Dr. Katzenstein continues:
“Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
In discussing the topic of anxiety, it’s helpful to have some understanding of how the human brain works, and why it often contributes to a level of anxiety that’s disproportionately higher than reality dictates. It’s just how human beings are created, neuro-biologically.
We're all created with something called a negativity bias, which means we're more likely to believe something that is negative than something that is positive. For example, if someone tells themselves, “I am a winner,” very often, that thought is transient. It goes by pretty quickly. But if we think to ourselves, “I'm a loser,” for whatever reason, that thought sticks to us a lot more, and we're much more likely to believe it.
In fact, we know from research that, for example, if a person looks for a parking space 10 times, and 2 out of those 10 times it was really difficult to find parking, in his mind, and after the fact, he may actually report that half or even a majority of time, he couldn’t find parking.
Why? Even though there's only a 20% chance that he's not going to find a spot, in his mind, he has integrated and internalized those negative experiences much more than the times he actually did find parking- to the extent that he actually believes that, “I never find parking!”
This relates to anxiety in that when we experience failures, difficulties, challenges, or traumas, we integrate and internalize those experiences much more deeply than we do our positive experiences. As a result, we become more anxious in anticipation of those kinds of negative experiences taking place again in the future. So, if a child does well on an exam 50 times and he failed an exam 1 time, he's not thinking to himself, “There's a 98% chance I'm going to pass this test.” Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that he’ll remember that one failure, and in the future, worry that, “Maybe I'm going to fail again,” even though statistically, rationally, and logically, it’s very unlikely that something like that will happen again.
In our next lesson, we will discuss how to address this negativity bias. Thank you.”