Why is it so difficult to remember the good stuff while we let all the negative hang around like one of those tiny grease spots on your tie? The more you focus on wiping it away, the bigger the smear becomes.
My wife, Lori, and I write in our thankful journals almost every morning. I was giving her a blank stare the other day when she asked me to share my list.
“Who was it that said something nice to me the other day?” I asked.
I couldn’t remember.
Squinting her eyes in my direction, she pondered, and she couldn’t remember either.
Frustrated with our mutual amnesia, she grabbed my thankful journal and started thumbing through the pages.
“I know you wrote it in your thankful journal,” she said, “because you shared it with me.”
In less than a minute, she had found not one but four entries about people who had either messaged me or verbally thanked me for something I had said or done. I had written these down at the end of each day, as is my habit, then the next morning, I shared them in our “thankful time.”
“I’ll bet if someone had said something critical about me, I would have had no trouble remembering that,” I commented after Lori read my positive entries from days ago.
Why is that? Why are we like that?
Nine people can give you the thumbs up on your new outfit, then one person stares you up and down and walks away with the comment, “It’s just not my style.” You spend the rest of the day wondering if you should sneak home and change clothes before it’s too late to return your new clothes for something else.
I was grateful for those people who had made positive comments to me. They had made such a significant impact on my life that I put their names and what they had said in my thankful journal, but then, a week later, I had to refer back to the journal for recall. Had they been negative comments, I wouldn’t have written them on paper, but their words would most likely have been embedded in my memory bank.
Why do we do that? Why do we tend to have what psychologists call a negative memory bias?
According to Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University, we tend to notice the negative more than the positive. “Many psychologists think that this has evolutionary roots; that is: It’s more important for people, for survival, to notice the lion in the brush than it is to notice the beautiful flower that’s growing on the other side of the way,” Carstensen said, in The Washington Post.
“The brain handles positive and negative information in different hemispheres,” said Professor Clifford Nass, who teaches communication, also of Stanford University. “Negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones,” he noted in The New York Times. Thus, we tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events — and use stronger words to describe them — than happy ones.
The negative can sometimes serve to make us better, just as the positive can encourage us. But, I tend to dwell on the one negative comment over the many positive ones. If you’re like me, you’ll need to work on keeping a balance. Being overly tuned to negative statements will eventually lead us into the land of imaginary criticisms—a dangerous place where we pre-play critical comments and experience rejection when it’s not there.
I like what one of my favorite actors, Anthony Hopkins, said about how he avoids that trip into the imaginary land of what others may be saying about us, “My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.”
What does this mean for me? I will have to be more diligent in training my brain to hold tighter to the positive and, after analyzing the negative, let it go. Releasing it doesn’t mean I ignore it. I won’t pretend the lion isn’t real, should there be one in my life, but I don’t want to forget the daffodils and Azaleas either.
Come to think of it, that’s going to be one of my entries in my thankful journal for tonight: those beautiful Azaleas I saw on my afternoon walk today.
Now that’s something I’ll remember to share with Lori tomorrow morning.