Dr. Rick Hanson on the Negativity Bias
These shifts in the brain go on constantly. Our trouble is that we inherited a brain built for a single purpose: keeping our ancestors alive long enough to pass along their genes, which then passed along theirs. In the wild, the first rule was simple. Eat lunch today, and don't become lunch for something else. Out of that pressure came what researchers call a negativity bias. The brain picks up lessons from bad experiences quickly, yet it absorbs the good ones poorly by comparison.
That matters because learning from the good experiences is where personal growth actually comes from. Think of the helpful states: mindfulness, compassion, gratitude, a sense of self-worth, resilience, grit, determination, caring about others, loving and feeling loved. Those are good experiences. Letting them settle into the nervous system so the benefit lasts, weaving these small everyday jewels into who we are rather than watching them run through our fingers, that is the heart of growing and steepening your learning curve across a life.
The brain, though, behaves like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good, even though taking in good experiences is the main way we build up the good stuff inside. So to put it plainly, my recent work has centered on breaking through that bottleneck of the negativity bias and slowly training a brain that holds onto the good and sheds the bad.
Erik: That's fascinating, Rick. Something a lot of people will recognize is that in mental illness, say, a person can feel stress in the body even when nothing in the surroundings looks especially threatening or dangerous. Is that part of what you mean by the Velcro, the holding onto the bad?
Dr. Hanson: Yes, nicely put. There's a term for it, and I'm scrambling to recall who first coined it. It's called allostatic load, the idea that a stressful episode leaves behind a bit of wear and tear. The body is set up to recover from that wear and tear and repair it, provided the stress stays mild to moderate and doesn't last long. Robert Sapolsky described this in his fine book about stress, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. In the wild, most bouts of stress come to an end fast, one way or the other.