It’s called the negative bias. Our brains seek out and remember particularly strong emotions. Mostly the negative ones – disgust, terror, shame, and so on. They register so strongly because in evolutionary terms, that kept you alive. One, in triggering the fight-flight-freeze reflex in the survival situation. And two, in ensuring you would stay away from whatever caused that – someone attacked you from a neighbouring tribe, a predator, you ate something poisonous, you did something horrible and it threatened your standing within the tribe.
The ratio in research is about 3:1* in terms of how much it weighs on you. In other words, for a parent, it’s a good rule of thumb to have three positive experiences with your kid for every 1 negative one. As a teacher or a coach, you have to create three positive experiences for your player or student before you’ve earned a criticism. The flip-side is that too many positives and you get toxic positivity, somewhere around 11:1, like it’s too much positivity and it doesn’t feel authentic anymore.
**As a note, the exact numbers have been debunked (the ones given by the original researchers), so use the ratios with a LOT of leeway depending on the person and the situation. I use this for ELI5 purposes.*
I agree with what people are talking about.
But there’s also a question of which memories you access at a particular moment.
If you’re in a stressful or negative moment, you may find negative memories easier to recall, or even recalled without you wanting to.
If you’re running from a lion, remembering that time you laid in the daisies all afternoon is not going to help you. Remembering that time you successfully evaded a lion might. Negative memory fixation is a stress response. And since our stresses today tend to be more abstract and less immediately solvable, that stress response triggering negative memories can misfire and linger. Especially if you’re dealing with something like chronic depression or axiety.
You remember stuff that sticks out. So if you had mostly a good life, you could remember all those bad moments vividly because they were out of the norm. If you had a constantly bad life, you could remember all the good, albeit few, moments.
Example about stuff sticking out: if you were driving to work and saw a car flip and crash, that would stick I’m your mond because it’s so out of the ordinary.
People also remember (or think they remember) important events, like 9/11 or the announcement that Osama had been killed.
Your brain is trying to help you learn the most important things in the world: what can hurt you.
Less ELI5, but holding up well after after a couple of millennia:
All those who learn must suffer
And even in our sleep
Pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until
In our despair, against our will
Comes wisdom from the awful grace of god
-Aeschylus
What people have said above about evolutionary advantage and negative bias, but this might also help:
Think of our genes as little people. And these guys are selfish as fuck. They basically just want to make more of themselves, to have their glorious selves cover more of the planet and take more of the resources. They want to fight every other gene to be more successful, but you can’t really blame them for that, since lots of other genes out there are exactly the same way. Bastards.
Remember this viewpoint, and the answer feels more intuitive. Do they care whether you feel anxious every time you walk on a rainy day since you fell that one time? They could not give less of a fuck. Do they care whether you think badly when you remember all the bad things? Do they care whether you’re sad? Like hell. As long as they can still keep you craving sex and reproduction enough, nothing you care about effects their bottom line. They are basically scummy CEOs.
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