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Why is negativity bad for us?
In my previous post, I talked about finding values and identities and roughly touched the aspect of life auditing. This post is about auditing and reducing the negativity.
We involve in all sorts of negativity in our day-to-day life, from our conversations with others and from media. There are many types of negativities:
- Complaining without actions: some friends continues to complain and refuses to really take actions or to find a solution.
- Cancelling the goodness: some people (sometimes ourselves!) always transform a compliment to something bad. “You look good today” becomes “Did I look bad normally?”.
- Criticizing non-constructively: people who like to judge others for different opinions or not having opinions, for others’ choices, without being constructive. Most of the time, these people are limited and are not willing to or not capable of helping address the issue they are not happy with, and are double standards.
- Unhealthy competition and controlling behaviors: people like to compare, and often too much. Sometimes people are too busy being competitive and want to beat others in the conversation, talking too much about their own success, or trying to give too much unwanted guidance to the extent that they are controlling.
Negativity involves conversations and stories triggering emotions and fear. It is bad for us because negativity brings long term stress to our brain. When such emotions are triggered, our brain naturally releases stress hormone cortisol. It takes a toll on the hippo campus which affects reasoning and memory and impairs immune system.
Cancers of the mind: Comparing, Complaining, Criticizing
“Think like a monk”, Jay Shetty
To live a healthy, fulfilling life, we need to stay positive, and it takes awareness and carefully cultivating the right environment for ourselves.
The external negativity
Negativity is contagious, just like emotions. Humans are wired to conform. If we allow too much negativities in our life, we will ultimately become the negative and toxic people.
In our day-to-day life, we receive much negativity from others. The most common is gossiping. We like gossiping because we like the excitement from emotions, as humans are emotional animals. When people are bored, or want to make a conversation, people gossip. People spend a lot of time gossiping. We gossip about others: our neighbors, our colleagues, our bosses, the politicians, the celebrities…
So, how should we reverse the external negativity?
The first step is to be aware. We need to be able to identify the negativity in the conversations and information. When in a conversation or reading a piece of article, think about whether the information is triggering bad emotions or is it a rational discussion about issues? If it is emotion-arousing, take a step back and be detached to the emotion for a moment.
Next, once we are aware of a person or a source of information is negative, do our best to back away slowly from it. If it’s an information source, like feeds on Facebook or email, unsubscribe. If it’s a person, reduce the time with him/her. We should purge and avoid the triggers of negative thoughts and feelings as much as possible.
It is hard to stay completely away from negative people. There are always friends and families, maybe temporarily, in the negative state and we don’t want to cut off people we care about. However, we can try to have more positivity in our lives than negativity. Get to know new friends, subscribe to positive information source, spread positivity yourself! A simple rule of thumb is for every negative person in our ecosystem, have three positive and uplifting people to compensate. And carefully allocate our times with them to be sure that we are absorbing positivity the majority of time. (Well, at least 75%)
Be on the lookout for yourself and remember you can only provide limited companion and support to negative loved ones. We cannot be the savor.
The internal negativity
Very often, we think and behave negatively ourselves. We may be competitive or cancelling, or criticizing a lot. Deep down, these behaviors often come from our fears:
- Fear of something bad will happen
- Fear of not being loved
- Fear of being disrespected
So how do we reverse our internal negativity and become more positive? To me, strengthening myself to resist the negativity comes down to the boring routines – regularly practicing reflections, daily workout, and sufficient rest. However, there is a caveat in the reflection part – again, it is all about awareness and efforts.
We need to carefully audit our thinking, reflect, spot the negativity and toxic ideas. As a practice, journal a list of negative comments we have. When we become aware of our own negative speech, we can stop and limit it. We can then apply the swapping techniques: looking at the negative statements, highlight the part that is negative, and try to swap it by a positive sentence.
Saying whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, is not freedom. Real freedom is not feeling the need to say these things.
“Think like a monk”, Jay Shetty
Finally, forgive people and ourselves for being negative. It is natural. We have to understand people are emotional and therefore it is very difficult to completely stop being negative. What we need to do is to set this as a long term goal: striving towards self-discipline and cultivating a positive environment.
This article is inspired by the book – Think Like A Monk.
