Take a moment to purposely notice what’s good in your world today. Start as small as you need to. Even if the good you notice infinitesimally insignificantly small.
The mere act of finding the good can turn the tide in the brain from a negative one, to a more positive one.
Humans are born with what is called a “negative bias”. A negative bias describes that we naturally have a hard wired favouritism for noticing the negative in our world. Why? Because by being good at noticing the bad, we’re most likely to notice a threat to our survival and avoid it to possibly live another day.
The other side of the coin might look like our ancestors missing an approaching threat because they were distracted noticing the shape of the clouds that day. Although insightful and inspiring, this would not help perpetuated the human race.
Today, our in-born, hard wired negative bias can run a bit of a muck if left in attended. It’s normal to have a strong bias towards safety and threat detection, but there’s a limit. When physical threats to our lives are more commonly replaced by deadlines, finances and relationship challenges, it’s an over reaction to interpret everything as a threat.
To this end, taking time, when you deem safe and appropriate, to feed our “positive-bias” will balance the over powering negative bias and help guide the nervous system towards a calm, relaxing and healing state.