Building resilience

Psychologist, academic and author Dr Rick Hanson is an expert on how to overcome the brain’s natural negativity bias to achieve happiness, self-worth and inner peace.

In an ideal world, says Hanson, the human brain would remember the good things that happen and let go of the bad. In reality, it’s the other way around. There is a good evolutionary reason for this — not getting eaten by a predator, for example — but as a consequence, negative experiences tend to stick and good things do not. Shifting the balance is the key to coping with stress and building resilience.

Margaret Forde is an organizational psychologist and holistic psychotherapist. She has spent the past 30 years guiding individuals and companies towards a more positive mindset. “Over time, our brain, our mental outlook and our behaviour all change in response to what we continually focus on,” she says. “A continual focus on fearful situations wires the brain to be more sensitive to threats. The brain’s alarm system becomes like a super highway flooding the body with stress hormones. Conversely, when you focus on the good, you build circuits that release feel-good chemicals throughout the body. What I try to make people aware of is that you are the gatekeeper. You can control this process by what you give your attention to.”

Forde is not suggesting being unrealistically positive. “We should accept our negative feelings but try to pay more attention to the good ones,” she says. “Increasing the amount of attention we give to positive emotional experiences downsizes the amount of attention we give to the negative ones. Professor Barbara Fredrickson, a world expert on positive emotion and its benefits for adaptability, calls this process ‘increasing our positivity ratio’.

Author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren calls it “letting the good stuff land”. Actively doing so is the antidote to allowing our worries to take over our lives. “We need to wire positive experiences into our headspace and that’s actually pretty easy,” Warren says. “We do this by noticing the tiny things during the day that are nice and then we take an extra beat to savour them.” For Warren, nice things are simple pleasures such as silence and the first sip of good coffee in the morning.