Psychology Today: Learn As You Go
References: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-wise-brain/201901/learn-you-go
How to beat our brain’s negativity bias and turn passing experiences into grit and gratitude:
Focus on what is enjoyable or meaningful about our experience.
As the sense of reward in an experience increases, dopamine and norepinephrine activity in the brain tends to increase as well. This flags experiences as “keepers” and prioritizes them for long-term storage.
(Shortened version of the article)
“We’re having experiences all day long, but what actually sinks in? Usually it’s the moments of stress and sorrow, anxiety and anger, hurt and resentment. Meanwhile, all the many experiences of gratitude, accomplishment, friendliness, feeling cared about, wholesome pleasure, insight, and commitment pass through us like water through a sieve. This is due to the brain’s evolved negativity bias, which makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.
To beat the negativity bias:
1. You need to experience whatever you want to grow, such as insight, intention, skill, satisfaction, calming, easing, soothing, or vitalizing.
2. That experience must leave a lasting physical trace behind in neural structure or function. Otherwise there is no lasting value, no healing, no growth, no learning.
> to turn passing experiences into grit and gratitude and other inner strengths hardwired into your nervous system
To turn passing experiences into grit and gratitude and other inner strengths hardwired into your nervous system, try one of these, or all three of them:
1. Stay with the experience for a breath or two or longer. There’s a famous saying: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The longer you keep them firing, the more they will tend to connect together.
2. Feel it in your body as much as possible. This is not about remembering specific events in your life, but about receiving the residues of lived experience into yourself.
3. Focus on what is enjoyable or meaningful about it. As the sense of reward in an experience increases, dopamine and norepinephrine activity in the brain tends to increase as well. This flags experiences as “keepers” and prioritizes them for long-term storage.
You might take these two steps only a few times a day, usually less than a minute at a time. But bit by bit, synapse by synapse, you’ll be growing happiness, love, and wisdom inside yourself.
..as you take in the good over time, you feel increasingly filled up from the inside out. Then it feels like there is an “enoughness” of needs met already, even as you cope with challenges. This reduces our biologically rooted tendencies toward “craving” based on a sense of something missing, something wrong. As we grow an unshakable core of resilient well-being, there is less push inside to fight pain or chase pleasure or cling to other people.
Then our footprint on the world and others becomes lighter, and we also become harder to manipulate with fear or greed or “us against them” grievances and rivalries.
We should certainly act to improve conditions in the world. But that is not sufficient—as we can see in the example of many privileged and affluent people who still see threats around every corner, can’t stop piling up more wealth no matter the cost, and dehumanize and bully others.
The sense of “enoughness” must land in the heart and take root—and if it does in the hearts of enough people, that will change the course of human history.”