I’m sure many of you reading this are familiar with the automatic, hardwired responses that daily disappointments, minor rejections, mistakes, personal slights, and sharp or indifferent responses trigger. They flood our brains with negative thoughts, worries and self-doubts, which often loop into a downward spiral.

The good news is, that this is a natural and adaptive process that has evolved to help us, humans, avoid premature death. Neuroscientists call this “negativity bias” (1). The bad news is, that our finely tuned and well-honed bias can sometimes make a meal out of day to day living.

Innocuous events can trigger a process of negative self-talk and self-doubt that can make problem-solving, decision-making and even navigating conversations and relationships a tiresome and onerous process. The constant triggering of negative self-talk and self-doubt reinforces the habit and over time can undermine our confidence and self-belief.

To understand how to deal with our negativity bias and manage negative-self talk and self-doubt it can be helpful to know what is going on in our brains. Our amygdala is an almond-shaped structure found in our brains and plays an important role in our emotions and behaviours. In fact, it is estimated to use approximately two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news according to psychologist Rick Hanson, PhD. When we experience a negative emotion, this triggers the amygdala, and both the negative emotion and experience is immediately stored in the long-term memory.

This is what, from an evolutionary perspective, protects us from danger. Unfortunately, the amygdala doesn’t favour positive events or experiences in the same way as they are not a potential threat. They need to be held in our awareness for much longer, around twelve seconds or more, to transfer into our long- term memory. In addition to imprinting quicker, our negative experiences tend to stick in our memory for longer – which makes sense as we would need to remember what might be a threat to survival.

So, what does this mean for our unhelpful thinking patterns?

If we follow the logic that our brains are on the watch out, scanning for negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, irritation, disappointment, concern, disgust and when it picks up on any of these emotions it immediately triggers a red flag and stores the experience attached to the emotion in our memory. When we engage in negative self-talk, or self-doubt or worries, our brains pick up on the emotion and store the experience in our memory ready to recall when needed. When you do this over, and over again, you create a well-worn pathway in the brain that basically acts as a shortcut.

The process may look like this …You experience a trigger (could be a snarky email or text), which creates a negative emotion(irritation) and triggers a thinking process/habit (negative self-talk) which reinforces the negative emotion and so the process loops in on itself. Like well-worn paths, the brain can take shortcuts, and associate emails from a particular person or emails in general as a trigger and you flip straight into your “life- saving” thinking habit of negative self-talk. As some of you may have experienced, you can get caught in the loop of negative self-talk and that becomes a habit that is hard to get out of.

As neuroscientist Donald Hebb(2) said, “neurons that fire together, wire together”

What can you do to interrupt the cycle?

The key is, to get the neurons you want firing together so you can create more positive pathways.

1. Awareness creates choice. If you are not aware of your negative thinking patterns, you can’t interrupt them, so your first job is to notice when you slip into negative self-talk, self-doubt and worries.

2. Interrupt the path. When you notice the pattern shift your thinking away from what’s wrong towards gratitude. Think of one thing you are grateful for right now. It could be your health, your family, your pet, your job, the weather, the love you have, the laughs you have, heat – anything at all that you are grateful for.

3. Hold the positive feeling. As you heard earlier it takes longer for a positive event or experience to move into the memory, so hold on to the positive feeling, savour it for at least15-20 seconds. This process, when repeated over and over can help you create a new pathway of thinking you are encouraging different neurons to fire together and wire together.

Try this daily for at least a week and see what happens.

Adrienne O’Hare MSc, Coaching Psychologist & Positive Psychologist