Special Moment
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Overcome sadness by collecting special moments.

By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Counselor.

The human brain has a negativity bias.

The human brain has a preference for remembering the negative and forgetting the positive. Whether that’s by design or the result of experience through millions of years of evolution, I will leave it to others to decide. But I can see how this negativity bias could benefit human survival and how it is causing a lot of pain and suffering today. Let me try to illustrate this with a couple of hypothetical stories.

Please hang with me to the end of these parables when I explain how you can overcome negativity bias and become a happier, more positive person by collecting special moments.

The story of the red berries.

Imagine, if you can, being a human living in the forest or jungle before the advent of electricity, refrigerators, canned goods, or any practical way to store food through the winter. You might’ve figured out how to dry certain seeds, but drying berries was very impractical.

One day, you’re walking through the jungle and find some bushes covered with bright red berries. You try a few, and they are tasty. So, you eat as many as you can. Imagine the time before the Industrial Revolution and modern civilization when humans typically went hungry through most of the winter. Hence, the preference in earlier times was for women with a little meat on their bones who might survive the lean times and be able to care for the children.

As an aside here, I read somewhere once that the human brain has twenty-two circuits to tell us we are hungry. When hungry, we get headaches, our stomach growls, we may feel weak, and so on. As I remember it, we only have eight circuits, which feedback to tell the brain we have had enough to eat. Hence, humans tend to continue to gain weight whenever food is available and only lose it when there is famine. Not a terribly adaptive quality in this modern industrial era.

The following day, you are walking again through the hypothetical jungle again. There’s no need to remember what the berries looked like because while they were tasty, you ate them all, and there are no more to be had. Hence, we tend to forget many positive experiences which may be challenging to repeat.

But, in our hypothetical tale, let’s say that you became violently ill, threw up those berries, and almost died. Can you see now why you might, having had a negative experience, remember those berries for the rest of your life? This negativity bias carries over into many other human activities where we remember one unpleasant event but forget large numbers of positive events.

What color were the flowers?

I was working at an agency that saw many children. Often, their parents showed up wanting to know how the child was doing. I noticed a definite negativity bias on the part of the parents toward the whole process. But I wasn’t quite sure how to overcome that bias.

One day, on my way to work, I noticed as I walked in the front door that the landscapers had replaced flowers in front of the building with some new plants that were in bright bloom. I hurried in and got to work, knowing the first family would be there to see the child in minutes.

Partway into the conversation, I realized that these parents could tell me everything the child did wrong, as well as what the teacher and the professionals were doing wrong, but had difficulty describing anything about the situation that was good or right. And then it struck me. I suffered from that same negativity bias. I had seen those brightly colored flowers when I came to work that morning, but now caught up in the problems of the day, I couldn’t remember what those flowers looked like or what color they were.

During my lunch hour, I went outside and looked at those flowers again. I spent anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes examining each one. I discovered that thirty seconds of looking at something positive was the bare minimum for me to remember it later. And the longer I looked at a particular flowering plant, the more likely I was to remember it hours, days, even years later.

The way you overcome negativity bias is to pay more attention to the positive.

Whenever something good happens in your life, spend some time consciously looking at it, staring at it, and committing it to memory. So many of life’s special moments go by unnoticed. Become a collector of those special moments, and the whole nature of your life will become more positive and filled with special moments.

This technique is especially useful with children and partners.

One simple rule of parenting is to always “catch your child doing something right.” The more you notice the positive things your child does and compliment them on it, the more likely they are to repeat that behavior. When children are doing something you don’t like, ignoring it whenever possible is likely to extinguish the behavior. It’s worth noticing that some children who will only get attention when they do something wrong behave badly more often simply to get that extra attention.

If you want a happy, more satisfying life full of contentment, become a collector of special moments. Consider writing them down. The more attention you pay to the positive in life, the more you will realize that positive things are happening all around you every day. If only you would collect that positivity and save it up against the next rainy day.

Does David Joel Miller see clients for counseling and coaching?

Yes, I do. I can see private pay clients if they live in California, where I am licensed. If you’re interested in information about that, please email me or use the contact me form.

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