Why is it so difficult to remember the good stuff while we let all the negativity hang around like tiny grease spots on a tie? The more attention we pay them, the bigger they seem to grow.
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 that person who said something nice to me the other day?” I asked, because I couldn’t remember.
Squinting her eyes in my direction, she pondered and couldn’t recall who it was, either.
Frustrated with our mutual memory lapse, she grabbed my thankful journal and thumbed 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 thanked me for something I had said or done.
“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 us the thumbs up on a new outfit, but then one person stares up and down at us and walks away with the comment, “It’s just not my style.”
What do we do? We spend the rest of the day wondering if we should sneak home and change clothes.
We tend to have what psychologists call a negative memory bias.
According to Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University, it has to do with our history of survival. “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.
Another researcher attributes it to how our brains are wired: “The brain handles positive and negative information in different hemispheres,” said Professor Clifford Nass, who teaches communication at 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.
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 Anthony Hopkins said about how he avoids that trip into the imaginary land of critical conversation: “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.”
While I admire his philosophy, how do we do as he does?
For me, it comes as I focus on what I am thankful for, which leaves less room for the negative. Negativity expands to fill up space in my mind.
So, I must be intentional about it, or I’ll invariably drift into the dark side. Maybe that’s why the Bible mentions gratitude at least 157 times. Most of us need a reminder. So, I make sure I recite Psalm 95 to myself early in the day. I love verse 2, “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving.” I want to stay in God’s presence from morning until night with a sense of gratitude.
Releasing the negative doesn’t mean ignoring 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 will 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.