Why we pay so much attention to negative thoughts or emotions…


Have you ever wondered why we pay so much attention to negative thoughts or emotions compared to postive once. Even if we have some positive thoughts or things happening still negative thoughts becomes highest priority for us. And we immediately start fretting on the negatives, why it’s happening to me? But we never try to retain postives to the same level or duration, Why?

If we look down the history we might get some answers, here are few to ponder:

At the core we are still much evolved animals..

Yes, we as social animals have a inherent sense of risks and dangers which is far more advanced than any other senses in our body and mind, reason being survival. If a deer does not constantly keep thinking and avoiding risks, it might not survive. Survival is core function for any life. And eventhough our current distress have nothing to do with survival risk, our mind and body makes that as highest priority and keeps brooding over it.

Easiest way to ignore or get out of it, is to recall another primitive function Being social, talk to someone who can empathize with you. This gives feeling of bonding and negativeness goes away. The best example is when there is lot of distress in office, we become lot more social with peers and creates a deeper bond. Think about it, your best office buddies are from places which have maximum stress.

We are ambitious and to some extend greedy…

We all want more and hence even if anything positive happens, like promotion or increments etc, we tend to move on much faster to next milestones. Also being social we keep comparing ourselves with others how they are doing and whether we are at par or not..

Both of these combined leads to lot of brooding over negative thoughts and emotions. And, knowing why we do, what we do, while being negative might help us recover out of it much faster, so lets try it out…

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