Why Your Brain Focuses on the Negative

Episode content

Have you ever noticed how one negative comment sticks while you forget all the positive ones, or you received a lot of positive feedback, but you're still fixated on the one thing that wasn't good. And why is it that one negative comment can ruin your entire day? Well, in this podcast, I will show you why.

Last week, there was a puppy wandering around our house, very skinny and full of ticks, and so she looked me in the eye, and she came straight to me and was like, “Help” sort of. So I was like, okay, I'll take you home, at least to remove the ticks, and then let's see. So on the first day, I removed 217 ticks, and it was not easy for her to sit quiet, but she did. She stayed quiet because she knew I was helping her, and a lot of ticks came off, all kinds of sizes and colors. And at one moment in time, she was, like, “Oh, enough”. So I was like, okay, let's do it in stages. And so then she fell into a deep sleep, exhausted, because she's, I think, five months old or something like it. And so yeah, she had been on her own and she was super skinny, and so, yeah, in survival mode. I think hunting for all kinds of animals on your own, it's not easy. So she went into a deep sleep, and the next day I tried to help her again, went over 230 ticks, and then I gave her a pill already on the first day, and the rest came off. And all these ticks died because of something in her blood. So, yeah, she's now tick free, so that's super cool.

And I gave her some food from our normal dogs, because I don't know her age, but that came out because, well, a puppy stomach, right? So I was careful, but it still didn't work. So I immediately went to the store to buy puppy food. And, yeah, she has blue eyes, or one full blue eye, and the other a little blue, so, very special.

Now, by day three, she was following me everywhere, and she was staying super close. And I was like, wow, this is awesome. And I didn't want to limit her with the leash. So I was like, she's ready to let her off the leash. But I was wrong. I made a big mistake. And the moment we got near the stables there, yeah, there's bushes and an orchard, and, poof, she was gone just like that. And she was in full hunting mode, and she disappeared into the bushes.

So immediately, my inner warrior woke up. Immediately, my brain went into the worst case scenario, thinking like “This is it. We had three beautiful days. She recovered. I will never see her again.” I was really already there. And she had a collar on, and she had run in these dense bushes, and so I could already see her in my mind, that she was getting stuck on a branch and dying a slow death, right? So my brain was catastrophizing? But then my inner warrior woke up, and that one, that part of me was like, okay, action: we need to go and search. We need to scan the environment. And that part of me is super practical and like, let's leave the door open, you never know. Let's take the fatbike with the motor and let's start searching the neighborhood. So that's what we did.

And while I was searching, my brain was in storytelling mode. There was another part of me like doubting everything, and that part was like, “She doesn't want to live with you. She wants to be free. She doesn't like you”, blah, blah, blah.

And my inner critic also woke up. And the inner critic was like, “What were you thinking, What's wrong with you? I mean, you should have never done that. Why did you think that was a good idea? You should have known better”!

And then my brain switched, and then the outer critic came in, like, “But what about the dog? I mean, what's wrong with the dog? I mean, come on, you did all that work. You removed 251 ticks, and three days with food and water and safety and a new home. Why would she choose the wild again?! What? Is she out of her mind?”
And it's funny how fast we do this right: first we judge ourselves, and then we judge the other, and we go very much into “there's a right way and there's a wrong way, and a good decision and a bad decision, and the worst case and the best case” and there we go. So, yeah, that is fascinating. The brain is so fascinating.

So I was searching for her on the bike, and I think I didn't really look at it, but 30 to 45 minutes, and then already on the property, I spent 15 minutes, and I was walking in the orchard to check. So let's say one hour, one and a half hours, sort of that, and during that time, I also caught myself, because I was biking around, looking around and I caught myself like, “Oh, look at me: worst case scenario, thinking, catastrophizing. And I noticed the inner critic and the outer critic. And I created a little space, and a little distance from what I was thinking, and, yeah, I was observing all my thoughts. And at that moment, I really felt that I stopped resisting reality, because that's what we do, right? And I accepted it. I was really like, yeah, if this is meant to happen, it's meant to happen. What if nothing has gone wrong? What if this is supposed to happen? How do I know? Because it's happening, right?

So I started balancing my thoughts, and instead of focusing on the worst case scenario, I also started to focus on, “hey, what's right at the moment?” I mean, you quickly show up, like a little control freak, right? Like, I need to save this puppy. But I was “No, this puppy has been in the wild for a while, all right, and this puppy is already good in living in the wild.” Because, how do we know? Because she's still alive, right? And she's good at survival. Yes, she's a bit skinny, but she was not, like, completely skinny, but she can make decisions for herself, right? And she's used to this kind of life, and she has a good nose, she can come home. And how do I know? Because I had other evidence in the past with my previous dog, Coddie: that dog also escaped, and then was gone for hours, and then she always came back, and she had a mouse, or, I don't know what she had, but she always came back home.

And I was like, hey, what if this is meant to happen? Life is testing all of us, right? I mean, nobody goes through life without tests. It's not an easy road to the finish line. I mean, we all face challenges, right? So, yeah, what if this is part of my life? Life is 50/50, and we had three wonderful days. As if it had to be like this. So I was doing all this self mastery, right, observing my thoughts, not like being super happy what was happening, but also not adding… I mean, there's the clean pain, right? The clean pain like, oh, the dog is gone. But on top of that is the dirty pain like “this should not happen. You are a fool. How could you do this?” Beating yourself up. That is dirty pain, right? And so we stack pain, we stack drama. We add drama to the drama. There's already one drama, and then the negative drama in our brain and the negative feelings is another layer of drama, and then the negative actions that we take. It's not helpful, right?

And that is the difference between reacting and between responding. Between stimulus and response, there is a space, but if there's zero space, then we react. But in that space, we can think about it, and we can choose how we want to think about it, and that thought creates our emotion, all right? And that's how we can respond. What we think and feel drives our actions. But if we go on autopilot, it's an automatic response, because that pattern of thinking, feeling and doing is conditioned, it's automatic, it's programmed, right? And so, yeah, I was seeing all that. I was seeing all that.

And but at some point I came home. I went left, right, here, there. I searched the whole environment, and at some point I was like, okay, let's go home. And there a plot twist… my goodness, like nothing happened… I opened the door. I came in: Bowie!!! Because that's her name. She was sitting there. Oh, I burst into tears, Reactive You again. But I didn't expect that, all right, and so I was so happy, and I cried, and I hugged her for half an hour. I couldn't let her go, and I was so happy. And so then I collected myself again, and I was like, “Oh, look at this. She did come home. She did choose to be with us. She didn't get stuck in a bush. She didn't die”, right? What I had imagined would happen, so all those stories I told myself like “she's gone” it created 45 minutes of suffering in me, all this drama to the drama and dirty pain on top of the clean pain.

But listen, that is normal. We all do that. We are very good at it. And let me share with you a Dutch saying. And because it's a saying, you know, mankind is suffering from this, mankind is doing this. So here it goes, in Dutch, we say:

A person often suffers the most from the suffering he fears, but never but that never shows up.

Most of the things we worry will never happen. We worry about things and it never happens. And the interesting thing is that already Seneca, he lived around zero, right, the year 0, a little bit before and a little bit after, and he was a stoic philosopher, and he already said:

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

I know all about it. And:

He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.

It's another saying. And:

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.

And this is a good one:

Don't cross the bridge before you come to it.

Yeah, that's it, right? And I already crossed the bridge. Oh, interesting.

Now, why do we do that? Long story short, it's positive–negative asymmetry in our brain. What do I mean by that? Our brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain is not designed to make you happy. It's designed to keep you alive. We have 600 muscles in our body and a lot of organs and hormones and fluids, and you know what? The brain is busy with that to keep your system going, that it's working. And yes, there's a brain, but the brain is just an organ to your system, and that organ is not designed for happiness in a way that it is the main task, okay? No, it is mainly designed for survival: keep breathing, keep doing all the things. And it goes automatically.

And for 1000s of years, this whole mechanism, it's a built in asymmetry, you literally have a part in the brain that is scanning for negativity. And yes, we can scan for positivity, but that requires effort: that is our prefrontal cortex. Then we really need to pause, observe and then choose. That's a slower brain. And the lower brain is fast, it’s the fast brain, right? The reptilian brain, the mammalian brain. And yes, I know it's more like a network your brain, but let's put it like this, you have a super fast network and a slower network.

And the fast network I call the Reactive You: between stimulus and response is zero space.
And the slow network (I call the Resposive You) is: Between stimulus and response there is a space: pause, observe and choose. So that is the difference.

But from a survival perspective, we have this built in asymmetry. There’s this part in your brain that scans for negativity all the time, and it weighs the negative more than the positive. That's just how our brain is wired.
Now scientifically seen, in science, they call this the negativity bias, and I explain it as positive–negative asymmetry. Because first I focused and learned a lot about the natural asymmetry in the horse, in the body of the horse, the horse's body. But along the way, when I was teaching people, and they were super talented and the horse was super talented, I found out about the natural symmetry in our own brain and the strong focus on the negative: “What's wrong with me? What's wrong with my horse? Why is this not working? I'm behind!” and lot of negative thoughts. And I was always, like, fascinated by it, and so I called it the positive–negative asymmetry in the brain. And it's a default survival mechanism, and it just helps you to stay safe. The brain is scanning for the worst, the bad, what's wrong, what's not working, what could go wrong, what needs to be fixed, what's not enough. So the brain is good in scarcity thinking.

And even when good things are happening, your attention goes somewhere else, right? You know: on social media, you have a post with 10 likes and one nasty comment. You don't look at the likes anymore, you just focus on that one little nasty comment, right? And so our brain is really focused on the negative.

Now, listen, negativity is not wrong. Focusing on the negative is not wrong. You need it, and there are no bad thoughts, all right. This is what I want to make very clear: there are no bad thoughts. Negative thoughts are not wrong. And if you have a lot of negative thoughts, you're not broken. You're not damaged. Actually, you are like your ancestors, they had that in a very powerful way, and that's what brought them here. That's why we are alive, right? So you're not broken. Nothing is wrong with you.
Especially if you become more aware, if you start to recognize your worst case scenario thinking and your catastrophizing, and the doom and loom loops, the ruminating, you're like, “Oh, look at me, scanning for danger and threats.” And actually, yeah, that helped us survive, right? Your ancestors were good at it, and that's why you're here.

So focusing on the negative helps you in a very good way: It helps you detect problems. It helps you anticipate risks. You learn from mistakes. You get better at things, you adapt to change. You protect what matters, yeah, you stay safe, you stay alive. So all good things, right? And so it's part of how we as a human species evolved, okay, and it helped us as a human survive. But the thing is, now it can hold you back. In today's world, our brain is not always using negativity - and the focus on the negativity - in a helpful way.

So again, the problem is not negativity. The problem is the imbalance. So the problem is not the negative, but it's that it gets all the air time in our brain. 95% of the time we run on autopilot. And 5% we are focusing on new things, that is just scientifically proven. So the problem is that the negative gets all the air time. It becomes a problem when it’s dominating. When it gets more attention and more weight and more airtime  that creates imbalance in our mind.

All right, so Straightness Training is about balancing the horse's body. And I developed STEREO Coaching to balance our mind. To counteract the positive–negative asymmetry in our brain. And that's how we can see it right: our horses is this physical asymmetry, and our brain is the mental asymmetry. And again, a lot of people give all the air time to the negative, and they no longer see the positive things. And that's the imbalance. The imbalance is the problem.

Again, I really want to make that clear. Negative thoughts are not wrong, it's not bad. It's the imbalance that can cause unnecessary suffering, all right. So the solution, that is what I call the concept of equal airtime. That's where STEREO Coaching also comes from. Like, you have negative, negative, negative, okay, positive, positive, positive. You're balancing it out. It's not like thoughts swapping, like, let's get rid of the negative thoughts and only think positive. No. It’s not about forced positive thinking. It's also not this toxic positivity. It's about balance, like we're super good in giving all the airtime to the negative, but as many minutes to the positive, all right. So it's not about changing your thoughts, but to expand them, all right, you have more options to think about the same situation. And you train yourself to not only see the negative, but also see the positive. It's adding new thoughts that are also true.

I mean, all these negative thoughts feel true, they seem true, but there are also positive thoughts, that are also true, all right. If we see a situation from both sides, especially the everyday situations - because our brain easily comes up with like, “Yeah, but what about the most horrible things,”, no, I'm talking about everyday situations. Something happens with your horse. You do liberty. Your horse leaves, and we make a huge drama out of it, right? As if it's a matter of life and death. That's what I'm talking about here.

Then we see both sides of what happened, and we stop reacting. We start creating space, and in that space, you see and start to add new and true options. And you don't fight the negative. You just expand your thinking and that helps you open up to other thoughts, other meanings, other possibilities and other perspectives. All right? So that is the power between stimulus and response, in that space you can reclaim your power of perspective, right? You can see a situation from different angles and from a wider perspective. So you have more options and more choices, and that's where your power lies in those choices.

So it's not about changing your thoughts. It’s about seeing more than one option, because our brains are binary thinkers. We are super judgmental, like: this is right / this is wrong, and this is good /this is bad. And often we only have two options: all / nothing, black / white. And our brain thinks only one of these two options is the right option. So actually we are left with only one option, okay? And that is the limiting thing. That is the problem that we have a map of the territory, and we make it so small. And STEREO Coaching helps you enrich the map of the territory. You see things from an eagle perspective, and you see more angles, and then you have more choices.

Okay, so what is this work all about? It's about recognizing your patterns: what you think, feel and do when you are in your reactive you. And that you understand that what you think, feel and do has an effect that creates your experience that adds your drama to the drama. And that by pausing between stimulus and response, and by observing, you can stop reacting automatically, and you can step into your Responsive You. You're no longer in survival mode, in programmed, conditioned, automatic pilot, but you're creating your experience, all right. Not by changing the situation, but by adding equal airtime to the positive, by changing your focus and seeing more perspectives and options and possibilities and meanings.

And so I saw Bowie a little bit as the ultimate test, right? Like last week, or actually this week, I launched my new website: stereocoaching.com and I also launched marijkedejong.com. Two brand new websites. We have straightnesstraining.com for balancing the horse, stereocoaching.com for balancing your mind, but there's also marijkedejong.com and that helps you to balance your whole system. I was talking about the inner critic, the outer critic, the doubter, the warrior with an ‘o’, the warrior with an ‘a’, and we have a whole team, an inner team, all right, and that is also what we are going to talk about here in this podcast in future episodes. But yeah, we balance our mind, we balance our whole system, and so that was what I launched this week.

And Bowie came into my life, like, “okay, ultimate test, final test here, before everything goes live”. And so, yeah, I caught myself. I was like: All right, brain's gonna brain. My brain is always going to brain. And what does the brain do? They want to keep me alive, right? So the problem is not that that happens. The problem is that you're not seeing it, all right? So that is a big thing of STEREO Coaching. It's not about like, “oh, we need to be fixed and everything needs to be changed.” No, it's, shifting from your Reactive You on autopilot, to become more Responsive: become more aware that you see your thinking, that you see your patterns, and you can change it if you want to, but you don't have to, right? But at least bring all your patterns from unconscious to conscious and look at it and see what is serving you, what is helpful, what is productive and what's not so.

Yes, with Bowie, I had all these “obstacles on the road” right, and these obstacles we can turn into an opportunity: an opportunity for self mastery and an opportunity to pause and observe and choose. We observe like: “What am I thinking? Where's my focus?” And with an attitude of fascination, like, “Wow, look at me in worst case scenario, thinking, Whoa, there's my inner critic. Oh, my goodness, I was already catastrophizing that the dog would die. I was all the way there”. You look at it with this attitude of fascination, like, “wow, look at my brain”.

That is the space, right? You have a little bit of distance between who you are and what you think. You are not your thoughts, all right? And there are no bad thoughts. All the bad and the negative thoughts are just there to protect you, okay?

And so that's what you do. In observing, you're like, “oh, fascinating”. So you observe without judging it, but you're like, “Ah, interesting”, all right? And then you can choose, because, good news: thoughts are optional. And if you start to learn to look at things from different perspectives, you have more choices. And there you can reclaim your power of choice. And then you can say like, “yes, there's clean pain, and yes, there's the drama in our lives, and I don't have to add drama to the drama and unnecessary suffering, and I don't have to add and create dirty pain on top of the clean pain that is”. That is a massive shift. And because you expand your thinking and you create more choice, that changes everything. The situation stays the same, I mean, our horse gets sick, they have a colic or a hoof abscess, and yes, that's the clean pain. But me creating a lot of mental drama, emotional drama, panicking about it, worst case scenario thinking, catastrophizing… that's not helping the horse, it's not helping you, and it creates unnecessary suffering.

And so STEREO Coaching really helps us to expand our thinking. And yeah, it's simply pause, observe, choose. Catch yourself in the pause: become aware of your positive–negative asymmetry, create some space, create some distance “I'm not my thinking. You are not your thoughts. You are not your inner voices.”

And then you observe, right? And you're curious, and you investigate your thoughts, and you see your survival patterns, and you normalize it. That's part of the observation. You normalize it. Like, “oh yeah, that's what brains do: Brains gonna brain. Nothing has gone wrong.” And you give equal air time to: What's right about this? What can you learn here? What else is possible? What else could you make it mean? What's the opportunity here? What's the good? What's the good in here? What can I learn here?

So, what can we learn from this whole story with Bowie: that it was not the situation that made my one and a half hour miserable, right? It was not the situation, it was not her escaping. It was what my mind was doing, right? I didn't suffer from what happened, because, in the end, nothing had gone wrong, but I was suffering because of what my mind made it mean, what my mind made it mean about the situation, what my mind made it mean about her, what my mind made it mean about me. Because the inner critic started to beat myself up, right? So I had all these negative meanings. All right? And so yeah, that's what we can learn here:

It's never the situation. It's what we think about the situation.

And so yeah, if you want to know more about positive–negative asymmetry in the brain, if you want to understand why your brain is gonna brain, why your mind is doing this, and if you want to reclaim your power and really want to take back control over your thinking, just go to the new website, stereocoaching.com/brain. There's a whole article about the positive–negative asymmetry of your brain. And I will also put the link in the show notes.

And in the next episode, I'll tell you what happened the day after, because the story is not over yet, so stay tuned, and I'll see you there.