Book Musings: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

While reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, an insightful paragraph struck a chord with me. Housel says “It’s easier to create a narrative around pessimism because the story pieces tend to be fresher and more recent. Optimistic narratives require looking at a long stretch of history and developments, which people tend to forget and take more effort to piece together.” 

This reminds me of a natural tendency for human beings to have a ‘negativity bias’. Our brains are naturally hardwired to respond to and recognize the negatives easier than the positives. Simply put, the sting of rejection can tend to hit us harder than the warm glow of acceptance. 

Evolutionarily negativity bias makes sense – registering negative stimuli was a matter of being attuned to threats and was a life-saving skill. It is just our brain’s way of keeping us safe. This explains why it’s easier to overthink the negative events and minimise the positive. 

Despite the evolutionarily hardwired tendency, we can still overcome this natural bias. The mere awareness of this tendency is the very first step to breaking through the negativity bias which often functions on a “default” setting. Mindfulness of how and what we react to, how we talk to ourselves thus becomes more important than ever before. 

As human beings, it is now high time we change the narrative around to seek the positive experiences in life regardless of the default hand that we may have been dealt. No matter how minuscule the good things in life may be in comparison to the negative situations, we need to begin to appreciate the positive. Not just that, let us intentionally pepper our lives with small moments of joy to counteract our negativity bias. As clichéd as it sounds, a gratitude journal in my personal and professional opinion helps our inner lens slowly yet surely. Let us celebrate even the littlest of wins!