The Wellness Scoop - Why do we see the bad more often than the good?

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Why do we respond more to the negative over the positive; to criticism more than praise? Why do we worry so much? How can we stop our negative thought patterns? Science shows this negative thinking is innate, it’s our negativity bias and it explains why negative events and emotions affect us more strongly than positive ones. Our guests today, John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, explain why our brains work in this way and how we can recognise the negativity effect and break destructive patterns.    Ella and Matt’s recommendations: This Is Us, History Hit, Tudor Dynasties and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, The Power of Bad See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stop sitting on your Aeroplan points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. Right now you can save up to 25% in Aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180 plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd. Book at aircanada.com. Conditions apply. Hi, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills, and my husband and co-host, Matthew Mills. Hi, everyone. I hope you're all doing very well this week.

And thank you again, everyone who got in touch. Podcast at DeliciouslyElla.com with any questions or episode ideas. I have to say I've been absolutely loving this season so far. I definitely feel that personally I've learned a lot from it that that episode with Tupton about looking at the building blocks of our lives and the external events that shape us that has really resonated with me. And I hope you have all found the same as well. And the feedback we've had on the first episode this year about the five pillars of health and all those small steps we can take every day has been probably the best feedback we've ever had so far on the podcast, which really means the world and knowing that you're able to integrate that through the app is just, yeah, it's really exciting. It feels like the crux of everything

we've wanted to achieve at Delicious Yellow in terms of making health and wellness more accessible every day. So it truly means a lot to both of us on a personal level as well. I've got two listeners questions for us this week. The first is, have we been reading, watching or listening to anything particularly good at the moment? So Ella's been posting about this quite a lot on social media, but we've absolutely been loving a show on Amazon Prime called This Is Us. It's a really crazy mix of being uplifting, quite sad at times. It's's very emotional it's really amazingly acted it's just a really incredible show we've loved it yeah it's probably the best tv i've seen in a long

time it follows the lives of a set of triplets and their parents and the writers are so talented because they managed to go back 30 years and forward 30 years and it all seems so seamless but it's absolutely phenomenal I couldn't recommend it more I've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently while I'm out walking with the girls particularly with May really trying to help her get to sleep in the mornings and I've always absolutely loved history I read history of art university and I've been really enjoying the Dan Snow History Hit podcast there's just lots of snippets of really interesting topics and you just get to spend half an hour or so delving into something and that's actually put me on a whole new podcast binge about the Tudors and I've been listening to a podcast about the Tudor dynasties and each episode's really short

it's about 15 or 20 minutes and they take each one of the key Tudor figures from Henry VII and Henry VIII to Henry VIII's many wives Henry VII's mother and how that entire era formed and all the different fact and fiction that takes place and it's really really interesting so if anyone's interested in that sort of thing I actually I really really recommend it and I've been reading Matt Haig's new book, The Midnight Library. We actually had him on the podcast really right at the beginning talking about mental health, but he's such a brilliant author and such a brilliant writer. And I've been really enjoying that as well for a bit of escapism in the evenings. Reading has been a brilliant thing, I think, for so many of us in the last year. And the second question that I had from a listener this week was will the delicious yellow business survive

through the pandemic has it had a massive effect on us gosh yeah good question no yeah our business I'm glad to say is very resilient and we're going to make it through just fine we're a smaller bit or at least we ended 2020 as a smaller business than we were forecasting being at the end of 2019 but we very much run our business for the long term and I'm a bit of a current affairs junkie and I think we had been expecting if you look throughout history every 10 years or so there's a nasty economic shock of some kind and so with the last one being in 2008 with the financial crisis we were expecting some kind of economic shock to come. We, of course, didn't realize it would be a pandemic.

But we have been saving in the business for the last two years to ready ourselves for some kind of economic shock. And so the business entered in a very robust and resilient spot. We've been able to come through our business, very diversified between our cafe which has obviously been shut and some of our high street customers our trade into those places of selling our products has been much much lower than we would have liked or thought it would have been but that's been offset by increased sales on our products that we sell into supermarkets and our apps done very well so our business is very resilient we'll definitely make it through and we are still just planning and trying to figure out all the possible ways that we can just be the most useful

productive company for all of the people who support us and our customers and we've got some really great great plans coming so the answer to that is is very much yes we take up as i say a very long-term view success for us in Delicious Yellow is our little girls have an opportunity to come work in the business one day if they want to. And all the decisions we make has that lens on them. Absolutely. And I think it's also pushed us to do some things like really develop the app out further, which has been a brilliant project. Get our web shop going, which has meant we're able to deliver to you all across Europe as well and we've got some really cool stuff coming to that this month as well including our brand new chocolate

box with our brand new chocolate bars which are the product that we've been working on the last few months that we've mentioned on here a couple of times that are coming it's such smooth creamy chocolate that we make we use cashews in it, which creates that creaminess. Then they're absolutely filled with toasted hazelnuts and cashews and almonds. And yeah, very excited. Those should be arriving in the next two weeks or so. And the webshop first production is happening this week. So that's a big week for us at Deliciously Ella. So lots of positive things to be focusing on at the moment which is exactly what we're talking about in this episode of the podcast today we are always told take the bad with the good but

actually science is showing that's not how our brains really work in reality our negativity bias is significantly more dominant when it comes to our mindset which means there is this universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us much more strongly than positive events and emotions. And our guests today, John Tierney and Roy Bormeister, have written this brilliant book, The Power of Bad and How to Overcome It, all about this term, the negativity bias. They're here to explain why our brains work in this way, and that by recognizing the negativity effect and our innate response to it, we can actually start to break these destructive patterns. So John and Rory, thank you so much for joining us today. So let's jump straight in. So what is the negativity effect and what are the principles in

which it operates? The negativity effect is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. When you hear a mix of compliments and criticism, you obsess over the criticism instead of enjoying the praise. It's basically that bad is stronger than good, as Roy put it in his famous paper on this topic. And is that something that is innately programmed into the human brain? Or is it something that is learned? It appears to be innate. It's so universal.

It seems to be everywhere. In a way, that's discouraging because it would make a more interesting theory if we say, well, bad is stronger than good here, but good is stronger than bad there. However, it added the excitement that this is so universal, it must be one of the basic properties of the mind. There's even some

evidence with animals that they show the same thing, that they respond more to negative things than to positive things. So yeah, yes, we think it's an innate property of the mind. And so how are you seeing it play out in the modern world that's, I guess, prompted you to write this book and feel that it's such an important conversation to have so that we can learn both to recognize the fact that that is how the brain is innately wired to be and therefore overcome it well we talk about the we're just surrounded by so many bad things there and there are merchants of bad as we call it the media politicians there are lots of people who know that the quickest way to get our attention

is with something bad, with something negative. A negative advertising works in political campaigns. So that gives us a very skewed view of the world because we're constantly getting bombarded with these negative messages. And there are lots of ways that the negativity bias helps us and helps us learn from mistakes. It can make us stronger and better. It's the prevalence of this overload of information that we have now and the kind of sensationalization

that we constantly see and the need for clickbaits and everything else, is that heightening it or has there been a relatively consistent presence across time anyway? They're just being more manipulated now. The easiest way to get the attention of a mass audience is with something bad. That's why, you know, the old TV dictum, if it bleeds, it leads. So we certainly have more of that 24-7 around the clock. And with social media, there's certainly lots of people can spread alarms very quickly with that. You know, the good news, though, is that social media, although it certainly has a potential for scaring us all the time. People actually tend to share positive things more than negative things. And that's one good thing. We hear all the bad things about social

media, about it causing these supposed epidemics of Instagram envy and Facebook depression. But actually, that stuff has been hyped. Again, that's the negativity effect. Journalists like myself, we love to find problems and say, oh, this is a terrible thing. But on the whole, when you look at studies, social media can be used positively. If you go on this low-bad diet, as we call it, where you curate whom you follow, what you watch, you can actually get lots of positive things. And there have been some interesting studies, for instance, where the things that people look at, at the New York Times website, for instance, where I work, the negative scary stories, school shootings, terrorist attacks, these things, they get lots of views on the site.

People look at that instantly. But the stories that people share that they email to each other, those tend to be more positive. You don't really send your friends pictures of school shootings. You send them stories about how to improve their health, about science, about cosmology. We also have this inner effect called the Pollyanna principle or the positivity effect, which is that we have a natural tendency to try to combat this negativity. There are lots more words for negative things than positive things because we really pay attention to what kind of bad mood, what kind of bad emotion there are. But we actually, in our language,

we use positive words far more often. And that's to offset the negativity effect, I think. So maybe if we can now move to two parts of the book, if we can think about ourselves as human beings who are maybe affected by a previous bad experience, which has had an outside effect on our lives, and then we move on to the to the low bad diet so the things that we can do ongoing that may improve our perspectives what's the science behind why we can have a single bad experience that can have such a profound effect on the way that we view certain circumstances And what are the ways that if you have had previously had a very bad experience, you may be able to reverse some of those

kind of deep psychological effects that it could have had on you? Right. One encouraging thing is that we've all heard about post-traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD, and people have the impression that once you have this trauma, it can have this long-lasting effect. But what researchers have found is that the great majority of people actually emerge stronger ultimately after a traumatic event. It's called post-traumatic growth. Because we learn from it, it makes us stronger. And so there are techniques for doing that. And that it's too bad that people just have this idea, my God, once I've been traumatized this is going to haunt me for life and and it's going to leave me worse off

but in fact people do have these ways to deal with that and they and they end up stronger in the long run i mean i think you see it in elite sport where you'll see people i'm a very keen golfer and you'll see it where people get something called the yips where they may have had a bad experience of missing an important stroke and then it has a terrible effect and they build a twitch where they can't make a smooth stroke i think you see that in basketball you see that in things like darts as well and then i think in in public speaking you see it with people with stammers we're watching one of our favorite films the king's speech over christmas where you see that if people get these reactions from having one of these bad experiences in a moment of pressure, what are the most effective ways that someone can start on that path to reversing the psychological

effects of that and starting to put those situations in a more rational, productive context for themselves? Well, one technique that they've noticed that people who do undergo this post-traumatic growth is you change the narrative. You know, wounded soldiers and accident victims, you know, they experience it by rewriting the story of their lives. They see the injury not as something

that shattered their plans, but something that started them on a new path. And you can use this for, you know, being fired from a job. It's traumatic, but you can see it not as a failure, but as something that pushes you to do something that leads you to a better career, something you're better suited at. And just devoting 15 minutes a day is one exercise they've done to what they call expressive writing. That means writing about your problems and your feelings about them. And this forces you to confront the bad and also in the come up with ways to deal with it and get over it. We were actually speaking about this a few weeks ago

in relation to the last year and the uncertainty and the unprecedented changes that have undoubtedly taken place in almost everyone's individual lives, as well as our collective society. And this idea that you have no control over external events or the news around you, but you do have control of your mind. And it sounds to me as though what we're saying is that if you recognize the existence of the negativity effect or negativity bias, you are able to change your mindset to stop solely perceiving the bad and start to hold on to the good. Is that about right? Right. One thing we talk about in the book is the rule of four, which is that in general, as a rough rule of thumb, it takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. And we base this on lots of studies of how people react

to bad events, losing money, making money, that sort of thing. And so by remembering to accentuate the positive and by, you know, rationally overriding that gut negative feeling makes a big difference and being able to focus on the positive. One of the interesting findings is that older people tend to be happier than younger people. And even though they have more physical ailments, they're actually happier because they're able to focus more on the good things of the moment instead of worrying so much about the future. There's a reason that young people tend to react more to negative things, which is that it's more important when you're young to learn from your mistakes. You're building your career, you're building relationships, and you're trying to get along with other people. So you're very attuned to the, and the negativity effect is very strong.

But they found some very interesting studies in just, you know, that older people don't react as strongly to negative things, to negative images as young people do. And in our book, we try to talk about techniques you can do. And in our book, we try to talk about techniques you can do so that everyone of any age can do that. I mean, one simple, very effective technique is simply counting your blessings, that keeping a gratitude diary, just writing down three or five things you can do it every day, or even doing it just once a week works. It's simply forcing yourself to remember the good things that's there that are going on. That's been shown to really boost people's mood. There's

another exercise called the gratitude visit where you write down someone who's made a great positive difference in your life. You write down a short little speech to give them. You go and you tell them what difference they made and you thank them for it. And both of you will feel better for weeks afterwards after that. It just does that. Another technique is sharing your good news. Psychologists call this capitalization. Mark Twain has one of his lines is grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. And so it makes a big difference when you share positive news, it has a bigger impact. And what's also really important is when your children or your

spouse tell you some positive news is for you to react to it. The worst thing is just to go, oh, really? That's nice. Because it tends to devalue that thing and they feel deflated and simply saying, oh, that's great. And then asking, talking more about it. How did that happen? What exactly happened? That makes a huge difference and it makes the other person feel better. It makes that victory seem more significant and it brings you closer together too. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game.

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or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with libsyn ads email bob at libsyn.com to learn more that's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n.com yeah i love that we should do more of that yeah you actually talk at depth in the book about how this concept plays out in relationships. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about how you see that. Well, this is one thing where I found the research literature really converged. People hadn't really pulled it all together to see the big pattern. But it starts even with first impressions.

Now, the first impressions researchers had sort of noticed they didn't know what to make of it. But if you meet somebody new, you learn something bad about them, it has a bigger impact on your total impression than if you learn something correspondingly good. But even going from there to marriages and other long term relationships, it's the bad things they do that have more impact on the relationship than the good things. I love that quote, a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, the bad things they do that have more impact on the relationship than the good things. I love that quote, a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar. I loved it.

The first thing to do to be a good partner is can you hold your tongue and not say something mean when you're angry? Can you avoid doing something like to make a terrible mess or expend the family's finances. The bad things have far more impact. And what particularly sets a marriage on a downhill spiral is when one responds badly to someone else saying bad, when they're both negative at the same time. You need to develop the skill in marriage that if you're living together with someone for a long time, sooner or later, they'll have a difficult phase and they'll be a bit unpleasant to live with. But the other one has to say, I've been trying to be supportive and so on, but I'm running out of resource. So you need to stop being so negative before I start responding negatively.

And that's essential. So the real challenge in making a marriage succeed over a long period of time, you want to prevent it from going downhill. So stay alert. If something negative happens, use the rule of four. You don't say, well, I did something to bother her or him last week, so I should do something nice to make up for it. No, you should do four nice things to make up for it and set it back on the positive track. And the so-called Gottman ratio says aim for a five to one so that it's clearly in the positive. You're not just breaking even. They've done this even like asking couples, how often do you have an argument and how often do you have sex? And if it's five to one,

then it's likely to be a prospering relationship. And if it's less than that, not so much. We talk about in relationships and in life in general to follow the negative golden rule, which is that it's not so much what you do unto others, it's what you don't do. You know, it's avoiding the negative. They find when they track couples, as Roy said, that it's the negative things that predict, you know, whether the marriage will last or not. And there are a lot of techniques you can use to try to's the negative things that predict whether the marriage will last or not. And there are a lot of techniques you can use to try to avoid the negative and to accentuate the positive. One thing is don't overpromise. Most of us tend to overpromise because we think we can do more than we can do. And we think that if we don't quite come through that our partner

will think, well, at least they were trying to do it. In fact, what they found was some clever experiments, how people feel when they get something from Amazon early versus on time. And when it arrives early, they're not particularly grateful, but they're really upset if it arrives late. And that's the way it is in relationships, that breaking a promise is so much more impactful than doing a little bit extra good. So don't expect credit for going the extra mile. Just try to meet your commitments and avoid breaking a promise. There's something that psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. And couples do this all the time that if I show up late for dinner, it's, well, there was a crisis at work. The traffic was bad. I couldn't get there on time. So I blame it on the situation.

But the fundamental attribution error is when someone else does this, when my wife shows up late, then it's, well, she really, it's something in her character. She doesn't really care enough to be on time. She doesn't love me. She doesn't do this. And so we tend to not give them the benefit of the doubt and think that it was something beyond their control. The more you can do that to give your spouse the benefit of the doubt, that's a great thing to do. And they've done some interesting studies where just bringing in this imaginary referee, basically force yourself, how would a third person look at this situation? And if you need to bring in a real referee, getting someone else, a therapist, or just a friend, you know, can have

that outside perspective. And at the negativity effect, the power of bad is really strong when it's something that is coming at you. You know, you feel threatened, this visceral gut reaction, and you overreact with the bad. We're more rational when we're looking at something else and we can say, oh, well, she didn't really mean that. She didn't mean to do that. And they can sort of calm you down. And the more you can focus on your partner's good qualities, they've done some really interesting studies in brain scanning couples and over time and seeing which couples stay together. And they found that the successful couples, when they're looking at their partner, the part of their brain that sees bad things gets tamped

down. They basically are managing to suppress that. And researchers call it positive illusions. They maintain this falsely positive view of their partner, which is really useful. And they've also found that over time that the partner will eventually start feeling, well, yes, I guess I am that good a person. So it works for both of you. So, you know, just being able not to take the bait when something goes wrong, not to escalate. That's really key because once bad things start happening, you know, people respond more strongly and the fight escalates. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice in the U.S., on her wedding day, her mother-in-law gave her a great piece of advice.

She said, in every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf. I'd like to add, too, that it's not just on the perceiver side that you want to enable your spouse to see you at your best? It's a very common thread across everything that we do at Deliciously Ella and in our podcast that we take a very keen view on an approach to genuine holistic health. It's not something that's a short-term fix. It's something that happens every day over a very, very long period of time. And it takes real effort. It's not something where being happy or being healthy is just something that you can just suddenly flick a switch and it happens it's something that genuinely takes effort I think it reminds me of something that my dad always used to say to me about marriage which he used to say being happily married is great but being really happily married is heaven and to do that it takes

real effort it's not something that just that just so happens it's something that you really need to work at and and invest in every single day. I had one other question. It's a slight tangent from where we were going, but it was something that I was wondering while we were reading the book this week is that there's obviously the negativity effect can create a heightened sense of fear.

There was a stat in your book, which really resonated with me, which is that the number of people killed worldwide by Al-Qaeda, ISIS and their allies over the past few decades is actually less than the number of Americans who died in their bathtubs. And yet 40% of Americans are worried that themselves or a family member will die in a terrorist attack. And I think that's actually a sentiment that we can all relate to. But one thing I wondered with this ability to hold on to the negative, both in kind of macro events like a plane low mood, depression is so much on the rise. And do you feel this negativity effect and this ongoing sense of fear, which undoubtedly has been

exacerbated in the last year by COVID as well, is having a big impact on that? I mean, we've certainly seen it the last year with COVID and with young people. There's striking public opinion surveys here in the United States that young people were actually more worried about dying from COVID than older people were. And the statistics were, of course, completely against this. It was actually for a young adult in the United States, and I'm sure it's true in Britain too, that you were more likely to be murdered than you were to die from COVID. There have been some studies showing that people who spend more time watching television news tend to be more depressed,

and it's hard to track anxiety over time. But certainly, it is true that in rich countries, virtually every measure of human welfare is improving, and it's dramatically so in poor countries around the world. You know, the hunger has plummeted. Child mortality has plummeted. People are living longer. Incomes have just gone way up. And yet most people in Europe and the United States think that these trends are going the other way.

When they ask them, is the world getting better or worse, A majority say it's getting worse. And it's interesting that in poor countries, people are much more optimistic because they've actually seen all this progress and they realize how much is being made. But here we have this gloomy view of the world. There was a striking survey in the United States of preteen children, and they asked them what the world would be like when they grew up. And one out of three of the children thought that Earth would no longer exist. We have this wonderful history of there are always problems and we solve problems and we end up better as a result. But there's an odd thing that our affluence, our prosperity, our freedom,

it gives us more time and opportunities to worry about more things. There's an old proverb, no food, one problem, much food, many problems. So we get all these new first world problems. And it's good. I mean, it's good to worry about things and make improvements and we can always do better. But we lose sight of this long-term trend that we are so much better off than anyone who lived before us. We're the luckiest humans in history, but we think the world's getting worse. I'd like to add, too, that picking up that a little book is called The Power of Bad, and it's about this property of the mind, is basically we intended it as a positive, upbeat book. Our message is partly is life is not as bad as it may seem because the brain is

designed to overreact to bad things. And so, yes, it looks for gloom and danger and threat and so on. But the objective facts just show that, as John said, life is continuing to improve and being born in Western Europe or the United States in the late 20th century is like winning the lottery compared to just about all other times and places in the history of the world. I mean, one thing also is that the good side of the power of bad is that it forces you to concentrate on learning from your mistakes. And that's why the world gets better because we see problems in the world and we react and we solve them. But the odd thing is that we also just are blind to how much things are getting better. There's some interesting experiments where Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, they would show people the series of two

faces, a hostile face and a friendly face and a neutral face, and they had to pick out the hostile faces. And they found that as time went on, they would decrease how many hostile faces were there. But people would keep seeing the same number, they would start misclassifying a neutral face as hostile, because we're so primed to look for those bad things that even if they're not there, we think that they're still there and we compensate and we don't realize things are getting better. Interesting. Really, really interesting. It's a really nice place to leave it with that sense of positivity. And I wondered if there was one thing, one take home, one summary that our listeners could take away

from The Power of Bad and how to overcome it and the message that both of you are trying to portray through your work. I wondered if you could share what that was. Well, the power of bad skews our thinking and our decisions and our relationships and the way we see the world. But we can overcome that. We wrote the book to show how to harness the power of bad when it's useful, how to learn from our mistakes,

how to improve things, but also how to overcome it when it's not. We want to show people how to go on a low-bad diet. I love it. Absolutely love it. Well, thank you so much to both of you for your time today. We will put details of the book, The Power of Bad, in the show notes for everyone who wants to read a little bit more

and learn a little bit more about the concept. And we just so appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Lovely interview. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll be back again next Tuesday.

Please do share the episode with anyone you think this will be helpful with. And we will see you back here next week. Thanks, guys. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.