June 12, 2023

How much of our experience is determined by our attitude? This was something I started thinking about as my weekend at Download Festival came to an end. I was reading some of the Facebook comments and there were some people who seemed to have the worst weekend of their life, complaining about queues, high prices, poor staff, miscommunication and so on. I experienced all of those things yet had a fantastic time.

Can both experiences be true?

The Power of Focus: How Our Mind Works

The problem is that once we get into a mindset of looking for negative things, then we find more negative things to confirm our negative experience. It becomes a downward spiral.

The same is true for positive things. If we look for positive things, we find more positive things. What we choose to focus on determines our experience of life.

Manufactured Negativity

We often take this a whole step further too, to ramp up the drama and confirm our negative experience. We start manufacturing and generalising things to feel negative about. That person who was rude? That becomes ‘aggressive people everywhere‘. That one stall that ran out of water for sale becomes ‘utter chaos and piss poor planning‘.

I try to catch myself doing this and laugh at my own silliness; once I spot it, I note how ridiculous it is and my mood quickly switches.

Negativity Bias

The negativity bias is the tendency for our brain to give more attention to negative information than positive information. This is because our brain is wired to pay more attention to threats, which helped our ancestors survive in the wild. But in modern life, this can lead us to focus on the negative and ignore the positive. Once we are aware of this, we can try to shift the bias the other way more often.

What Are You Giving AirTime To?

Some of those people who had a bad time at Download were focusing on the queues, the prices, the staff and the miscommunication and they gave those negative aspects airtime in their minds… enough to actually post about them on a Facebook group. Their experience was both valid and real, BUT they let the emotions circulate, get stronger and then looked for more things to confirm their negative experience.

It’s almost as if we decide that we are having a bad experience and then gather as much supporting evidence as possible.

Switching to Optimism

An optimistic outlook doesn’t mean you ignore the bad stuff that happens in life. It just means you focus on the good stuff too. Optimism has been linked with better physical health, mental health, and overall well-being. It is a resilience skill. We only have a limited amount of focus in our minds, so the skill is to choose what we give airtime to.

I tend to ask the question “is this negative feeling going to add any value or serve any purpose?“. If the answer is no, then I try to let it go. It doesn’t always work – sometimes I just have to have a massive whinge – but we do have a reasonable level of choice and control about how we experience most things in daily life.

Not The Same As Toxic Positivity

Just a note of caution; this is not the same as toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is the unrealistic belief that everything should always be good and happy. It’s the idea that we should always be happy and positive, no matter what (“good vibes only”). This can be harmful because it ignores the reality of life and can lead us to suppress healthy ‘negative’ emotions.

So, next time you’re having a bad day, ask yourself what you’re giving air time to. Are you focusing on the negative or the positive? What might you need to do to shift your focus and improve your experience?