to think about what started them (Point A).
- Mindfulness: Through guided meditations, reflection, and other mindfulness interventions, you can start to observe your feelings and thoughts more objectively. Scientists have found that practicing mindful breathing is associated with an increase in positive judgments and higher levels of optimism. You can find out more about mindful breathing exercises on thunai.org.
- Cognitive Restructuring: Try reframing the event or experience to get a more objective view of situations and people. “I did not screw up the meeting. It was a difficult question that the interviewer asked and I somehow managed it. Now it is upto the gods to give me a good outcome”
- Savor the Positive Moments: Building up your store of positive mental images and feelings helps you address the imbalance that negativity bias causes.
3 Exercises for Overcoming Negativity Bias
- A ‘Finding Silver Linings’ intervention: This includes several steps to build more optimism and resilience. You’ll shift into a positive mindset, identify a recent difficulty, and identify the costs of it, then find silver linings (i.e. positive aspects) to it.
- Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion is a mindfulness exercise that you can use to view your thoughts as thoughts, rather than something with a literal meaning. You can then reframe those thoughts, and put some distance between you and negative events/situations.
A Savour the Moment exercise: learn to appreciate micro-moments of positivity in your life fully. Write them down so you can look back on them when you need it.
When we find ourselves getting stuck on the negative aspects of our lives, it helps to be aware of how it might be rooted in our negativity bias. However it is possible to re-train our brains to adopt a more positive mindset and boost our well-being.
Positive psychology is not about eliminating negative thoughts and emotions – it’s about how we handle them.