This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Psycho-Cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you often catch yourself ruminating about the bad experiences from your past? Why do people tend to focus more on the negative and take the positive for granted?
People don’t choose to develop negative thinking patterns—they’ve simply developed the habit of dwelling more on the bad experiences in their lives. Psychologists refer to this tendency as negativity bias. Research shows that you’re hardwired to notice and dwell more on negative events than on positive ones.
In this article, you’ll learn how negative thought patterns develop, and how you can rewire your mind for positivity.
Your Negative Thinking Patterns Are the Result of Your Brain’s Hardwiring
Research shows that negative events have a greater impact on you than positive ones—your emotional responses are stronger for negative events than they are for positive ones. In other words, negative events feel more important to you than positive ones. Subsequently, negative events create a strong and vivid impression in your long-term memory, and they influence the decisions you make.
Consequently, you’re more likely to notice, react to, and remember:
- Criticism more than praise: This leads you to focus only on feedback that reinforces your feelings of insecurity. As a result, you may feel like a victim (you blame others for criticizing you) and withdraw into self-pity, or you may end up lashing out at others in an attempt to release your feelings of resentment.
- Sad memories more than happy memories: The habitual focus on sad events from the past makes it difficult to find reasons to be happy in the present moment. This can lead to apathy and depression.
- Bad news more than good news: This tendency trains your mind to perceive situations as unjust or unfair, and often leaves you feeling fearful of taking action and moving forward in your life.
- Your mistakes more than your successes: The more you focus on your mistakes, the more difficult you find it to accept yourself as you are—you reinforce the false belief that you should be better than you are.
- Negative traits in others more than their positive traits: The tendency to focus on flaws in others makes it difficult for you to trust others and show them who you really are—if you can’t accept them as they are, how can they accept you? The more you restrict your self-expression, the more isolated you feel.
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- How to program your mind in the same way you’d program a machine
- How your self-image and patterns of thinking impact everything you do
- Five methods you can use to improve self-image and create success
