Why Am I Unhappy?

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In his great novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy spends hundreds of pages describing Count Vronsky's desperate longing to be with Anna, the woman he loves. He risks his reputation, his military career, his standing in society. He endures uncertainty, jealousy, torment. And finally, after all the struggle and sacrifice, he gets what he wants. Anna is his.

But almost immediately, something strange happens. The feeling he imagined would satisfy him forever begins to fade. Tolstoy writes, "In spite of the complete fulfillment of what he had so long desired, he was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes."

Many of us make what Tolstoy called “the eternal error.” We assume that external circumstances, a better job, more money, the right relationship, will finally make us happy. Or we blame our unhappiness on what's happening around us and the people in our lives.

But psychologists increasingly believe that the greatest obstacles to happiness are not in external events or the people we encounter; the barriers to happiness lie within us.

This week on Hidden Brain—understanding the invisible emotional machinery that keeps lasting fulfillment just out of reach.



Most of us think of happiness as something the world gives or withholds. If only I had more money. If only I found the right partner. If only I were able to move to a different city.

But what if many of the forces that erode happiness emerge from within—from our own emotional makeup?

At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologist George Loewenstein studies these internal saboteurs of happiness.

George Loewenstein, welcome to Hidden Brain.

George Loewenstein: Thank you for having me on the show, Shankar.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: George, at the very start of your career as a professor, you were finishing up your graduate studies and going on the job market. Uh, I understand that your classmates had 10 or 20 job interviews lined up. Uh, did you as well?

George Loewenstein: I didn't. I-- My degree's actually in economics, and I went to the economics meetings, which is where people search for a job, and I had no interviews at all, except I had one with a company that wanted to hire me as a brand manager to sell dog food.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Okay. Uh, so after this inauspicious start, um, you ended up landing something of a dream job. Um, tell me what happened, George.

George Loewenstein: It was really a, a fluke. I did get a interview at the University of Chicago, and I went there and I managed to really blow it.

My colleagues there l—later told me that they had voted not to hire me. But I did have a really fantastic dinner the night before the interview with some senior faculty, including, um, the head of the group named Hilly Einhorn.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Mm.

George Loewenstein: And he liked the dinner so much that he offered me a job over the vote of the group. Mm. So I just clawed my way into an academic position.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You must have been ecstatic. I mean, given the fact that you had, uh, relatively few prospects to now land at the University of Chicago, you must have been ecstatic. Did you, did you stay ecstatic, George?

George Loewenstein: I was probably more relieved than ecstatic, but I, I was happy about it for a few weeks, and my wife and I moved to Chicago, and then I got a whole lot less happy. They put me in probably the worst office in the building. It was in the basement. It had these slit windows, and It was located directly under the dean's bathroom. And, and there was a huge, um, pipe that came down through the ceiling and then went out, went off to the side, and every time the dean went to the toilet, I could hear the toilet— ... the toilet flushing through this pi- through this pipe. And so it was a pretty miserable beginning.

And also, I suddenly realized that I had this new hurdle. Hmm. And that was to get promoted and to get tenure. Hmm. And actually, that was, uh, o- one of the most miserable years of my life—Hmm—the f- first year at the University of Chicago.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. So psychologists have a name for the phenomenon you experienced, uh, the hedonic, uh, treadmill. Uh, we've talked about this idea many times on Hidden Brain, but in many ways I feel it doesn't quite capture the scale of the phenomenon. Uh, what is the hedonic treadmill, George?

George Loewenstein: The hedonic treadmill is the idea that we keep thinking that the next accomplishment, the next goal that we satisfy, the next material object that we crave, if we only get that, if we only accomplish our goal, that we will finally achieve the happiness that has been elusive so far. but of course, as soon as we do achieve these goals or obtain these material things, they recede into the background and new goals emerge, new wants. And so we're on a, a treadmill where we always end up in the same place.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So our capacity to adapt, uh, to experiences includes, um, intense experiences, and I understand that at one point you went canoeing with a friend, uh, Peter, uh, Ubel, who's also been a former guest on Hidden Brain. I'm wondering if you can paint a picture for me of the day and what happened, uh, George.

George Loewenstein: Well, it was in the early 1990s, uh, and it was in the winter. And It rained for several days in a row. In fact, it poured down rain for several days in a row. Hmm. And I realized that, um, rivers that were ordinarily not navigable would become navigable. And I located a river, it was a tributary of the Cheat River in West Virginia. Hmm. And Peter and I got up very early, put the canoe on the car, put the bikes on the car, and we drove to this river. Hmm. We dropped the bikes off at the bottom of the river, put the canoe in at the top, and sure enough, it was an extremely exhilarating day.

The rapids were very dramatic. We kept on swamping the canoe and having to pull it over to the shore and, bail it out and get back on the river. And it was a lot of excitement.

And then at some point, the river broadened out and the rapids ended.

And we were just floating calmly down the river. And I think we were both experiencing a tremendous letdown.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm.

So in other words, you'd, you'd enjoyed the thrills of the river, and in some ways the hedonic treadmill had kicked in at this point, and, and you're saying, "All right, uh, those, those were fun, uh, uh, but now we're in calm, clear water, it's kinda boring."

George Loewenstein: That's right. Yeah, we, uh, very rapidly habituated to the excitement and to the danger, and we felt let down and we felt bored. And we were canoeing along and I noticed up ahead a dam, that the river went over a dam, and we pulled the canoe over, and I went ahead and I looked at the dam, and there was millions of gallons of water flowing over the dam.

The dam was about three feet high, and I said to Peter, um, "Let's shoot the dam." Like, basically, let's ride the canoe over the dam, which was And, the canoe was, like, spinning on its axis like a water wheel. And it was kind of crazy, crazy conditions. Millions of gallons of water flowing over the dam right on top of us. And at some point, Peter started waving his arms like somebody who's drowning. Which he, which in effect he was. And I tried to kick him out of the hydraulic but I failed, and he just floated past me. to the place where the biggest volume of water was coming down over the dam.

And I could see that he got driven underwater by the water coming over the dam. And he disappeared from view.

that was almost unquestionably the worst moment of my life. And I didn't see him reemerge, and I knew his wife. I'd met his parents. And I was treading water, and the water was pouring down on me.

I was getting colder and colder. We weren't wearing wetsuits. It was in the middle of winter. Finally, I realized that I was gonna die too, and part of me was actually relieved. I end up floating exactly to the place that he had floated to, and there was so much force of water that it drove me underwater.

And I remember looking up, seeing the gray sky, and thinking, "This is the last light you'll ever see." I also thought to myself, my son at the time was two years old. And I thought, "I'll never see my son again." "And he'll grow up without a father." And so it was a very sad feeling, but a few seconds later, I popped out downstream.

And my immediate reaction was, "Oh, I'm alive." And I thought, I'm alive, but life isn't going to be worth living 'cause I killed my friend."

And so I was floating down the rapids. I was too exhausted to do anything, and then all of a sudden I heard my name, um, kind of croaked out. And I looked over, and there was Peter on the shore of the river, and he waded into the river, and he pulled me out of the river and pulled me up on the bank.

And then I went into shock. Like, my heart started beating uncontrollably. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. And he actually has an MD, and he made use of it, and he calmed me down and he got me through the shock.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. And so in some ways, this, this, um, this horrific incident happened because of this hedonic treadmill, right?

Because at this point, you had actually gotten so used to the excitement of the water, you were looking for something more, and in some ways, that's what sent you over the edge of the dam.

George Loewenstein: That's right. It was the kind of a letdown feeling, the feeling of boredom. And, for me boredom is excruciatingly painful. Um, I think a lot of people, a lot of self-destructive things that people do are driven by boredom. And that incident was like a perfect illustration.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So one enemy of happiness that lurks within us is our tendency to get used to things that pleased us or thrilled us at one point in time. A second enemy arises from the way our emotional states temporarily reprogram the mind and body.

One element of this dynamic, George, is that when we are sad or fearful, our minds reach for sad and fearful thoughts that amplify our suffering.

George Loewenstein: That's absolutely right. There's a, whole lot of different reasons why when we're in a negative emotional state, we tend to get kind of pinned down into that state.

Perversely, when we're in a down state, our brain just naturally and automatically tends to recall negative memories, memories of social blunders, memories of things that we regret.

And that, that also helps to pin us down in a negative emotional state. And then for many emotional states, we often take actions that worsen our situation.

And jealousy is a perfect example of that. When people are jealous, they often do things that are either very insecure and clingy, or they do things that are very aggressive that end up producing exactly the effect that they fear. What you're talking about is feedback loops, that very often negative states end up perpetuating themselves via a variety of different mechanisms.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. So this calls to mind the sad end of the author and the Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi.

He was the author of Survival at Auschwitz, but there was a foe he confronted later in life that turned out to be, in some ways, as dangerous as a Nazi concentration camp. Uh, tell me that story, George.

George Loewenstein: Yeah, there's a lot of controversy about Primo Levi's death.

Some people think it was an accident, but I think most people do believe it was a suicide. There's also controversy about what, what role his time in Auschwitz played in his suicide.

So, Elie Wiesel famously, said that Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later. He kind of attributed the suicide to Auschwitz.

But Ian Thomson, his definitive biographer, had a much more prosaic account of his death, which he did believe was a suicide.

So, um, Levi had insomnia. He was in a deep depression. And Thomson said that he just couldn't see his way out.

And there's actually a remarkable, um, quote from Thomson's biography. from Primo Levi.

Quote, "I know that this phase will pass just as the others have done, but I'm aware of this only at the rational level. My overriding impression is that it will last forever and that I will never find an exit."

I think when we're in the midst of a depression, it's just hard to see our way out of it. It feels like we always have been depressed and we always will be depressed.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We often imagine that the enemies of happiness lie outside us—in our circumstances, our setbacks, the difficult people we have to deal with. But many of the forces that erode happiness come from within.

When we come back—why our emotions work against us, nudging us toward the negative even when we want to feel positive.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam,



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

George Loewenstein is a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies how our emotions shape our judgments.

George, in your effort to understand negative emotions, you conducted what you call a misery survey. You asked hundreds of people to tell you about their greatest misery. What did they tell you?

George Loewenstein: People really bared their soul. It was absolutely remarkable going through their responses.

I mean one of the things I noticed was that, a lot of the miseries had taken place, um, years or even many decades earlier and they were still very much alive for the respondents. Another question I asked was, "How long did the misery last?"

And "Are you still experiencing the misery?" And just a rem- an amazing number of people reported that they were still experiencing the misery a decade or many decades after the fact.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In some ways, the, the picture that is painted from this, um, this study, is that large numbers of people are really leading what, uh, Thoreau would call lives of quiet desperation.

George Loewenstein: That's right. At, at least at a minimum, it seems like almost everyone has pockets of misery.

But I do think that there are an awful lot of people who are leading lives of quiet desperation where the miseries are kind of the dominant force in their lives. I mean, uh, there are lots of people who never get into social situations because they have such extreme social phobias.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So we've been talking about the internal enemies of happiness, the ways our emotions conspire to undermine any lasting sense of well-being. It strikes me that among the people who participated in your misery survey, um, I'm guessing that none of them wanted to feel bad, but they couldn't stop feeling bad.

And in some ways, this is both odd and also familiar. So we think we should be able to control negative emotions, but we all also have been up at 3:00 in the morning worried about something. We want to stop spinning our wheels, but find that we can't stop. Can you talk a moment about how this inability to control our own feelings is another internal enemy of happiness?

George Loewenstein: I mean, it, it is really, uh, remarkable. in lots of the different stories that I read from the misery survey, it just seemed patently obvious that it was within the respondent's control to end the misery. Like for example, there's so many people living with anger, some of people in their 60s or 70s living with anger that dates back to things that happened to them in their childhood, and they just can't let it go.

And resentments towards ex-spouses, towards colleagues, and it would be so beneficial for these people to forgive and forget, and yet they are unable to do that. I have a paper with a former graduate student named Shireen Chaudhry, and it's titled, um, "Thanking, Apologizing, Bragging, and Blaming."

And it particularly focuses on thanking and apologizing. And in so many cases, a simple thank you or a simple apology would fix rifts in relationships, and yet people are just unable to get themselves to utter the words. And it's quite analogous to anger and, envy. So many of these emotions, if people could just let go—Hmm ... they could move past their misery.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. So a central idea underlying many facets of how the mind works is that our brains are the product of a long evolutionary process. You and others argue that natural selection has constructed our minds to be survival machines, not happiness machines?

George Loewenstein: Well, survival and reproduction machines. Reproduction might be even more important than survival. Yes. We're, um, we're designed for evolutionary fitness. Yeah.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And so talk about this idea. In some ways, I think when we think about our own minds, we say that obviously we want to be happy. Our minds must, in some ways, be designed to help us be happy—but perhaps that's not what our minds are designed to do.

George Loewenstein: Our minds are designed to do things that will enhance our evolutionary fitness, which means help us to survive and reproduce. And happiness and unhappiness are just mechanisms that the brain has evolved to get us to do the things that we need to do to survive and reproduce.

And it turns out that negative emotions are much more effective in getting us to do these things than positive emotions are. And that's probably the reason why there are so many more negative emotions than there are positive emotions. In a lot of cases, there isn't even a positive emotion that corresponds to the negative emotion.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm.

George Loewenstein: I-if you think of any kind of positive emotion, positive emotions do almost always have negative counterparts. So think about something like, um pride. And the inverse of pride is shame. it's nice to feel proud, but it, it's not that strong an emotion, and it's pretty short-lived.

But shame can be extraordinarily miserable. You almost can't plumb the depths of shame. And shame is very lasting. It can put you in a negative state for weeks, months, years. So there's just no comparison. And, for every pair of emotions that exists, of positive and negative emotions, the negative emotion is invariably stronger and more lasting than its positive counterpart. And as I said, many negative emotions don't really have a positive counterpart. For example, dread. Dread is a hugely important negative emotion, and we don't even have a word in the English language for the positive counterpart. We have to use like pleasurable anticipation.

But there's, there's no word for that. And I think that's very telling.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. So the psychologist, uh, Paul Rozin, has captured this dynamic with a very vivid, uh, metaphor. He says if you drop a cockroach into a vat of wine, uh, the whole thing is ruined, but if you pour fine wine on a cockroach, it does nothing to improve the cockroach.

So in some ways, this is the roach effect that you're describing here.

George Loewenstein: That's true. That's absolutely true. A nice illustration of that would be, imagine going to dinner with your significant other, and you go to a really, really nice restaurant, the best food imaginable, and then the waiter comes over and behaves in a kind of a high-handed fashion, that's gonna ruin the food. It all it takes is one cockroach to kind of take the pleasure out of, one's activities.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The psychologist Mark Leary says we all carry around what he calls a sociometer. Uh, what is this, uh, George? How does this affect us?

George Loewenstein: Self-esteem is a nice illustration of the asymmetry between the negative and the positive, because you can feel high self-esteem, and that's good, but there's no comparison to the depths of low self-esteem that are possible. In any case, Leary argues that when we were doing our evolving, uh, much of which we actually did b-before humans existed we lived in groups, and it was very, very important for our survival and reproduction to remain part of the group. And being cast out of the group was virtually a death sentence. And when something is so important, we tend to evolve psychological mechanisms to help us deal with those situations. And Leary postulates that we develop this, um, sociometer. And it's constantly monitoring our world. It's doing it automatically. It's always turned on.

And to see how we're being valued by the people around us. That's the sociometer. And that's what we commonly refer to as self-esteem. And I think one of his profound insights is sometimes we think that, um, self-esteem is an internal matter, that, um, if only we could develop a high internal sense of self-esteem that didn't depend on how other people view us. But according to sociometer theory, the idea of how other people view us is inextricable from self-esteem and vice versa. That, um, self-esteem is a measure of how we think the world is evaluating and valuing us.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So we've been talking about how sensitive we are to the judgments of others, but in some ways our own judgments about ourselves can also be very harsh. Uh, one of the things that you are self-critical about has to do with your willingness to spend money.

Uh, you dislike overspending, but you also dislike feeling cheap.

George Loewenstein: Oh, that's right. I've done a lot of research on individual differences in spending behavior, and there are some people who are spendthrifts, they spend easily, but there's other people, and actually a, a lot more of these other people, who are tightwads.

They find it painful to spend money, and as a result, they don't spend money. I'm in the tightwad category. I just came back from a trip trekking in Peru with a bunch of male friends who all happen to be tightwads as well. But, um, one of our number is, like, a ridiculously, wealthy individual.

He's, like, a real estate developer, and his children and his nieces and nephews, they all have trust funds. But on this trip, I noticed, as I've often noticed on our outdoor trips, his boots were falling apart, and his backpack was held together with a paper clip. And he's it, it doesn't s- he's just completely unwilling and unable to spend money.

Yeah. And he knows he's, he knows he's ridiculous but there's nothing he can do about it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So that's what I find interesting. It's not so much that you actually are a tightwad, but that you know that you're a tightwad, and you want to stop, and you find that you're not able to stop. I understand you experienced this dilemma during a trip to Croatia at one point in your life?

George Loewenstein: That's right, and it was the same individual. And we, we were going sea kayaking the next day and we were staying in a, in a hotel in a town called Split. And we just got a single room, and with a single moderately large bed. And we found ourselves sharing a bed.

And Croatia at that time was pretty inexpensive, and we both have plenty of money. And I was having trouble sleeping just 'cause I- ... didn't really want to be sharing a bed with my friend. And, and I just thought, uh, I just thought to myself, "Uh, this is insanity." But I, I mean, I think being a tightwad, it, it's part of a, um, more general pattern that we tend to be kind of victims of ourselves. We're trapped in our own personalities.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Our emotions can undermine our happiness in powerful and surprising ways. Is there anything that can be done about their hold on our minds? That's when we come back.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

As you've listened to this conversation, have you thought of ways in which your own mind undermines your happiness? Do you have a personal story you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience about a missed opportunity that keeps you awake at night?

If you'd like to share your story or a question or a comment about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "Enemies of Happiness." Again, that's [email protected].

George Loewenstein is a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. He's the author of The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us.

George, in your book you write about the psychologist John Gottman and his discovery that we often take one of two attitudes when someone comes to us with their emotions. Either we are accepting or we are dismissive of their emotions.

Uh, talk about these two attitudes and your own insight about how we respond to our own emotions.

George Loewenstein: Gottman talks about how parents, caretakers and friends and partners can be accepting or dismissing of their partners' or their children's emotions, and he distinguishes between two different stances that people can take, an accepting stance or a dismissive stance.

And he says that a dismissive stance, kind of denying other people's emotions, downplaying them, belittling them, tends to exacerbate those emotions and their negative consequences. And I take, um, Gottman's work, um, in the book, and I say that we often, um, play this out in our own minds. We take an accepting or a dismissive stance towards our own emotions. These are emotions about emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Mm.

George Loewenstein: So let's say that we experience envy towards a friend and we think that that's unacceptable, then we feel guilt that we were experiencing envy towards our friend. Or suppose that a relative dies and we don't experience grief hen we feel guilt or shame because we didn't experience grief. These are all meta emotions. They're kind of like emotions squared.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Mm.

George Loewenstein: It's like the, the emotions aren't bad enough. We have to flagellate ourselves with the, feeling that we aren't experiencing the right emotions, the emotions that we should be experiencing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Gottman finds that people who respond to their partner's emotions in a more accepting manner, these people have happier relationships. Their—their partners are better off. it's a healthier way of responding to our partners, to be accepting toward their emotions rather than dismissive.

I'm assuming the same thing must hold true of us. Uh, in some ways, does accepting our own emotions, can that ameliorate some of the, the sting of negative emotions, George?

George Loewenstein: I think that is true to some extent because as I said, these meta emotions are kind of emotions squared. And when we judge ourselves negatively for the emotions that we are experiencing or are not experiencing that just worsens the emotions and often introduces a whole new mix of negative emotions. I think one of the reasons why we do tend to self-flagellate is because we think that our emotions are more unique, more unusual than they actually are. And I do think that it can be useful to people to appreciate how widespread the negative emotions that they are experiencing are. And then they're less likely to blame themselves for feeling those emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It strikes me that as we are reading a novel, a, a well-written novel, you know, even though the characters may be experiencing all kinds of negative emotions or making all kinds of mistakes, very often, you know, we don't sit in judgment of those characters. We have a lot of empathy for them. Uh, a beautifully written novel, even when people do things that are really foolhardy or really, uh, dangerous to themselves or others, we end up feeling compassion for them. And it's so striking that we're able to feel compassion for other people's emotions when they're presented in a novelistic form, when we often have very little compassion for our own emotions, even though we're experiencing them just as vividly as reading a novel.

George Loewenstein: That's right. I th- I think you're absolutely right that that's one of the functions that novels serve. It, it does make us more compassionate towards people. Um, Tolstoy famously was very, very negatively judgmental towards Anna Karenina, a character who he developed. But as he wrote the book, he became, uh, more and more sympathetic to her, which I think is, um, part of the beauty of the novel. She’s not really that nice a character but the sympathy for her comes through.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So another thing that we can do with our negative emotions is to discuss them with others, and thereby discover how universal negative emotions are.

Um, talk a moment about why this helps. Why does it help to talk about our negative emotions?

George Loewenstein: I have a paper with Cass Sunstein, um, and, and Erin Carbone. It's titled “Spirals of Silence.” And it's about how when people are embarrassed or ashamed of something, they don't talk about it. And when people don't talk about it, you don't hear about it, and you think it's rare. And then when you yourself are experiencing it, the fact that it's so rare makes you embarrassed and you ashamed of it, and then you don't talk about it, and it creates what we call a spiral of shame, a spiral of silence. And so I think you're actually doing a public good by sharing your negative emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. I understand that you found some relief in hearing someone else confess to a particular shortcoming that you thought that you suffered alone?

George Loewenstein: Yes. This story is about how when I was an adolescent and young teenager, I suffered from this problem. I had a difficulty urinating in public places, and I'd never heard about this issue. It turns out to be extremely widespread, but I didn't know that. And I wondered what it meant about me. I thought, like, maybe... Well, I had all sorts of negative ideas about what it might mean. Eventually, I actually just naturally got over it. But years after I got over it, I was in graduate school, and I, I was at a dinner party, and a close friend just casually made a reference to his own stage fright as he referred to it, and it was perfectly obvious what he was referring to. and I was just shocked when he talked about it because it's something that I had just kept hidden for decades. And he just mentioned it so casually, and nobody blinked an eye. It really brought home how you mentioned, um, Thoreau's like l—what is it? Lives of What's the, um—

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Lives of quiet desperation.

George Loewenstein: Quiet desperation, yeah. How many of us are living with these shameful secrets, which if we went public about them, nobody would blink an eye, nobody, um, would judge us for. And, if we shared them, we might stop judging ourselves for them.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: As we've talked about, George, one of the factors that makes it so hard to stay happy in a lasting way is that positive feelings tend to fade over time, and that's true, and that's sad. Uh, but of course, the same is also true for negative feelings. Uh, you write that misery isn't built to last.

George Loewenstein: That's true. Adaptation is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it, um, robs us of lasting happiness, but on the other hand, it is also merciful. But it's not universal. There are some things that people don't adapt to: loss of a child sometimes, divorce, unemployment. There are things that cause very lasting misery. So yes, adaptation is a two-edged sword, and it is merciful because it means that pain is not necessarily lasting. But there are things that- Hmm ... can interfere with our adaptation to pain, to misery.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: A reminder, has this conversation led you to think about your own experience with negative feelings? Has it raised questions for you about the scientific research on emotion? If you have questions for George Loewenstein or a personal story you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Then, email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Enemies of Happiness." Again, that's [email protected].

George, uh, you say that some of our unhappiness stems from the belief that we shouldn't be unhappy, that we ought to feel good. Uh, the preamble to the, the American Declaration of Independence says one of our God-given rights is the pursuit of happiness.

Given all the ways our minds work against our happiness, do you think it makes sense for us to expect less?

George Loewenstein: I do think that there's kind of a, happiness industrial complex. There's a, a hu- There's a ... If, if you go, if you go into a bookstore, you'll see shelves and shelves of, uh, books about happiness, about how to achieve happiness.

And I think i- if you can do it, uh, um, more power to you. But there's a lot of us who find that happiness, if we are able to experience it, is fleeting, and that misery is a bit of a constant in our lives. And I think hopefully, if you are one of those people who is more on the glass half empty side, hopefully reading the book will give you some insights into your own feelings. And maybe it will even make you more accepting of yourself, knowing how broadly shared your miseries are.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Sigmund Freud once famously said that the aim of psychoanalysis is to, quote, "transform neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness." Is ordinary unhappiness the best we can hope for, George?

George Loewenstein: I think we can hope for intervals of happiness, but for most of us, the fact that we're going to have unhappiness in our life is an inevitability and something that we should learn to accept and not reproach ourselves for, not flagellate ourselves over.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So as your research has shown, when we're in the grip of a negative emotion, it can be hard to imagine feeling any other way. And because this illusion is so strong, you say that it can be beneficial to enforce some objective rules for how to behave when we're in a negative state.

So there was a time in your life, George, when you had to decide whether to respond immediately to an email that made you very upset. Um, I'm wondering if you can paint a picture for me of what was going on with you that day and what this email said.

George Loewenstein: Yes, this was an incident that happened in the winter, and I was supposed to go, um, skiing with a friend that day. But I made the mistake of getting on email, and I got an email from a colleague at another university that wasn't actually addressed to me, but it was about me. He accidentally sent it to me. And it was a very uncharitable email, talking about negative qualities that he believed that I had. And I was extremely upset by the email, and I started to compose a really nasty response to the email.

And then my doorbell rang, and it was my friend, and it was time to go skiing. And so I didn't have a chance to click send, and I spent the day venting to my friend and talking about it. And over the course of the day, I started to realize that the guy had just made a mistake,

And by the end of the day, I got back on my computer and sent a kind of an amusing conciliatory note to the person who had accidentally sent me the email. Hmm. And that was such a better response. It's a perfect illustration of why you shouldn't act when you're in a negative emotional state. An an amusing coda to the story is that I sent this academic the manuscript of my book. Wow. And he learned about how I almost did respond so negatively. And he ended up, I won't give any more clues than that, but he ended up writing a blurb for the cover of, of my book.

So you can try to guess who it is if you look at the cover.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: George Loewenstein's work leaves us with an uncomfortable idea. Negative emotions serve an important purpose. They are key to our survival. But at the same time, they can also cause us to see the world in ways that are not just wrong, but self-defeating.

Recently, we received a story from a listener named John that highlighted this idea. John was in grade school during the nineteen seventies and played youth football, but he despised the game. He wasn't athletic and especially feared getting tackled.

John: And I was on a team that hadn't won a single game all season. Still, our coach always awarded someone the game helmet for exceptional performance, and it was no surprise to me then that I had never won one.

Well, how could I? I was put in to play for just a minimum amount of time that the league said was required for a kid to play. And then I was put in a position that was as far away from the action as was possible. I was a safety, so I didn't have much of a chance of being involved with anything.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Heading into the last game of the season, John's team was winless. Their opponent, the undefeated best team in the league.

John: By some miracle, the score in the fourth quarter was tied at zero, and with minutes left in the game, the coach had to put me in. The other team had the ball at the five or seven-yard line in their own territory. It was fourth down, and they chose to throw a Hail Mary pass, and the ball was coming straight for me. Had I been a better player, I would have intercepted the ball and made an effort to run with it. But just like the scared kid I was, I cowered in fear and batted the ball away. But then our side erupted in cheers, but all I heard was them jeering at me. We took control of the ball, and it was first and goal. Within minutes, we'd scored. I don't remember it. I was lost and feeling ashamed. I had the chance to be brave and catch the ball, but instead, I batted it away.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: John's team won the game. Later, the coach bestowed the game helmet upon him, but John did not feel like a hero. All he could think about was his own cowardice when he saw the ball coming straight at him.

John: I focused only on how I cowered instead of caught the ball. I think I may have been in my forties when I finally realized the strategic importance of my having batted that ball down. I completely overlooked that. It was because I did that, that we got the ball within scoring range and eventually scored. That was why I got the game helmet. But for so long, I couldn't see the positive because I was consumed by the negative feelings that I had held on to from my childhood.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: If John had intercepted the ball and caught it, he would have had to run it all the way to the other team's end zone.

By batting it away, the other team turned over possession right where they started, close to their end zone. That's why John's team was able to score and win the game. John's play wasn't foolish, it was genius.

John is not alone in his relentless focus on the negative.

All of us are prone to turning into Negative Nancys and Negative Neds. When we come back, more stories about how we reach for the negative and what we can do about it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Imagine two students walk out of the same exam. One gets their test back with a note, "Great work, 88%." The other student receives, "Needs improvement, 88%" Same score, same grade. But ask each student an hour later how they feel about the test and you'll hear two very different stories.

Bad news often weighs on us more than good news. One harsh comment from a friend undoes a dozen kind ones.

Psychologist Alison Ledgerwood has spent years studying what researchers call the negativity bias. Alison was a previous guest on two episodes of the show. The first was called Stepping Out of the Shadows.

The second, for Hidden Brain Plus subscribers, was titled Going Negative. Today she's back on the show to respond to your questions and stories about her work. Alison Ledgerwood, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Alison Ledgerwood: Thank you, Shankar. I'm so glad to be back.

Shankar Vedantam: So Alison, in our last conversation we discussed the so-called negativity bias at some length. Why is it that our brains are wired to focus on the negative?

Alison Ledgerwood: Well, evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that we would want our brains to focus on problems or threats when they are there in our environment, right? You don't wanna be going to get, I dunno, berries or water and notice a tiger but then forget about the tiger because you're so excited about the berries.

So we want our brains, in many situations both in our ancestral past and today, to notice when there are problems, to notice when we've made a mistake and hold onto that information, and not get distracted by positives in the environment.

Shankar Vedantam: So you've run studies showing that when we initially frame information as negative, it's very hard to change this framing. Describe that work for me.

Alison Ledgerwood: Sure. So we took a pretty common paradigm in the psychological and economics literature, um, called a framing paradigm, which just means that you give people a problem or talk about an event or an issue, and you focus their attention on the part of the glass that's full or the part of the glass that's empty. So you might say that there is a policy that's been designed to save jobs, and it's, it successfully saved 70% of jobs. Or there's a policy that's been designed to prevent job losses, and only 30% of jobs have been lost under this policy. And past research on framing effects shows that the way that you describe that issue to people matters a lot for how they think about it. If you focus on jobs saved, they like the policy. If you focus on jobs lost, they don't like the policy.

Shankar Vedantam: Hm.

Alison Ledgerwood: What we did was we kept going instead of stopping there, and we reframed the policy using the alternate frames. So people who had seen the jobs policy framed in terms of jobs lost, we said, "Hey, you could think about this as a good policy that saved 70% of jobs."

And people who had seen the policy framed in terms of positives, in terms of the jobs that had been saved, we said, "Hey, you could think about this as a bad policy. 30% of jobs have been lost. And what we found is that people had a much easier time shifting from the positive frame to the negative one than going in the opposite direction. If we started out with positives, and then we said, "But part of this policy is bad," people were like, "Oh, we agree. It's bad." But if we started out with the negative frame and said, "Hey, part of this policy is good-" Hmm ... people said, "No, no, no, no. It's actually pretty bad."

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. So let's talk about various contexts in which we see the negativity bias at play. listener Aaron has had 10 surgeries since being injured playing football. Here he is.

Aaron: once that initial injury happened, and I had to get surgery, my mind just kinda almost switched. Um, 'cause I'm a naturally positive person, an optimistic person, but I became, uh, pretty negative and started to focus almost exclusively on the negative. So every single day I'm kinda faced with a choice to either see my pain and my current situation through a negative lens or focus on the positive. And I fail every day, but I try.

So Aaron sees that his brain is working in a certain way, Alison. Um, he knows that it's working that way, he wants to change it and yet actually changing the way he thinks is very, very difficult

Alison Ledgerwood: You know Shankar, injuries and illnesses are so difficult. the worst advice would be oh just be positive right because you were dealing with a real looming negative that affects everything. And it's in your body It's not like you can go to a different room and take a break. Work on something else then take a break. It is omnipresent. One of the biggest predict predictors of happiness and well-being is just our physical health and this is why. Because it's just there all the time. I think it's important to remember as we think about Aaron’s question That society is designed for abled bodies Even though many of us most of us will be disabled at some point in our lives if not throughout our lives So it's hard. It is hard to get around when the world um hasn't been designed for the way that your body is working.

Shankar Vedantam: It's also striking to me, uh, Alison, that Aaron in some ways sees that his brain is working in a certain way and wants to change it, and is unable to do so. That he finds his brain sort of slipping back. Almost as if his brain has a you know, a mind of its own.

Alison Ledgerwood: Our brains definitely have minds of their own. They're just doing their thing. And sometimes we can watch them and ask like, "Hey could we do this other thing?" But those well-worn habits of thinking, just like the way you drive or bike to work every day? Um or anything that you do kind of everyday, right. It's really hard to get out of that groove, to get out of that habit.

Shankar Vedantam: Mm

Alison Ledgerwood: And so it's...it's a big success when we can just catch our minds doing it, right? Noticing, “Oh here it goes sliding into the negatives again,” is A big step all on its own. And then if we don't, if we think it's kinda tilting too far, If we don't like how far our brain is tilting into the negative right feels like, “This is taking over my day I can't do anything useful with this negativity. Its just kind of consuming me.” Then we can start once we notice it Too Try to develop practices that give us a little bit of balance.

Shankar Vedantam: We received an interesting story from listener Gordon. Uh, he writes about a project he’s working on and says “I submitted a proof to a client. According to the client I did an award-winning job. Despite the ‘award-winning,’ comment I only see the mistakes I made in my original draft. While I’ve been successful at my profession for thirty-plus years, the criticisms and small errors, like missing a comma, still resonate deeper, calling into question a younger, disorganized and careless self. I am wondering, Alison, are we particularly vulnerable to the negativity bias at work?

Alison Ledgerwood: Oh my gosh i resonate with this story so much. And I think many people will. Umm I dunno if we are particularly vulnerable to negativity bias at work so much as negativity bias kinda follows us around In our brains wherever we go, and we spend a lot of time at work. So we notice it in so many work contexts. But I think many of us can relate to a performance review or, um, maybe you run a business or a podcast that gets rated by people. I get teaching evaluations where students rate how well I taught a class and you can see, you know, so many positive comments and just one negative one. And the negative one is the one that rattles around in your head and that you remember long after the positive ones have kind of dissipated.

Shankar Vedantam: I find Gordon's last sentence particularly interesting. He takes a small mistake like a grammatical error and gives it huge meaning. It reminds him, he says, of a younger, disorganized and careless self. I'm wondering if that's part of the staying power of the negativity bias, Alison? That it makes us interrogate parts of ourselves that we dislike?

Alison Ledgerwood: I think that can be part of it in some contexts. Um, sometimes a negative comment can hit especially hard because it calls up insecurities or things that we don't like about ourselves or seems to fit with other negative things that we've heard in the past. Um, I think this often happens with mistakes. We can feel like this mistake says something about me. I wonder about the extent to which this happens, especially like in US culture where we've kind of, we're steeped in this idea of there's good guys and there's bad guys, right? Like watch any Disney movie or almost any Disney movie um, and you can be good or you can be bad, and if I made a mistake it means I'm bad. And that's a very different way of thinking about or framing a mistake than, say, well everybody can do bad things and good things. Or um, I make mistakes and they are my opportunities to learn and grow, and thank goodness I make them, because otherwise I wouldn't get any better or I wouldn't improve over time.

Shankar Vedantam: We also see the negativity bias at play in our social lives. Some time ago listener Rafah went to a friend's house to watch a sports game after work. She still had a few tasks to finish so she decided to multitask uh, work and watch the game with friends at the same time. Here she is.

Rafah: So I was doing that, um, and a little bit less, uh, kind of locked into the social dynamics and the game because I was multitasking. One of the friends was getting up to leave, and this is a friend who I'm, who I have like a playful kind of trolling dynamic with. So I was thinking about how to best troll him when saying goodbye, but my brain kind of moved slowly between the switching context and everything else happening, and I accidentally made a really offensive, uh, hand motion and specifically offensive to his identity.

But I didn't clock that I had done that, but I was reacting to his facial expressions, which looked like confused and then kind of like, "Are you doing that?" And then I realized, oh, this is something I'm doing, and then I was like, "Oh, shit." And then other people saw, and it was kind of this like embarrassing moment, and we all laughed it off, um, and it was no big deal.

But I, as I was recording this, realized that I literally remembered almost nothing else about that night. I really had to think about what kind of sports game it was and what I ate and who was there. And I just remember that night as a night sort of shrouded in this embarrassing moment that, it changed the memory of that night. And also, um, I've noticed since then that I've been a little bit less like playful or been a little bit less off the cuff with improvising humor out of fear, which is something that I think I love being playful and I love being silly, and so I thought that was an interesting reaction.

Shankar Vedantam: So I feel like Rafah's comment is very relatable, Alison. We've all been to social events and accidentally said something we didn't mean, and then thought about it for a long time afterwards. And of course the intense feelings of embarrassment that Rafah experienced, this seems like another version of the negativity bias, right?

Alison Ledgerwood: Absolutely. I think we can all relate to Rafah's experience of having some kind of positive interaction or a great time at a party and then, and then making one mistake putting our foot in our mouth saying something harmful to somebody without meaning to and it takes over our, our minds. It takes over the memory of the event and can linger with us. I'm of two minds about the impulse is sometimes like, okay, how do I stop that from happening. But this is a case where sometimes it's really useful that that negativity bias is there in our mind. It's really useful that our bodies feel embarrassed. Um, maybe guilty. Maybe we want to reach out to the other person. Or not make the same mistake again and we're worried about that because that's our body's helping us to not keep repeating the same mistake Over and over again

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, is there such a thing as too much positivity? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Today, we are talking about the negativity bias. Alison Ledgerwood is a psychologist at the University of California Davis. Her experiments reveal that our brains are built to notice the dark tones of life more quickly than bright rainbow colors, and those dark tones endure long after the rainbow hues have faded and disappeared from our memories.

Alison, let's talk about some of the implications of the negativity bias. A listener named Kate played cornet in high school and achieved first chair in the school orchestra her senior year. But just a few weeks before graduation, the conductor replaced Kate as first chair with another student. She writes, "I was devastated, humiliated, and angry.

At the end of the year, I put my horn in its case and didn't take it out for three decades. When my uncle died, a man who had played in the Army band during World War II, I opened the case and sounded taps at his funeral. It was very moving. I ended up getting a new silver trumpet, took lessons, and am now happily playing in a community band.

This was the biggest regret in my life." So Kate's story points to the cost of the negativity bias, Alison. A single bad experience in high school cost her three decades of joy with music.

Alison Ledgerwood: Absolutely. I'm I'm sorry that happened to you, Kate. and I'm so glad that, that Kate was able to, to find a way back to this instrument that's, that's bringing so much joy.

Shankar Vedantam: You know, we talked, um, at the start of our conversation, Alison, about the evolutionary roots for the negativity bias. Uh, you know, you, you remember the tiger near the watering hole, and perhaps you avoided that watering hole ever afterwards. You know, it made sense when it comes to a tiger, but it doesn't make sense when it comes to a cornet.

And, and what's interesting here is that there doesn't seem to be much calibration in the brain, right? So in other words, when a negative thing happens, we treat the, the cornet, and we treat being relegated, uh, you know, to second chair from first chair in the school orchestra, we treat it almost as if it were a tiger.

Alison Ledgerwood: Yes. And then that tiger looms in our minds and can shape decisions that we make for a long time after that. Sometimes I think of negativity bias as a, like a computer program or an app that's, that's often really useful, but sometimes it's running even when we don't need it or want it to run, and it can be hard to shut it off. Sometimes there's nothing to be learned from that experience or the one negative review or, the one negative instance, right? Mm. And you don't want it to keep taking over your mind. And sometimes the only way that it feels like we can get away from it is to pack up the instrument and put it away and not look at it. And so I think the question in those contexts is, how can we navigate our way through those sometimes painful events, so that we can not lose something that we love, right? So that we can process the negative event, often with other people can help. Or maybe it just takes some time, and then come back to it and unpack it and, and figure out what parts we want to, learn from if there was something to learn, and what parts we can let go of.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. Listener Alice called in with an interesting implication of the negativity bias.

Alice: In April of 2026, my husband and I decided to take his eighty-six-year-old aunt on a trip to Italy. Everything was going well until his aunt started complaining. There wasn't enough room on the airplane. She didn't get the meal she ordered. Once we arrived, the complaining continued. "My room is so small. I wish the tree wasn't in the way of my view."

And on and on it went for twelve days, touring the beauty of Italy from Sorrento to Rome, Florence, and Venice. There were so many beautiful sights, but it was all marred by this nagging complainer that couldn't see the good. It was draining, and I missed a lot of the beauty of the trip because of it.

Shankar Vedantam: So what's fascinating to me about this question, Alison, is that there are almost two different aspects of the negativity bias here.

Uh, the aunt, of course, was, was seeing everything that was wrong in the trip and complaining about it all the time, but for poor Alice, who was hearing her aunt complain about everything, that was another form of the negativity bias at play because in fact, she was traveling through some of the most beautiful spots in the world, but the negative commentary she was getting from her aunt kept her from seeing the beauty that was all around her.

Talk a little bit about the social consequences of the negativity bias.

Alison Ledgerwood: Right. I mean, it's, it's so easy to spread negativity, um, to kind of catch it from other people, and then you're ruminating on it yourself, and then you maybe complain about it to somebody else, and then they're ruminating on it too, right?

So we can get into these, um, spirals, not just within our own minds, but also kind of interpersonal spirals with other people, and it can be really hard to break out of that.

Shankar Vedantam: Hm. We got a very interesting, uh, comment from a listener named Hussein. He's a psychiatrist from Iran.

Hussein: About 50 years ago, many Iranians shared the belief that the situation could never become worse than it was.

They believed they were living in the worst possible situation. That way of thinking became one of the forces behind the 1979 revolution. The political system and many aspects of society changed radically. But decades later, many, maybe most Iranians no longer see it that way. Many people even wish those earlier days could come back.

That made me wonder whether this is an example of negativity bias, not just in individuals, but in an entire society. Today, I feel I can see something similar happening again. Many Iranians believe that the current horrible situation cannot become worse, but the recent war reminded us that it actually can become much worse.

It made me think that as a society, we may have difficulty imagining a future that is worse than the present. So my question is, is there any psychological concept like collective negativity bias or something similar? Can negativity bias exist and get increased at the level of a whole society?

I love, uh, Hussein's question and find it so interesting and insightful, Allison. Uh, so often when we are upset with something or some institution, we feel that things would be so much better if we simply burned everything to the ground.

Shankar Vedantam: But of course, once we burn things to the ground, what we're left with could be worse than what we had.

Alison Ledgerwood: I think Hussein captures the way that, um, negativity bias can play out not just in our own minds, not just between us and, you know, me and one other person. Um, but also at the level of societies

The experience that feels more familiar to me anyway is feeling like this is so bad and then not thinking about the ways that it could be worse. Mm-hmm. And maybe even imagining the ways that it could be worse is too painful and too scary 'cause it's already so bad. I think we also have a hard time sometimes imagining the ways that it could be better. Um, Rebecca Solnit talks about this concept of hope in the dark. Of not knowing what the future holds right? It could go up or it could go down and we genuinely don't know. And there's something important about holding the possibility of both so that we can work toward - Something better while also maybe acknowledging that, um, that there are some positives in the present Right? It's not 1000% negative right now.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, Alison shares tips on how to address the Debbie Downer living inside your own head. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Alison Ledgerwood is a behavioral scientist at the University of California, Davis. She studies why our minds often fixate on the negative

Alison, let's talk about some ways we can address the negativity bias in ourselves. You say that even in difficult situations we can look for the silver linings?

Alison Ledgerwood: The first thing I think that's important to remember is that the goal is not to suppress the negative thoughts. So research shows that pushing down or suppressing negative emotions doesn't work. The most vivid example of how suppression can backfire is a classic experiment that asked participants, "Don't think about a white bear." So if I tell you, "Don't think about a white bear" and pause for 10 seconds, the first thing you're going to think about is a white bear.

And even if you manage to get through those 10 seconds without thinking about it, as soon as you stop paying attention to it, right? White bear pops right back into your mind.

Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm.

Alison Ledgerwood: So same thing with negatives. If we push them down, if we pretend they're not happening, that can backfire and make that negativity reappear in our heads stronger than before. At the same time, our minds often need a little bit of help to get more balanced, right? To accept that the negative thing is happening, and that positive things are happening, too. And so I think of it as kind of working out a muscle. We can practice also noticing positives. Things that we appreciate, the way that the sun is filtering through the trees right now outside my window. Something small and lovely that happened earlier in my day. And the more that we practice that, not instead of thinking about negatives but in addition, the more our brains can get a little help balancing out.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. So we got a story along those lines from a listener named Bill. Uh, he writes, "While undergoing cancer treatment, I adopted the practice of noticing and paying attention to the good things that happened every day.

On chemo days, if we got a good parking spot in the parking garage, celebrate. If the nurse starts the IV on the first poke, yeah. If the cafeteria had my favorite sandwich, fantastic. Alison, talk about Bill's approach here. Do you think it makes sense?

Alison Ledgerwood: I love this approach. I think it makes a lot of sense. It takes work. It takes effort, right, to practice noticing those things. Sometimes it helps to talk about them with somebody else or write them down. And the more that you practice it, the easier it gets.

Shankar Vedantam: So Bill goes on to write that he was accused by others of treating his cancer as trivial or being in denial about it. Uh, he rejects that and says he knew exactly what he was facing; he just chose to stay focused on the positive. What do you make of, uh, both the concerns raised about his positivity as well as his argument, Alison?

Alison Ledgerwood: I mean, I think Bill knows himself best. I'm reminded of my colleague Dulce Westberg's research on, um, what people want in support from friends when they're going through stressful situations and what they don't want. And one of the things that we don't want, this is very unsurprising when you think of it from your own perspective, but one of the things that we don't want is unsolicited advice. So that's unsurprising when you think about you not wanting unsolicited advice, but it's really useful at least to me to be reminded of this from the outside when I'm the friend who wants to rush in and tell people like, oh, you should really do this or consider this possibility or don't focus so much on the negatives or do acknowledge the negatives, right?

But if we can instead go in and, and ask like what does support feel like for you right now? what could I do to support you? Do you want somebody to validate these positive things and talk about them with you? Do you want to talk through any of the negative things? I think that can be really helpful.

Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm. I've noticed that in some situations, Alison, when, you know, you might feel the situation is really really bad. But in fact you can see some silver linings. It's very difficult to talk about those silver linings when other people are talking about how bad things are because that sounds like you are downplaying How bad things are and how Badly other people Feel Can you talk about this a little bit That there's almost uh domino effect that comes from the negativity bias that makes it hard for people To stand up and say, well, yes, things are bad, but in fact there are a couple of silver linings here.

Alison Ledgerwood: You know i think we have a hard time again at least In this culture holding two truths at once, holding that things are really bad here and these things are good over here and making space for them to both be true. So I think there Is some of that where it can feel like if one person is saying "it's so bad" and another person says,"but look on the bright side," that it's negating that negativity.

It can really feel like that. And a lot of times when we're sharing how we feel about something negative, what we really want from other people is validation. We don't wanna be told, don’t worry, the view is fine. Look at the pretty trees, or, don’t worry, or like, "Look on the bright side." Like, "Yes, you're injured but on the, on the bright side this thing over here," like we don't want that.

Right. We want the person to say, "I see you and, and that sucks." and that's not the only thing that we need to talk about with other people. So research also suggests that we really need other people for something called capitalization. We need other people to be joyful about our successes. We need to be able to share positives and have other people share in and validate the positivity too.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm One of the frustrating things about the negativity bias is that it feels like our negative thoughts are out of our control. So we might want to be positive, but the negative thoughts keep intruding. Listener Hollis was diagnosed with cancer 22 years ago.

Hollis: What I chose to do was to not focus on the negative, and in fact, to somewhat shield myself from what I would describe as negative information. And as a professional researcher, I knew that I could go down a rabbit hole if I started doctor googling everything.

So I told my friends and family that if they wanted to research, uh, my diagnosis, they could, but that I was going to instead focus on myself as not a number or statistic, but as a person who could remain positive so much as I could. And, it worked for me. I am cancer-free. And also, it significantly helped me manage my anxiety, which there was a lot of during that time. I only later learned after a long time into my treatment and, seeing positive results that the form of cancer, breast cancer that I had was very deadly. And so I'm really glad that I shielded myself from information like that because I think I would have perseverated over it.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you make of Hollis' approach, Alison?

Alison Ledgerwood: I'm, I'm so glad that Hollis is now cancer free and it sounds like this approach really worked and I think it points to how when there's a lot of possibly very negative threatening information, when you feel anxious about it and you can tell that getting more information is going to just lead you to feel more anxious, then finding ways to put boundaries around that information can be really useful for allowing you to keep moving forward throughout your day. Right? So you know, I keep talking about balance. We don't want so much negativity that it drowns out all the positives. We don't want so much positivity that we're not paying attention to information that we really need. And finding that balance, I think, sometimes involves like, okay, I am not gonna be good at coping with all of this negative information So who can, who can help me do that? My doctor can be the one in charge of taking in that information and recommending the best route forward. Or these friends or family members can help me with this. And then let my mind get a break from it and have the space to work through what I need to work through.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. Listener Christina is a mental health therapist and found herself in stressful situations with her supervisor. She has a story and a question for you.

Kristina: Whenever I received a message saying we needed to meet, I didn't know what the meeting was about, but almost immediately my mind would begin filling in the blanks with the worst possible explanations. My heart would race. I'd replay every interaction I'd had over the previous week, and I'd start preparing myself for criticism before I had any actual information.

At first, I wondered if this was just negativity bias, but then I realized it was more complicated than that. Some of my previous meetings really had been difficult. My anxiety wasn't coming out of nowhere. My brain had learned from real experiences. What fascinated me was what happened next. My brain stopped distinguishing between this meeting might be difficult and this meeting will definitely be difficult.

It was trying to protect me by predicting what had happened before, but in doing so, it treated uncertainty as if it were certainty. As a therapist, that was a humbling realization. I spend my days helping other people understand their thinking patterns, and yet I was experiencing the very same thing myself.

It reminded me that negativity bias isn't about imagining problems that don't exist. Sometimes it's our brain taking real experiences and overgeneralizing them in an effort to keep us safe.

Shankar Vedantam: So Christina brings up a really good point, uh, Alison. What makes the negativity bias really challenging is that sometimes there are factual grounds for our negativity. Uh, so the problem is not anticipating something negative might happen but going from anticipation to certainty. I'm wondering, how do we distinguish between situations where in fact it makes sense to expect the worst and situations where our minds are imagining the worst?

Alison Ledgerwood: Hmm. I, I really love the way that, that Kristina characterizes this of our brains confusing that something might be difficult, might be scary, might go badly versus it will be scary or it will go badly. and I think it's really useful to remember that negativity bias is often based in something real, right?

Um, our brains really are trying to protect us. Our brains really have learned from past experiences and so that's information. And it's useful to make the distinction that Christina is describing between might be and will be. So it might go badly means it might also go well, and I can think about, okay, well, do I wanna do anything to prepare for the possibility that it might go badly?

Is there anything I can do? Maybe I can go in with, uh, something planned that I want to say. Or maybe... I, I don't know. It could go badly in a million different ways, but I can block an hour of time afterwards to call a friend or eat some ice cream or something that's gonna feel restorative to me. And that's different, right, from it will go badly which can make our bodies feel like deer in headlights, right?

The tiger is coming full system alert. Um, that's really taxing over time.

Shankar Vedantam: Kristina also shared a suggestion, uh, with us. Uh, here she is again

Kristina: The biggest lesson I've taken away is that whenever I find myself assuming the worst, I try to ask one simple question: Am I responding to what's actually happening right now, or am I responding to what my brain has learned to expect? That question hasn't erased my anxiety, but it has given me enough space to become curious instead of certain. For me, that's been one of the most valuable lessons about how our minds work.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you make of Kristina's tip, Allison?

Alison Ledgerwood: I really like this tip. I think that is spot on to take a beat and make space for curiosity.

Um, I have also found it really helpful to distinguish between when I'm reacting to something negative that's happening right now versus when I'm reacting to something negative that's happening right now but it's also something negative that happened last year with somebody else, and it's also something negative about something that happened five years ago, right?

And so my reaction to it is about those three different layers maybe, and then that maybe leaves a, as Kristina puts it, more space for curiosity about like, oh, how do I feel about that thing that happened several years ago? And how do I feel about the thing that's happening right now? And how are they similar, but also how are they different

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if you have found ways to apply these research insights, Alison, to the people in your life, uh, friends, family, kids?

Alison Ledgerwood: Well, with my nine-year-old, I have learned many lessons all the time.

Um, but one of them has really been kind of a deeper internalization of the idea that you can't just jump in and tell other people to focus on the positives, right? When a nine-year-old is dealing with what feels like a huge negative thing, it doesn't matter if I agree that it's a huge negative thing.

I can't say like, "But think about the positives. Think about what we did do." That doesn't help. I just have to wait out the big bad feeling, the frustration, the loss, the sorrow, and then in its wake, there is some space for something positive. And I think why this is such a useful lesson for me is that I, I have such a hard time doing that with myself.

Like, when I'm focusing on the negative, when I'm having a big feeling about a negative thing, I can be so impatient with myself.

Shankar Vedantam: Mm.

Alison Ledgerwood: I can say, "Don't you know the research?" Like, "Let's go. Your brain's tilting too much to the negative. What are the positives?" Or, "Just get over it already. This ruminating isn't actually doing anything useful."

And occasionally, I remember to give myself the same space that I give to my nine-year-old. And that works much better.

Shankar Vedantam: Alison Ledgerwood is a psychologist at the University of California Davis. Alison, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.

Alison Ledgerwood: My pleasure Shankar. Thank you for having me back.

Shankar Vedantam: We also heard today from George Loewenstein. He's a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of "The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us."

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

If there's someone in your life who would find today's episode to be comforting or thought-provoking, please share it with them. Take a walk together and ask yourselves how you can better focus on the positive things in your lives. I very much hope that one of those positive things is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon