Count your Yesses

As Rick Hanson famously says, “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” That’s because your brain’s primary concern is your survival, so it’s primed to pay more attention to the negative. Positive things may indeed help you survive. But negative things can kill you. As far as your brain is concerned, it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry. It’s better to expect and prepare for a possible threat (there might be a tiger behind that bush) than to be surprised (and wounded or eaten) by that tiger.

It’s easy to forget that we’re operating with essentially the same brain our ancestors on the savanna had. But if you want to overcome your brain’s negativity bias, it’s important to remember that System 1, the unconscious part of your brain that runs you most of the time, doesn’t always deal effectively with the stimulation, stressors, and sheer volume of information you have to contend with in your daily life.

It’s easier for all of us to pay attention to the negative: the threats, the slights, the hurts, the things that fall apart or don’t go our way. We don’t have to make a point of looking for what isn’t working in order to find it. Our brain does that automatically.  Another aspect of our survival-based brain—its associative method of “thinking”—makes it easy to get on a negative track and stay there. One darn thing leads to another, meaning one similar thought reminds you of another similar thought. Before you know it, your mood and your attitude have soured, and your ability to refocus your attention has evaporated.

You can’t stop your brain from noticing the negative, and it wouldn’t even be a good idea to try. But neither do you have to give in to it. The advice to count your blessings comes to mind, but I find blessings to be a loaded word on several levels. I prefer to count my yesses. It’s a great way to turn the tide when I notice I’ve mentally starting traveling along that road to nowhere.

Although I tend to be pretty optimistic and upbeat, the first thing I noticed when I began this practice was how much easier it is to count my nos. Because the nos are brought to our attention by System 1, the unconscious part of our brain that is always on and processes 11,000,000 bits of information at a time, they come to mind immediately and automatically without any effort on our part. Counting yesses, on the other hand, requires intention, which is a function of System 2, the conscious part of the brain that is slow, lazy, and easily depleted.

The process of shifting my attention doesn’t just change the mental track I’m on; it also causes me to be aware of how influential my mental model of the world is at any given moment.

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

That quote has been attributed to several different people, but regardless of who said it, it’s true.

When you’re tired, stressed, or sick—or when life has dealt you some kind of blow—you simply have less System 2 attention available. So it’s easy for the nos to get the upper hand. A couple of weeks ago I went through a bout of food poisoning. During the illness itself and the two days that followed, the nos were abundant. I observed the downward trend in my thoughts, but I also understood what was happening. I was pretty sure my perspective would change once I got better (which it did), so I didn’t let the nos carry me too far downstream.

Someone I know regularly posts what she calls “The Daily Yes” on Facebook. It’s a prompt that works well for me because I don’t have a regular schedule for accessing Facebook, so I don’t always see it at the same time of day. But every time I do see it, I stop to read it. It doesn’t matter what the specific content is. It’s the word yes that’s my cue to pay attention to what’s juicy and zesty and working in my life—to who and what has said yes to me and who and what I’ve said yes to.

It’s easy for one no to outweigh many yesses, so much so that we may not even notice the yesses when they occur. That’s why I’ve found it helpful to make a list, whether it’s on paper or just a mental list. It reminds me that my brain does have a negativity bias—but that I don’t have to agree with it or go along for that particular ride.