The "Negativity Bias"

It's All Out Of Our Control, Anyway

Courtesy: OpenArt

Each week, I sit down at my laptop, open a blank Word doc and consider the Sunday Art 2 Aging newsletter.

Usually, it’s an easy ask to fill that blank screen with timely content.

During the week, if I spot a worthy story in an international publication or news outlet, I’ll email the link to myself and the story will form the basis around which I construct our weekly post.

This week, it hasn’t been so easy; what I have read, seen, and heard has just worn me down by the sheer negativity of the stories: Trump hates Musk; Musk hates Trump – the “bromance” is over (just like Trump’s marriages, including the current one); the “big, beautiful bill” is forcing Republicans to now consider taking the knife to Medicare after starting the process of slashing Medicaid; people in the U.S. are being swept up by ICE and sent off to ridiculous places like South Sudan (I mean, for God’s sake, why THERE?); university students aren’t safe, either, and top drawer universities themselves are facing bleak futures where the pursuit of knowledge is an afterthought but paying homage to the king is critical.

Frankly, it’s all too much and I’m sure you get where I’m coming from. Even as a Canadian (and a proud one, too), I just can’t take the negative energy that is swirling through America today.

There was a rather silly story in the Well+Being section of the Washington Post today (Friday). The title of the article was, “Your Brain Is Biased To Negativity. Here’s How To Be More Positive.”

Could that be my problem??

The story quotes various professors and assistant professors who say things like:

“Very simply, bad is stronger than good. We respond more strongly to things that could hurt or harm us than to things that could benefit us.” (Catherine Norris, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Swarthmore College)

“If you’re walking to get water and you encounter a tiger, it’s a great idea to stay focused on the tiger and not the pretty sunset.” (Alison Ledgerwood, professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis)

The reporter refers to “negativity bias”, a cognitive tendency that makes negative events more intense than positive ones. Apparently, many of us are somehow pre-programmed to be like this.

Well, there’s not a lot of hope there even when the article goes on to suggest ways to counter negative feelings, like taking a walk. Okay, exercise is good but we’re missing the point, here.

And the point is that we’re not born negative. So “negativity bias” is the result of social programming and not a bad break at birth that results in us being prone to negative thinking.

Which brings me to the larger point I want to enunciate. We experience what we focus our thoughts on. Negativity bias only exists because too many of us dwell on negativity in our minds.

I’m a big fan of Neville Goddard’s work. Neville wrote extensively during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, from a highly Christian position, about how we create our individual lives with thought.

Like channelled entities such as Seth, Abraham, Kryon and lately, Bashar, along with many other renowned thinkers like Einstein, Carl Jung, Nikola Tesla and plenty of quantum scientists, Neville expounds the same truth: what we focus on, we create in our lives.

If you’re not into spiritual stuff, that’s fine. But you can’t also dismiss quantum science which has proven that thought changes matter at the quantum level by merely focusing attention on a particle, for example, somehow turning it into wave-form and then back to a particle again when the human focus is removed.

I chatted at length on Thursday with a former guest on The Art 2 Aging podcast, Kathie Donovan (here is the link to that episode and it’s a wonderful listen).

Kathie has mastered what I would call the “happiness formula” and she lives her life from the standpoint of creating happiness within herself each and every day. She is the last human I would consider as having a “negativity bias.”

She firmly believes that our thoughts create our reality and that our lives don’t happen TO us but FROM us; in other words, our outer lives are mirrors of our inner lives.

If that’s true, then does that mean that we have no control over our thoughts? You know the answer to that.

To hell with negativity bias. That’s an easy excuse for thinking that the world is against you.

Kathie Donovan is going to join The Art 2 Aging again in the near future to discuss this very idea that we create our actual, physical reality with our thoughts. I can’t wait.