When you think back on your work or career, what moments come to mind? Hopefully a number of successes and highlights, but if you’re alone and not sharing your answers with anybody, you might find yourself immediately calling to mind – perhaps with visceral emotion – some moments that you view as failures. Perhaps these are moments where you messed up, embarrassed yourself or others, took shortcuts that you’re ashamed of, or just didn’t follow through on something that you wish you had. If you’re like me, you might find that those memories seem so much more powerful than the moments of pride and success. Why is that?
Well, first it’s worth remembering that if this feels true for you, you’re not alone. It’s not a reflection on you, your abilities, or your past. In fact, all it says about you is that you’re human.
This is negativity bias. It’s an evolutionary survival tactic, dating back to early human development. It was very important for human survival that we remembered which scenarios were dangerous, which locations contained predators, and which food was toxic. So our brains developed to highlight this information and flag it as much more important than moments of success. Success would be nice to repeat, of course, but these other dangers were necessary to avoid repeating to ensure survival.
The problem is that where we’re experiencing this negativity bias in the 21st century is not in life-or-death scenarios of predators and toxic food; it’s in office spaces, and on Zoom calls, and in client meetings. You can see how it doesn’t fit, but your brain is in a different stage of evolution than our day-to-day work environment. So rather than negativity bias helping us to stay alive, it instead makes us fixate on one piece of critical feedback we received in an otherwise positive annual review. Or it brings to mind an embarrassing choice you made years ago rather than the myriad of client interactions you’ve had that have been positive and successful. Or we avoid taking a risk because we remember one painful failure rather than the dozens of successful leaps you’ve taken.
We also ruminate on negative experiences because we instinctively want to solve problems and see what we would do differently if the situation arose again. Positive memories, on the whole, do not come with challenges, so we tend to compartmentalize them and move on, possibly even forgetting them fairly quickly. Bad memories, on the other hand, strongly activate the amygdala (for fear and threat processing) and the hippocampus (for memory organization), which glues the emotional details deeper into long-term storage. Not only that, but every time we ruminate on such memories, we strengthen their neural pathways and make it more likely that we’ll remember it more in future.
Of course, such negativity bias plays out throughout the many facets of our lives, but in the work context, what can we do to combat this bias and help us to see a more well-rounded view of our work and its impact?
This Week’s Tips:
- Outsmart your brain’s biases by intentionally highlighting the positive. Write down ten positive memories of your work, and/or impacts of your work on others – especially impact that you know to be true but that you don’t see every day. Place each one on a Post-It note and place them where you’ll find them each day, or on signs that you can hang in your workspace. Think of this as advertising to yourself. Make it hard for your brain not to see the positive, at a higher ratio than you might think you need.
- Actively shift your relationship with past events. This could involve work with a therapist, counselor, a loved one, or a trusted friend or colleague. Share the experience – their response might surprise you. A quick clarification might be necessary here: sharing it with someone else is different than rehashing the story again in your head. The act of saying it out loud gets it out of your head, and you might find that the conversation about the memory dissipates it in some way for you, and helps you move away from rumination and towards completion.
- Practice mindfulness techniques to be present, and redirect from intrusive thoughts. Practices like meditation or active thought suppression can weaken neural reactivation in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, helping intrusive images fade.
Try these out this week, and let me know how it goes – I’d love to hear from you.
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