Mindfulness, Negativity Bias and Wellness Change — Part Two

Part one of this blog looked at negativity bias, our built-in tendency to accentuate the negative and de-emphasize the positive.

This evolutionary relic is kryptonite to wellness change (badly needed, given the  national obesity rate of 35% in 2014 among other things), creating built-in resistance of which you might not be aware.  This post summarizes how mindfulness can mitigate negativity bias impacts. But first, some key points on it from the first post:

• Fear helped keep our ancestors alive.  Perceived threats make a bigger mental imprint than do positive opportunities.
• Negativity bias creates inertia for wellness change by crippling healthy decision-making with a fear-based foundation.
• It’s a “low-level” cognitive activity that can happen quickly and powerfully influence choices and behavior.
• It’s built into our animal brain.  No escaping it, but mindfulness can tame it (see below).

The Mindfulness Fix

Practicing mindfulness, as defined in the last post —  judgment-free awareness of body-mind and environment that advances learning around everyday choices to foster behavioral change — helps us to recognize and adjust for the effects of negativity bias.  And on some levels, eliminate it.  “Has this worked for Arnold?” you ask, if you read the first post.  To which I would reply (sorry that I mentioned Arnold in the first post), “How about that San Diego weather!”

Here’s how mindfulness helps to mitigate negativity bias (or for the colloquial among you, how mindfulness makes negativity bias its bitch).  Note that mindfulness is a practice, not just a state.  No practice, no  (or less) mindfulness.  Plenty-o-practice, mindfulness-o-plenty.  Do-be-do-be-do, as Sinatra used to sing.  Hence the phrase “practicing mindfulness”.  One good and basic way to practice mindfulness — among many — is through meditation, and we’ll take up that giant subject in another post.

• Practicing mindfulness first and foremost helps you get to know your own “monkey mind” in the moment.  This is the brain that’s always running in the background of which we’re less aware, flinging it’s cognitive/emotional poo in every direction (negativity bias and the “simulator”, among other things, as described in the first post).  The idea/practice is not to judge yourself or the flinging, but just to observe it.
• Mindfulness helps you to focus more clearly on the world right in front of you.  By gently placing your attention on the present, you gain awareness of what’s really going on outside you, which is probably different than your monkey mind’s background commentary on the event.  Example?  Your boss says, “Revenue is really down this quarter.”  The unchecked monkey mind naturally latches onto other fears/threats and starts flinging, “I’ll bet this jerk wants me to work this weekend.  There goes my kayaking trip.  I better come in so my job’s not threatened.”  Over time, mindful practice and attention might produce a different response:  “What does ‘really down’ mean?”  or “What kind of pressure is the boss under?”
• Your maturing awareness of inner and outer worlds reveals connections and triggers.  You see more clearly how environmental stimuli and how your own thoughts instantly produce emotional “seed” tones — either aversion, attraction or indifference — and the cognitive/emotional feedback loops that follow from the “seeds”.  That feedback loop could be a depression or fear or anger spiral or, at the other end of the spectrum, an infatuation spiral.
• Becoming familiar with these patterns/triggers (whether internal or external) helps you avoid the start of or halt the escalation of negative  or destructive thoughts and fears (the spirals described above).  You see how they start, how they unfold, and how they end, and how negativity bias participates at every phase.  You realize that you are both the flinger and the victim of the flinging, and how it detracts from the quality of your life and good choices.
• Over time you grasp — not just intellectually — the very temporary nature of thoughts and emotions.  Sad or angry or happy thoughts will pass.  They come and go, and rather than trying to stop or fix them, you simply become better at letting them go and not allowing them to condition your responses and behavior.  You recover and return to the present more quickly and and nimbly.  Ironically, this “low or no effort” approach reduces both the severity and frequency of monkey mind fling and negativity bias.  Just observing it makes it go away.  Making an enemy of it and trying to suppress it or get rid of it is just more fling; it actually makes it worse.

The Swiss Army Knife of Wellness Change (or any change)

For wellness change, the benefits of mindfulness are enormous.  Way bigger than your mother’s chicken soup, Lance Armstrong’s steroids, or even Jillian Michaels’ 30-day shred to flat abs.   That’s because any change — particularly change which takes time and where you’re working off a vision, implementing a new program, adjusting to the results, forming new habits and breaking old ones — can introduce new time pressures, awaken cravings, generate new discomforts fears/threats, etc (think the guy above whose boss says that revenue is down right when he’s starting his new diet/exercise/sleep program)  And with all of that, new threats/fears come to the surface from your monkey mind.

With greater mindfulness, you see your vision/goals AND the external paper tigers (fake threats) AND the trojan horses (couch/potato chip time) AND your own learnings more clearly.  You adjust more efficiently to the changes needed, which you have programmed and invested in.  You are more self-forgiving and willing to experience failures and distressing emotions, from which you learn and adapt  (you ask what led to the late night pint of ice cream and realize it wasn’t a character flaw or moral failing).  You see and integrate the bright spots in your experience more readily, which feed and sustain the motivation you need to fuel your wellness change.   You reduce general stress that can work against you.  And you wake up to new elements and aspects of your existence that make you more grateful and give you perspective.  You develop a new mental mode which encompasses your thinking but is bigger than your thinking.  You get out of your head and enjoy life more.  On balance, you get the analogue of a swiss army knife for your existence.  A powerful tool that does it all and comes in handy in every situation.

But you have to practice….  And the experience is way more empowering than the description of it.  How to do that and cultivate mindfulness?  Plenty of information on that is already out there.  Another time, another post….