Accentuate the Positive in 2022
You've got to accentuate the positive, Eliminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between! - Johnny Mercer, 1944
Did you know that our brains naturally notice and remember negative experiences and emotions more than positive ones?
It makes sense. For our ancestors, staying alert for negative cues was essential for survival. It was important to remember the poisonous berries that made them sick or which cave housed a bear!
In today’s world, we happily don’t face many of the life or death circumstances that existed in the past, but our brains are still programmed to react more strongly to negative stimuli.
One neuroscience experiment, led by Maria Richter (click here to read about the experiment), found that, apart from negative experiences, even negative words can cause the release of stress and anxiety-inducing hormones. In our modern lives, our brains’ natural reaction to negative words can make us less healthy, less happy and affect our relationships with others. An interesting thing about Dr. Richter’s experiment was that they found our brains react not only to words that were spoken aloud to us, but also the ones we imagined inside our minds. The way we talk to ourselves can hurt us!
Fortunately, the opposite is also true: Positive thoughts and speech can help us be happier and healthier.
In their book Words Can Change Your Brain, neuroscientists Andrew Newber and Mark Waldman say:
“By holding a positive and optimistic [word] in your mind, you stimulate frontal lobe activity. This area includes specific language centers that connect directly to the motor cortex responsible for moving you into action. And as our research has shown, the longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain.”
It’s not easy to overcome our brains’ natural negative biases, but we can practice consciously choosing positive self-talk. By doing this, we can actually reprogram our brains to make ourselves less stressed and healthier, along with feeling happier and more positive about ourselves and other people.
What does positive self-talk look like? I’ll be talking about this more in the coming weeks, but this article provides some good examples:
Negative: I’ll disappoint everyone if I change my mind. Positive: I have the power to change my mind. Others will understand.
Negative: I failed and embarrassed myself. Positive: I’m proud of myself for even trying. That took courage.
Negative: I’ve never done this before and I’ll be bad at it. Positive: This is a wonderful opportunity for me to learn from others and grow.
To get started on the path towards positivity, I encourage you to simply pay attention to how you talk to yourself, and see if you can find ways to reframe your thoughts in a more positive way.
