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Pretend you’re a caveman. You’re in your cave preparing for a hunt, but something outside seems dangerous. You hear violent sounds you don’t understand. You have two choices: Skip the hunt, spend the night hungry, but live another day; or risk death and go outside. Hold onto that thought. We’ll be getting back to that.

Now, imagine you’re driving to work. While getting off the highway, someone cuts you off. You slam on your brakes. You know the feeling that’s coming. A tense anger rises up. Your fingers clench the steering wheel. It’s enough to make you feel horrible all day. You might be less productive at work and distracted during meetings. You might try to counterbalance the feeling with a quick shot of endorphins from junk food, mindless web surfing, or time-wasting YouTube videos. This only compounds the problem.

So why does this one minor thing—getting cut off—have such a powerful effect on us? Why does one negative experience ruin an otherwise great day? The answer has to do with our friend, the Caveman. Research shows that our brains evolved to react much more strongly to negative experiences than positive ones. It kept us safe from danger. But in modern days, where physical danger is minimal, it often just gets in the way.

It’s called the negativity bias. Our ancestors lived in a world of carrots and sticks. Carrots are rewards (food, sex, shelter), and sticks are punishment (predators, disease, injury). “Over hundreds of millions of years, it was a matter of life and death to pay extra attention to sticks, react to them intensely, remember them well, and over time become even more sensitive to them.” Carrots and sticks are internal as well as external. Bad experiences are almost always stronger than good—and the way we take in that information shapes how we see ourselves. The negativity bias is so powerful, we might do anything to avoid the stick rather than find a way to pursue the carrot. In other words, the Caveman is both scared of the predator and the threat of failing—potentially causing him to hide in a cave and never find a way to successfully hunt.

While our brains might process everything our eyes see, the mind might never become aware of it. Your focus and your attention are the keys to the information processing that filters what goes on in the conscious mind. A negative bias, then, is really a negative attention bias. When we focus on negative things, we actually reshape our perception into seeing negative things. You might be so focused on counting all the negative events in your life that you entirely miss the positive gorilla that’s in the frame.

The amygdala—the brain region that regulates emotion and motivation—uses about two-thirds of its neurons to detect bad news. Think about this: two-thirds of your motivation regulator is designed to focus on negativity. That seems problematic. Also, economic studies have shown people are more likely to make financial and career decisions based not on achieving something good but on avoiding something bad.

Older workplace models may have supported this behavior—20th-century assembly-line workers were not expected to “fail fast” or innovate. Being a good employee was following a series of don’ts. Don’t show up late, don’t talk back to the boss, don’t touch that button. Most of us aren’t working that way anymore. Modern business psychology shows need to focus on growth and progress, behaviors that inherently need action, not avoidance.

You might assume the best way to beat one bias is with another—fighting fire with fire. Wouldn’t your well-being be better served by feeding it positive feelings and information than negative? It’s not that easy. Like it or not, evolution hard-wired your negativity bias for a reason. Over-emphasizing negative events enabled our ancestors to survive. The Caveman might live a more anxious life, hiding in a cave and worrying every sound outside is a predator, but that Caveman will live longer than the one that assumes every noise means nothing. The optimist might be right nine times out of ten, but if they’re wrong once, they’re dead.

Of course, in modern times, that one time out of ten isn’t nearly as deadly. But that doesn’t mean the logic is fundamentally flawed. Negative events have the potential to damage you much more than positive events have the potential to help you. Encouraging a positive bias, however, makes it no less likely that you’ll avoid negative events or experience positive emotions. In fact, it might do just the opposite. A positive bias is similar to the more well-known term confirmation bias. When you’re biased toward positive confirmation, you’re much less likely to notice or take in negative information. You set out each day with an expectation and expect the world to conform to it. If it doesn’t, you’ll find a way to perceive that it does anyway. Your mood might be higher—but so are the risks you’re unknowingly inviting.

Think of gamblers. Gamblers are very optimistic. They can empty their wallets pursuing a positive event they’re absolutely sure is coming. When they’re wrong a dozen times in a row, a positive bias will re-frame this to: “Oh, that means my lucky chance is coming up next!” Or think about an average worker putting in average work. A positive bias might convince them they’re doing all they need to do to succeed at work. Without a little skepticism, a little self-doubt, even a little negativity, they might never find the need to work harder or differently. If they come into work every day expecting it to go one way and contort their effort to confirm that expectation, they might miss all sorts of opportunities.

So is there a way to beat the negativity bias?

A gratitude journal sounds hokey, cheesy, silly. But research shows it’s much more than that.

Numerous studies show that practicing gratitude can have all sorts of positive effects. Regularly being thankful and noting the good things in your life can improve sleep, reduce stress, and provide a boost for your relationships. Practicing gratitude is one of the most useful results of research in the field of positive psychology. As cynical as your instincts might be, quantifying the positivity in your life, writing those things down physically, and making it a habit to do so again and again can slowly retrain your mind to focus away from the negativity bias.

Excerpted from http://blog.idonethis.com/negativity-bias/