Why Is It Easier to Think Negative Thoughts?

3 Reasons Why It Seems Easier to Think Negative Thoughts than Positive Thoughts

Why does it seem easier to think negative thoughts than positive thoughts?

Why do you think negative thoughts? What is a negative thought? Can you describe what you understand by negative thought?

My understanding of a negative thought is that it directly or indirectly, one way or another reminds me that my/my loved one’s body is fragile (… and can die).

There is so much buzz around negative thoughts, their benefits, disadvantages, effect on health, and so on. We even started using this term as an excuse for our misfortunes. Negative thoughts attract negative experiences. Negative thoughts result in diseases, ineffectual relationships, poverty, etc.

But if negative thoughts are bad for us, how come we seem to be predisposed to have them without much effort? Why does it look like we think negatively by default?

Learn more about negative emotions and negative thoughts here >>>

If positive thoughts are so much better, why don’t we have them all the time? Why do we need to deliberately train our minds to think positively? Shouldn’t this be our default way of thinking?

An observation

Let’s do a simple exercise that I call “Check Point.” Take a few minutes (or more) and complete these 3 simple tasks:

Watch and listen carefully to the news for 5-10 minutes (please, no more than that) – you can do so by turning on the TV, open the YouTube app, visit the news channel website, etc.
Listen carefully to people (who are not your close friends) – if you work, have a quick chat with a colleague. If you don’t work, have a quick chat with a neighbor, or try to remember one of your recent chats with others.
Try to remember the last time you were tired (regardless of the reason) – were you in a good mood? How did you behave? Were you cranky? Or irritated?

Now, reflect quickly on the messages you have just heard or read. Were these messages about success, happiness, love, prosperity, hope, etc.? Or, these were about disasters, distress, complains, troubles, worries, hate, etc.?

When you are tired, do you tend to think that everything is okay and that all you need is a break? Or are you snappy, criticizing, and pessimistic? Do you allow yourself to take some time, relax, and restore your balance? Or do you go headfirst into the dark hole of negative thoughts, victimization, guilt, unworthiness, and so on?

In this article, I share with you 3 reasons negative thinking seems easier than positive thinking.

3 reasons why it seems easier to have negative thoughts than positive ones

(1) Your negative thoughts come from your survival instincts

If you are not familiar with the work of the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, here is a snapshot of this work.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow is most famous for creating the hierarchy of needs [1]. This hierarchy represents the priority humans give to the different kinds of needs.

The base of all needs is pure physiological needs for food, water, air, reproduction, etc. In other words, as humans, our highest priority is immediate/short-term physical survival (i.e., the need to stay alive).

Only after we are sure we won’t die soon, we would worry about our long-term survival. These worries are often related to our health, safe home, stable source of income, etc. That is, our second highest priority is our long-term survival.

Once we feel confident in our long-term existence, we turn our attention to having a family, happy relationships, personal growth and development, entertainment, and more.

If you are not convinced that the above is true, try to remember the last time you were very hungry or needed to go badly (to the washroom). At this particular moment, what was your highest priority? See? Maslow got this right 😉

Our negative thoughts

Let’s take a look at this from another angle. Remember the earlier exercise? Recall a couple of negative news (from the TV or your colleagues/neighbors) or thoughts. Can you see how these are related to the short-term or long-term suvival?

For example, if you’ve just listened to news about the rising unemployment rate, perhaps a negative thought about the state of your source of income (i.e., long-term survival) popped up. If your neighbor shared that they had flooding in the basement last week, perhaps a worrying thought about the state of your safe home passed through your mind (i.e., long-term survival). If you heard someone talking about the increasing prices of fresh produce, chances are a negative thought about what you will eat appeared (i.e., short-term survival).

Do you see how easily and fast negative thoughts appear? And the most simple explanation for this is that our physical existence always comes first. Always. And our negative thoughts are part of our defensive mechanism.

Over the generations (thousands of generations), humans learned to deal with troubles by predicting, preventing, and avoiding them. If you think about what is going wrong right now, you can do something to fix it or decrease the adverse effect. If you think about what could go wrong, you can do something to prevent it and secure your/your loved ones’ well-being.

(2) You learned negative thinking as a child

If are a parent to a child, a pet, or a plant, you have already experienced the feeling of worry and all associated negative thoughts. For example, we worry that our kids might be hungry (how many grandmas are “guilty” of this 😉 ). We get upset if they don’t do their homework because this might mean a lack of stable income for them. Likewise, we get angry if they don’t do their chores because they might not know how to do them when they grow up and might not be able to survive on their own. We feel anxious if we don’t know where they are because something bad could happen to them.

In short, as parents we teach our children that bad things could be around the corner, so they need to be extra careful.

Well, if we teach this to our children, chances are our parents taught us the same. Just as I mentioned above, negative thoughts help us stay alive. And since newborn babies, we’ve been on a mission to stay alive.

So, if you’ve been taught to think negatively for years and years, it’s normal that these same thoughts quickly rush into your head.

(3) You pick up negative thoughts from the media

For one last time, let’s review your observations from the earlier exercise. Yes, the one in which you observed that much bad news, hardship, disasters, etc., is coming from the news, colleagues, neighbors, or our memories.

Sometimes, these negative messages are explicit. Some examples include the news, action/drama/horror movies, commercials, and more.

In other instances, these messages are hidden. Most commercials and ads are the perfect example. The well-trained marketing experts understand the power of fear and often use it as a way to attract customers. This fear goes into our subconsciousness and starts generating negative thought after negative thoughts.

And since we are so often reminded about everything that could jeopardize our existence, it becomes hard not to think negatively.

Are we doomed to think negatively?

The short answer is absolutely not. Negative thoughts are just thoughts, and as Louise Hay used to say, “A thought can be changed.”

As a beginning, stop watching/reading/listening to the news. Trust that if it is very important for you, the news will get to you. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t that important after all.

Stop spending your free time remembering or imagining the worst-case scenario. Instead, think of beautiful, peaceful, and loving things.

Start re-training your mind to have more positive thoughts. One of the best strategies to do so is positive affirmations.