Negativity Rewires Your Brain
Negativity is a downward spiral, meaning that the more you focus on problems instead of solutions, you eventually start to see the negative side of everything in your life.
While bouts of negative thinking happen on and off, it’s important to let yourself vent, but quickly move on to solutions.
And it’s really worth doing : for one, negativity physically destroys your brain. ” …people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting,” explains Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (2).
Plus, negative thinking reinforces neuropathways associated with that emotion, eventually making it an automatic reaction (3). The same can be said of any repetitive thought or action.
However, this also allows you change your brain!
How To Stay Positive
You can train your brain to do anything, even when it comes to your outlook. The more you work hard to find the positivity in every situation, the more in becomes automatic (4).
Eventually, you’ll work hard to see the negative!