Recently I wrote an article about a morning where I encountered a number of pleasant experiences that ended with an unpleasant experience. I remarked that I had the choice as to how I wanted to remember the morning. Either I could think of all of the nice encounters or the single negative one. Despite knowing that I had a choice, I still ruminated about the unpleasant experience for an hour or so. A friend who commiserated with me remarked that she had the same experience where she had a lovely day that was ruined by an unpleasant encounter.
I wondered if we were the only people who were affected by this negativity bias. But it turns out that our brains are wired to remember the negative experiences. This evolutionary bias is designed to keep us safe by prioritizing threats, pain, or failure over our positive experiences.
The brain’s amygdala and hippocampus process and store negative events with greater intensity than positive experiences. Events such as fear, anger, or humiliation activate the amygdala, which stimulates the hippocampus to encode those memories in vivid detail. This is important to avoid similar dangers in the future, making negative memories stick longer and seem more impactful. The brain treats emotional pain or traumatic memories as dangerous, urging us to remember them to avoid re-experiencing them.
In the distant past, remembering a dangerous situation (e.g., a predator) was vital for survival. But today, it just increases anxiety, depression, worry, and trauma driven nightmares.
Studies indicate that positive memories require three times as many positive experiences to outweigh a single negative memory.
While we dwell on negative experiences, studies suggest that we often forget the exact details of past events over time, while positive emotions from the same events endure.
So, we are effectively programmed to remember our negative experiences. Since we no longer need to survive a predator (except the human race), it is important that we recognize that this negativity bias exists and we can overcome it by accepting it and choosing to think differently. But still we have to counteract the way we are wired.
A Sisyphean task.
