Psychological Recommendations to Help Reduce Negativity Bias

How to increase awareness and reframe your thoughts to kick the negativity away.

Imagine if you knew how to reduce the impact that negative events had on you in your life. It’s a change that would drastically improve the way you feel and your ability to cope with adverse events.

Our brains are hardwired to focus on negative events. As psychologist Dr Rick Hanson said, “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.” These negative stimuli affect us more than positive stimuli. This is referred to as negativity bias and occurs because:

As an assistant psychologist, I see the people I work with experiencing negativity bias all the time. But, we all experience it time and time again too. Because it’s so hard to stop, we often try and work on reducing the impact of negativity bias. Luckily, a massive advantage that we have is that we can train our mind to interpret events, interactions or scenarios in a different way to reduce the impact that negativity bias has on us.

Negativity bias can have a profound effect on how we think, act and feel. Let’s say you’re having a performance review at work. Your manager praises your work but has a couple of things for you to work on. It’s highly likely that you can become fixated on that negative feedback, even though it is constructive. Even if you have more positive feedback from your manager, you might find yourself saying, “If I had been more proactive, I might not have had any negative feedback.” Sound familiar?

Because of the negativity bias you experience, you focus on the negative feedback and it can lead to self-defeating thoughts and rumination. You might feel low and upset with yourself. This can then impact how you behave. It turns into a vicious cycle. You can imagine that if negativity bias affects…

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