Our brain is biased towards focusing on negative things. This is hardwired into each of us. If we leave our brain to go on default, we will be on a downward spiral, and that affects everything in our life.
Be intentional about seeing beyond the negative. The positive things are there, but you have to intentionally direct your brain towards those things.
Listen to this episode for 3 small things you can do each day that will help you to begin breaking free from the negativity bias of your brain.
Do your holiday family get-togethers get a little (or a lot) dramatic and difficult? If they do, you’re not alone. I’ve created a free pdf guide called:
The 3-Step Process to Keeping Your Cool Around Family Holiday Drama
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE
You can’t change your family members, but you can manage yourself around whatever happens. This guide will help you to feel more in control of your thoughts and emotions no matter what happens.
Full Transcript
Tina Gosney 00:04
Hey, welcome to the coaching your family relationships podcast. I’m your host, Tina Gosney, the family conflict coach, this is where we talk about the business of strengthening our families. I’m so glad you’re here with me before we get started about breaking free from negativity.
Tina Gosney 00:20
Today, I do want to tell you that my download for keeping your cool around family holiday drama is available through the holidays. So if you are dreading that get together, if you’ve been trying to avoid that one person, if you’re just bracing yourself for you know what’s going to happen when you get to this family get together, and you know that the drama is going to happen. This is your free PDF, so this is going to help you plan ahead of time, so you’re going to feel better. You’re going to feel less stressed about what might happen. You’re going to be able to take charge of your own experience. You don’t have to leave that experience in the hands of somebody else. You get to decide.
Tina Gosney 01:02
So go pick up that free PDF that’s going to walk you through having a plan what to do so you don’t have to dread that. You don’t have to be not wanting to see that person or wondering what’s going to happen when so and so gets together with the other person, right? And what’s going to happen. Then you don’t have to worry about that. You get to keep your cool. You get to have your experience in your own hands and not leave them in someone else’s hands.
Tina Gosney 01:30
Okay, so let’s get down to how to break free from negativity. I think that there is so much negativity in the world these days, even more than there ever has been before, more polarizing opinions and just people more entrenched in their opinions and their biases. That this is something that we all need to be aware of.
Tina Gosney 01:56
I’m going to talk a little bit about brain, our brains today, and what they do. So, you know, it’s very common for us to think I can just be happy if I would just lose that that last 20 pounds, or if I had a better relationship with my spouse, then I would be happy if I didn’t have this illness, if I had a better body, then I could be happy if I had more money, I could be happy. If I had a better job, I could be happy. Super common for us to think if my life was just different, if my life would change, then I could be happy.
Tina Gosney 02:33
But this is what our brain does. Our brain will default to the negative. It’s a biological thing. It’s been programmed in us for 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of years, and it’s not something that we can turn off. So if we are not aware that our brain will default to the negative, we become a prisoner to that default. And our brain is always going to tell us, I don’t have enough. It’s that’s one of the things that it does. It’s always looking out for. I need more. I don’t have enough. And this affects everything.
Tina Gosney 03:09
The world is actually not just one set way. You might think that the world is exactly how you see it, but the world is not just one set way you actually see the world according to who you are. So you were a specific set of prescription lenses that lets you see the world the way you are and the way that your brain works. It filters out everything that doesn’t confirm what your brain already wants to think and everyone lives in a little bit different world than everyone else.
Tina Gosney 03:45
When I was a teenager, I attended one summer, I attended a music camp that was across the country from my family. So first time I had been across the country and I flew there, which we didn’t fly often. Back then, a long time ago, we didn’t fly often, so it was kind of a big deal for me to fly across across the country. And this is also before the days, of course, I’m dating myself here, before the days of email and cell phones, and you know, you had to have like, a calling card. Everything was long distance, or we communicated through letters, an actual letter that we wrote out on a piece of paper, put in an envelope, addressed it and put on a stamp, and then send it off in the mail and the postman picked it up.
Tina Gosney 04:33
So this was in those days, and I was a very good letter writer. I would write my family regularly. I wrote my friends regularly, and one day towards the end of the summer, I got a letter from my one of my parents that said, Hey, I ran into your friend the other day. This happened to be one of my very best friends that I had been writing letters to all summer. And my friend said, Hey, do. So you know, Tina is having a really good time at summer camp. And my parents said, How do you know, what did she say? And my friend said, Well, it’s actually what she didn’t say because she didn’t complain about anything. So I know she’s having a really good time. So the letter that I got from my parent was, hey, it’s a problem if you’re complaining all the time.
Tina Gosney 05:21
So I was a complainer. I’ve been a complainer like well past my teen years, but I did have a lot of trouble seeing the good, because I did not know that my brain would automatically default to the negative and pull in more negativity to show me that more often than anything positive or good that was happening, I just called myself a realist, and I thought, oh, all those people that are optimists like they’re just deceiving themselves. They’re just lying to themselves. They just refuse to see the problems. I’m a realist. I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist, I can see the problems. That’s what I had myself convinced of for a long time, and I’ve coached a lot of people that have said pretty much those same things to me. So I know I’m not alone in that realist point of view and wearing that realist identity.
Tina Gosney 06:18
You know, for a long time it would have been really difficult to convince me that I was not just a realist and that I wasn’t just seeing the world the way that it was because I didn’t know also that my brain was only showing me things that also confirmed what I already thought. So that was a little story about me.
Tina Gosney 06:41
Here’s another story, not about me. This is about Marty Seligman, who was the father of positive psychology. Now, you would think that someone who was the father of positive psychology would be a pretty positive person, right? Well, let’s take a look at this story. First, there was one day he was weeding in his garden with his daughter, Nikki. And Nikki was five years old plus 11 months, and that’s important. We’ll get to that piece in a minute. But Marty said, you know, he’s a really serious gardener. He takes his job as a gardener very seriously, and when he was trying to get a job done, he just wanted to get it done. And here’s Nikki in her five years and 11 months having fun next to him in the garden, dirt spraying everywhere, weeds flying all over the place, no rhyme and reason to what she’s doing.
Tina Gosney 07:35
And he said, despite all my work around optimism, I’ve been somewhat of a Nimbus cloud around my house, and I’m not that good with kids, so that afternoon, and he is trying to get his job gardening done. And here’s Nikki just having fun spraying dirt and weeds all over the place, all over the place. And he starts yelling at Nikki, and he said, Nikki got a stern look on her face, and she walked right over to me, and she said, Daddy, I want to talk with you. And then this is what she said, from the time I was three until the time I was five, I whined a lot, but I decided the day I turned five to stop whining, and I haven’t whined once since I turned five, he said. Then she looked me in the eye and said, Daddy, if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.
Tina Gosney 08:29
Isn’t that a fun story about a little five year old, 11 month old girl and how she was so wise in her young years, she was practicing, maybe even better than her father was, some of the aspects of positive psychology anytime you are working on yourself, the way that you see the world, the prescription lenses that you are looking through, the things that you’re Deciding to focus on.
Tina Gosney 09:01
Anytime you are working on yourself. You are working on your relationships with other people. The you that shows up to each relationship is who you are through your own percent of prescription lenses if you are struggling with some big problem, or maybe even a little problem in your family, the way that you see the problem that you’re facing is a reflection of you. It’s much more a reflection of you than it is of anyone else.
Tina Gosney 09:36
Our brains have this thing called a negativity bias. And think about how our ancient ancestors, they had to they didn’t have the same kind of world. They did not live in the same kind of world that we did. They had a world that was full of danger. At any point, they could die, they could be eaten by a tiger. They could be crushed by a rock. They might be stuck out on the elements. And freeze to death. They had to be constantly aware of danger, and their brains developed to be aware, acutely aware, of this danger, and to give it more importance than something positive that was happening, like a beautiful sunset or a bush full of berries, if we only paid attention to those really positive things that made us feel good, we might not be paying attention to the thing that was right behind us that could kill us. And so we just evolved with this negativity bias, the need to prioritize negative things that threaten our life, because think about natural selection.
Tina Gosney 10:50
The people that lived then, if they were paying attention to the beautiful sunset, they might get eaten by a tiger, and so they didn’t pass on their genes. The ones that passed on their genes, were the ones that were paying attention to the negative, and then that’s how they survived. And we have the same brain as them, and we see the same negative things in our lives.
Tina Gosney 11:14
We don’t have Tigers that are going to eat us. Usually. We don’t have a lot of food scarcity in most parts of the developed world, but we have a lot of other things that our brain interprets as threats, and we give them a lot of attention. We give them a disproportionate amount of attention in our lives.
Tina Gosney 11:38
Okay, so whatever you practice. You get better at I was really practiced at complaining. I got really good at complaining. Marty Seligman, he got good at being a grouch, and even his daughter noticed he was really good at being a grouch. Nikki practiced not whining, and she got better at that. Wherever you put your attention, you will strengthen that, and you will reinforce it.
Tina Gosney 12:09
We say where your attention goes, energy flows.
Tina Gosney 12:13
So often we think this is just the way that I am. So if I had thought, Well, I’m just a complainer, that’s just the way that I am, I wouldn’t have seen my ability to do anything about that. Nikki, at five years old, saw that she was not a whiner. She was a little girl that was whining, and she could choose to do something different, and she practiced not whining.
Tina Gosney 12:38
I’m sure that, as Marty Seligman, Nikki’s dad had this pointed out to him that he could not be a grouch too. I’m sure he knew exactly how to do that.
Tina Gosney 12:49
We get really practiced at whatever we think identifies us. But maybe it’s not true. Maybe we don’t have to say this is just the way that I am. Maybe that does not have to be true. Perhaps it’s just what we’ve practiced doing a lot for as long as we can remember, even and now it’s just a habitual way of being.
Tina Gosney 13:16
Years ago, I decided I wanted to stop complaining, and I have noticed a big difference in my life since then. And I think one of the main things that I’ve noticed is I am not a complainer. I was just a person that was complaining. I don’t have to be a person that complains. I can be someone different. And when I practiced doing that, I got better at not complaining.
Tina Gosney 13:46
This year, at the beginning of the year, I decided to embark on a pretty big self, self development project. I had a desire to really change in a big way, the way I was seeing myself and other people and the world in general, I really wanted to understand all of those things at a deeper level, and I decided to change some of the habits. I decided to give up some some habits and bring in other habits, mostly with just daily practice. I started reading different kinds of books. I started doing more meditation, more journaling, more contemplation, and I combined this with some pretty significant diet and exercise, some physical habits as well.
Tina Gosney 14:33
Here’s some of the things that I’ve noticed. Just a few of the things. I have more peace in my life. I feel more even and steady. I feel like I have a deeper root system in my own self. I have more ability to sit with difficult emotions. I am much more kind to myself and the people in my life. I hope they will agree with this and I. Have heard several that have I am much more kind to other people. I am happier, I’m more patient, I’m more forgiving. I can let go easier of things that don’t matter, that might have mattered a few years ago, I am more intentional about what I say yes to and what I choose to say no to, and I just feel an overabundance of love in my life.
Tina Gosney 15:29
In general, it’s been a lot of effort to change and to establish these new habits, to to change my diet, to change my exercise routine, to bring in this daily emotional, spiritual and mental health exercises that I’ve been doing every day and anytime we are working to change something, it is going to feel like a lot of work. That’s just the nature of establishing new habits, it’s going to feel like more work until it becomes something that becomes more habitual that we don’t have to think as much about.
Tina Gosney 16:13
But this is what our brain does. It learns by what we do over and over and over again, and as we repeat the things that we do, whether we want them to be there or we don’t. It gets really good at it, and so now I don’t have to think as much about my daily routines, because it’s more of a habit that I miss if I don’t do it. But I will tell you that the benefits of adapting these new habits has greatly outweighed the difficulty in establishing them.
Tina Gosney 16:48
But if we don’t purposefully work to establish habits of health, this is what’s going to happen by default, our brain will go to the default, which is the negativity bias our body will go to default, which is a constant, seeing threats everywhere, going into fight or flight, which triggers our cortisol levels to be high. That’s our stress hormone. And then our health suffers, our relationship health suffers. And then it just becomes harder to be in your own body and to live in your own body, it affects the way that you see the world. So here’s something that you can do to start breaking free of your brain’s default of looking to the negative.
Tina Gosney 17:34
We all pay attention to things. Our brain is constantly taking in information all the time. I want you to tell it on purpose, what to pay attention to. Remember, if we don’t tell it what to what to pay attention to, it’s going to pay attention to the negative things in life. So you’re going to pay attention to how you are paying attention.
Tina Gosney 18:02
And one of the best ways to do this, and this has been documented so many different times, over and over again, there’s it’s not even a question anymore. The one of the best ways to do this is to start with gratitude. In fact, before you go to bed, just have a little notebook by your bed, write down three things that you’re grateful for that day. You have goodness in your life, but your brain will block you from seeing it unless you look for it. Gratitude has been proven by neuroscientists to have the power to change our brains on a cellular level.
Tina Gosney 18:45
Focus goes energy flows, and that is the wiring in our brain. It changes our brain on a cellular cellular level. So look for the good things in life. Look for the things that you are grateful for, and you will find them. Just jot down three things at the end of the day.
Tina Gosney 19:05
And the next thing this is there’s three things here. The next thing to do is to serve one small piece of service for someone else. It could be a smile at someone at the store. It could be offering a quick prayer for someone, it could be letting someone into your lane of traffic. When we do things for others, it lifts us and it comes back to us, because we are all connected. We are all connected in many, many more ways than we are aware of. So when we offer service, some sort of kindness, to another person, it always flows back to us.
Tina Gosney 19:49
The third thing is to savor, savor one thing for 15 to 30 seconds a day. I want you to think about when something bad happens to you. So how long do you think about that? You’re going to think about it, you’re going to ruminate about it. You’re going to have lots of spinning thoughts about it, and then it becomes something that you’re feeling in your body, something really difficult that your body experiences. Because we take it, then our brain creates these physical vibrations in our bodies, and then it cements in that memory of that bad thing into our brain. When we connect it with an emotion, it cements in that memory into our brain.
Tina Gosney 20:32
What if we could purposefully do a savoring exercise with something that was positive and good, and when we could cement that in to our memory, I live behind an empty field, and this empty field was going to be developed into a housing development, and then ran into some legal issues, and now it’s just sitting a big empty field. Well, right behind my house is a big dirt pile that rises far above our fence line. It’s very visible to us, and it’s been sitting there for two years at least, and it started growing a lot of weeds. Imagine just a big dirt pile just sitting and growing weeds. And it’s kind of taken on its own ecosystem at this point. But this in summer time, the you know, the weeds are green, and then now in the winter, in the fall, in the winter, it goes dormant, and those weeds turn yellow and brown.
Tina Gosney 21:37
And I could really easily look, in fact, I do easily look at those dirt the dirt pile with the the yellow, brown dead weeds, and think that is so ugly to look out my back windows and see this big, ugly dirt pile with these dead weeds on it. Well, the other day, we had some rain. It was early in the morning. The sun was just starting to come up. It had rained overnight. I walked by my back windows and was stopped in my tracks the dark sky with the sun just coming through, shining on those dead weeds. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful that I had to stop it took my breath away to notice how beautiful that dirt pile with the weeds was. And I just stood and savored the moment and just felt it in my body, took it in, and now it’s become a memory that I can call on, because I connected something that I savored with an emotion and held that for at least 30 seconds.
Tina Gosney 23:00
How often do we take the time to savor something like a beautiful sunset, a delicious meal? How often do we slow down and savor every bite of a delicious meal, or do we just rush through it? How often do we savor the kind words of a friend, and do we just let our self receive it without blocking it off? How often do we give something positive, some air time in our brain and in our body, the things that we give our attention to and hold on to and tied to an emotion in our body have the power to change us. What are you holding on to and giving emotion to?
Tina Gosney 23:55
So for one week, just try this out, gratitude, three things at the end of the day, one kind thing for somebody that day and savor 15 to 30 seconds. This whole process won’t take you very long. Probably the thing that will be the trickiest is to remember to do it. So just write it down. Just make an intentional effort to do it this week and see what happens when we do exercises like this one week, one week can make a difference.
Tina Gosney 24:23
It’s like it would be like going to the gym for a week can make a difference in your health, right? Or eating healthy for one week can make a difference in your health. But we all know that exercise should be a lifestyle, not just something that we do temporarily, and that a healthy diet should be a lifestyle, not something we just do temporarily. So when we bring that healthy habit that we’re doing, either exercise, diet or this exercise that I’m giving you, of gratitude, serve and savor, when we’re bringing this into our lifestyle, rather than just. Something that we’re temporarily trying out, we can begin to make it a habit, and it begins has the power to change us. Things that we do temporarily rarely have the power to change us.
Tina Gosney 25:13
But we can make gratitude, service and savoring a habit. There was a time in my life where I would have heard this podcast, and I would have said, there is no way I don’t have time to add one more thing into my life, and I am well aware that I am not in that stage of life now, and what my former self would have said then. So make sure that you are looking at this according to your own season of life, and even if it’s five minutes a day, doesn’t even have to be five minutes a day, it could be less. It can make a profound difference in the way that you experience your life.
Tina Gosney 25:52
Some people go through really, really difficult things. You know, everyone goes through really difficult things in this world. Some people go through horrific, awful things. But everyone goes through difficult things, the details of what we go through don’t matter as much as what we do with those things. What do we do with the things that have come to us in our life, the things that have been our life circumstances we are here on this earth as spiritual beings to experience mortal heartbreak and sorrow. It is our birthright to rise above those things and to experience joy.
Tina Gosney 26:32
Joy is not something that is like far down the road. It is not something that we will have someday if we’re worthy enough to be granted it. It’s available to us right now. We don’t have to wait. We can purposefully direct our minds to learn through the things that we go through, and to be more in touch with the spiritual aspects of our being on this earth.
Tina Gosney 27:01
Here’s a poem that really struck me as something that I wanted to share in in correlation with this topic today. And this is by Dana Faulds. She says,
Tina Gosney 27:12
Do not let the day slip through your fingers, but live it fully now, this breath, this moment, catapulting you into full awareness. Time is precious, minutes disappearing like water into sand, unless you choose to pay attention, since you do not know the number of your days, treat each as if it is your last. Be that compassionate with yourself, that open and loving to others, that determined to give what is yours to give, and to let in the energy and wonder of this world, experience everything, writing, relating, eating, doing all the little necessary tasks of life, as if for the first time, pushing nothing aside as unimportant. You have received these same reminders many times before this time, take them into your soul. For if you choose to live this way, you will be rich beyond measure, grateful beyond words, and the day of your death will arrive with no regrets.
Tina Gosney 28:15
Have a wonderful holiday season, my friends, your relationships are your own personal growth machines stay open to that process even when it’s messy.
