Dr. Katzenstein continues…
Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. We've been discussing how to address negativity bias, which is a predisposition to recall and internalize negative events and experiences way more than positive events and experiences. Negative emotions are a lot more intense than positive emotions. Simply put, they are stronger. We give negative feedback a lot more credence than we do positive feedback.
As a personal example, I was once in another part of the country giving a presentation at a conference. At these conferences, after you give a presentation, the audience fills out surveys, in order to give feedback to the presenter on how they felt the presenter did.
The responses were overwhelmingly positive and I felt good about them. But there was one particularly biting negative response, and for the entire plane ride home, all I could think about were the words of this particular person's negative feedback.
There could have been 99 positive surveys, but this one negative one was the one that I kept thinking about- why did this person not like my presentation? And I realized that it was just 1%, so why was I dwelling so much on it? And the answer is, because it really hurt, even more than how good it felt to read the other 99. So how do we address this?
We have the ability to engage in what we call sophisticated thinking. Sophisticated thinking is the ability to rise higher than just thinking that something is either good or bad; that there's either absolute positivity or absolute negativity- that’s an all or nothing approach to the way we experience things. With that approach, things seem either good or bad. But it's possible that both can be accurate at the same time; it's possible that of those hundred attendees, some, or a majority of the people, had positive feedback, and one of them did not enjoy and gave negative feedback. To me, it's possible for both of those things to be true.
How does this relate to anxiety? We have a way of thinking that's called, “Yes, but..,” which is, “Yes, I'd like to go on this rollercoaster, but I'm too scared.”
When we use that term, ‘Yes, but,’ we're basically minimizing or eliminating the first part of what we said, that we'd like to go on the rollercoaster, because we're too scared. However, if we change our language to, “Yes, and…,”
“Yes, I'd like to go on the rollercoaster and I'm scared…”
so both of those things right now are true. I want to go on this rollercoaster and I'm too scared to do it. It still leaves open the possibility, the chance, that I can do it. Going back to my example, yes, most of the people enjoyed it and there were one or maybe a few more that did not. Both of those things can be true. Thank you.