Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health, Awareness. In his previous class, Dr. Katzenstein mentioned a concept called the negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, which is what we call a cognitive bias. It’s a fancy way of saying that something in your brain makes you biased. Bias is a negia in Hebrew. It means you have an agenda, and the result of this bias is that adverse events have a more significant impact on a psychological state than positive events.
That means something negative takes hold in a stronger way than something that's neutral or positive. For example, if you had a horrible trip on a plane, that's going stick in your mind more that a good flight. Many, many years ago, I flew on Spirit Airlines and I'll never fly it again. Once was enough. I don't remember all the wonderful flights on ELAL, American or Delta, but that Spirit Airline trip sticks in my mind.
So, how do we fix this? In his next class, Dr. Katzenstein will talk about how, taking a psychological approach. But I have a thought. The word cognitive means it's something in your brain. And a lot of these things start off with how we're thinking, which is really what Musar is all about- reprogramming your brain to think in different ways than you were thinking up until now.
The Hovot Halevavot, in his Shaar HaBechina, which talks about seeing Hashem in creation, starts off by saying that the first thing to say is, “‘Goodness of God on His creations,
They include everybody,’ as the pasuk says, ‘Tov Hashem LaKol/God is good to everybody.”
But he adds the following,
Number one, “The majority are blind. They don't even realize the good.
Number two, “Even if they see it, they don't realize how great it is. They don't really delve into the goodness of God.”
This goodness is something that we don't pick up on, and that's probably the main reason for looking at things negatively,
Why don't we pick up on the good? Why do we see things negatively? He gives three reasons. Today, we will discuss one of them, because it’s an important one and it influences how we look at everything. He says reason number one is that we're overly busy in worldly pursuits and pursuits of pleasure and enjoyment, and whatever we don't get causes us to get down.
I’m other words, I ignore the good because I'm just looking to fulfill my desire for more. Basically, we can call that entitlement. We don't pick up on anything. It’s a beautiful day outside, but that doesn't mean anything. When we look back and see how life is going, and think about all the bad things, of course we're going to be anxious and nervous about the next bad thing that's going to happen.
Because we view life as basically a place of bad things. We have to start reprogramming our brain that this world is a place of good things. You're not supposed to say, “We take from God's goodness,” but rather, “We're living in His goodness.” We're wading through goodness. The world is just a world that's overflowing and oozing with goodness.
That's the world that we live in. We have to get up in the morning with that feeling of goodness, but our Middot interfere, and as the Hovot Halevavot quotes from a pasuk, to back up his point, “The wicked man, because of his great arrogance, doesn't see the goodness.”
Of course, this is not an immediate solution for anxiety. The problem is, when a person already has anxiety, and it's taken on a life of its own, even reaching the level of a disorder, these techniques are not necessarily going to fix it. It already took hold. This is a just a general healthy way. If we raise children with an appreciation of the goodness of the world, that the world is not a scary place, that helps for anxiety. It's a general outlook on life.
Rav Wolbe says that if a person lives with what he calls Olam HaYedidut, that it’s a world of belovedness, a world of love and care and concern from Hashem, that will alleviate the breeding ground for anxiety. It's the negativity that breeds anxiety. And we live in a world of belovedness.
Again, for some of us, I can't say it's too late, but the anxiety has already taken hold, and we need a little bit more extreme measures of therapy to undo it.
Have a wonderful day.