Welcome to IVF this- Episode 31 Negativity Bias

Hello and welcome back to the podcast today! I’m so happy you have joined me and that we get to talk today. Well, that I get to talk. Although I do one day hope that I get to actually talk to my listeners. It has always been my hope that I get to talk with you all- so I do kind of think of these episodes as a way of doing that, our own little chat!

I mentioned in the last episode, I’m doing a little project to help continuing to organically grow this podcast. I have little postcards printed up with the podcast art and a QR code that people can scan that will take them to my website’s podcast page and they can choose their preferred platform a listen to any episodes. I have started sharing them around town to some of the Austin fertility clinics, but if you all, my amazing listeners would like to be a part of that too, shoot me an email at hello@ivfthsicoaching.com and I can send you a few dozen to lay out in your clinic as well. A fun little way for all of us to spread the word on this podcast and the community that is growing around it. 

Ok, so I want to share a little story that happened at our house a few weeks ago because it ties in so beautifully with this weeks topic. 

My oldest son, he’s 6 will be 7 in late August recently graduated from Kindergarten. His school actually got to have a ceremony so it was so adorable watching them sing a few songs they prepared and watch this little human walk across the stage. 

The day of his graduation was a super fun day. They had a class party that morning, it was like a rodea theme (because, ya know, we live in TX) and they played little games and won prizes and parents got to be there and then they got to go home early. So he and I hung out at his school, then we went shopping for some new clothes (because this child refuses to slow down on growing up), we had lunch, then we came home, I did some work while he played on the ipad then dad and little brother came home, we got ready, and we all went to the graduation. 

He had an absolutely blast. By all accounts a perfect day, right?!?!

Oh and I forgot to mention that before his graduation ceremony he got to pick out dinner and he wanted ice cream for dinner so we all ate ice cream for dinner!

So, pretty spectacular day.

When we came home, it was a pretty mad dash flurry to get everyone to bed. We got home right around the time my 3y/o goes to bed and my oldest is only about 30 min behind that- so we were brushing teeth, changing clothes, all the things. 

While I was in the bathroom helping my 3 year old to brush his teeth, my oldest walks in and says, “mommy there’s something wrong with Yoshi”

Ok, so now I will introduce you to the supporting cast of this story- Bowser and Yoshi. Bowser is this beautiful betta fish that my oldest saved up for 3 months to get (that includes the fish, the tank, the food, decorations, everything) and so we’ve had him now for a few months. About a month after we got Bowser, I decided that Bowser needed a little friend. 

You probably know that Betta’s, particularly males, aren’t super friendly but there are a few animals that they can share a tank with and an African Dwarf Frog is one of them- enter Yoshi. 

Ok, back to the scene- My oldest walks in and says something is wrong with Yoshi, he’s just kind of laying there. So I get my 3y/o finished up and I tell them to go see their dad, who was in our bedroom. I go to my sons room and look at the tank and sure enough, that tiny little frog is belly up at the bottom of the tank. Le sigh, poor dude. 

So, I get him out of the tank and then I get to work explaining to our boys what happened. 

There were a lot of tears, from both, obviously. We did a little ceremony, we prayed over Yoshi and then we flushed him down the toilet. 

Now my oldest, he is a VERY tenderhearted little dude. He is truly too pure for this world. He was REALLY struggling with this loss. He asked me to lay in bed with him, so of course I did.

Now there were two things that really stood out to me when I was laying with him:

1. Kiddos grieve SOOO cleanly it is a beautiful thing to watch. When I first started in SW, I worked in an out-pt oncology center and those kiddos would be playing, have a total breakdown, tears, screams, let all the feelings out, and then resume playing after a few minutes. It truly is the most beautiful thing to witness someone responding so easily to their body and what it needs in that moment. So he did a lot of that. Just like I describe in the Clean vs dirty pain episode, which I think is episode 8, clean pain, clean grief comes in waves. And that’s exactly what was happening with my son. 

2. The second thing that I noticed, which Is why I am telling you this story in the first place, is how our brains built-in negativity bias comes into play- even at 6 years of age. 

As we were laying there, and it was in the moments between the greif waves, he said the following statements to me:

• Mommy, today was supposed to be such a great day

• Why did he have to die? The whole day is gone now

• Today was supposed to be special

• It was such a fun day until now

• This is the worst day

• I wish Yoshi didn’t die so it could still be a good day

Now these are just a FEW of the things that he said, until he finally relaxed into sleep. 

Now, you might be asking yourself WHY I told you this INCREDIBLY long story? 

Because what my little snuggle bug experienced, and what we ALLL experience, was the brains negativity bias.

The brains built-in negativity bias is our tendency to not only register or identify negativity stimuli more readily but also to dwell or focus on those events. 

Have you ever had like the most perfect morning? Woke up on time, if you planned to exercise you did and it felt amazing. Shower was perfect, hair and make up were on point, even your home brew coffee was everything you needed to fill your soul? Then something happens- maybe it’s an email from your boss, maybe you’re back to commuting to the office. Maybe your coworker walked in with a raging case of the grumps and was snappy toward you. Maybe it’s been a perfect day and then you’re scrolling SM before bed and you see a pregnancy or birth announcement. 

And then all of a sudden, you’re telling yourself it’s a shit, a shit day, or that you have a shit life. Right? This is SOOOO common. You could kind of plug ANYTHING into that scenario and it works. 

Maybe you’re having a perfect day and you got a call from your clinic and there’s a delay, or an unexpected financial obligation or something. And then it’s like the whole day is shot to hell. Throwing our the baby with the bathwater thing. 

So we all do this, but why?

Our capacity to weigh negative inputs SO heavily is based on our evolution and for very good reason- it keeps us and has kept us out of harms way. Our day-to-day survival relied on our ability to judge potential threats and to avoid danger. 

That’s why we say that our primitive brain, the brain that drives all of our unconscious thinking only lives to do three things -seek pleasure, avoid pain, and be as efficient as possible. 

Our brains developed systems like this to make it unavoidable for us to NOT notice danger so we could, ideally, respond to it. 

So, just like my little kiddo who had, by all accounts of a 6y/o let alone this grown 37 year old- he had had a perfect day. And yet, when faced with the very really loss of this little frog, his whole day (in his brain) was terrible. 

THAT is the negativity bias at work. 

I’m gonna give you a couple more examples of the negativity bias-

So the first example was what we were just talking about- the negative stimuli. Those events that we largely interpret at negative and therefore we often believe them to be the totality of our experience. 

Another example is how news coverage is often predominately negative. The media uses built-in the negativity bias to it’s advantage because the more negative the news, the more attention-grabbing the headlines tends to be. That’s why doom scrolling is a thing. Our brain wants those hits of outrage and negativity- it thinks it’s doing something productive. I did this so much at the start of the pandemic, as I’m sure most of us did. We would just scroll and scroll, I would CONTASTNLY refresh the world-o-meter COVID case counts, like several times a day and just be in shock every time. This is part of the negativity bias. This is why sensationalism in media works so well. This is why we hear all of these extra-ordinary accounts of things and then our brains extrapolate that data to make it universal. 

And finally, another example is how we tend to think about and remember negative events in our lives. Do you know that I still sometimes think about the time my 5th grade teacher, who in my mind, HUMILIATED me in front of my entire class over a paper I wrote, or the rejection I faced from my first love my sophomore year of high school? To this day, and I am by all accounts a well adjusted 37 year old woman in a thriving marriage and have had considerable academic success after the 5th grade. And yet, sometimes, I am just sitting at my desk or walking down the street, or God-forbid trying to fall asleep at night and a flashback like that will hit me. The other night, I woke up around 1am -which isn’t too uncommon for me, and as I laid in bed, I was hit with this flashback from the few days after we found out our embryo transfer had failed. That night, I was laying on my couch, because I didn’t want my crying to wake up my husband, and I just kept crying and whispering “please come back” I remember it as clearly as it happening yesterday. 

That’s grief AND the negativity bias. Our brain, in it’s near-constant efforts to avoid pain will toss us these shit-sandwiches of memories in an effort to remind us “hey, do you remember when we got rejected bc we tried something- we shouldn’t try anything ever again” Or, “hey, do you remember when you opened your heart so wide to the possibility of love and a future and it was stomped on so spectacularly- yea, we probably shouldn’t do that again.” 

Our brain wants to avoid pain, so it reminds us of the negative. Our brain doesn’t want to try anything new, because that’s not efficient, so it reminds us of the negative. Our brain likes to seek comfort and so it wants us to stay on the couch, watching Netflix, and eating popcorn because that is way more pleasurable than, well most things. 

Ok, so we’ve got this negativity bias, what the hell do we do?

1. Awareness- self awareness to what is happening inside of your brain during this time, well I can’t overstate it. Checking in with yourself, frequently throughout the day can be one easy, nearly effortless way to create more self awareness. 

One way is to do a body scan- start from the top of your head, and slowly scan down through your body to your toes. If you mind starts to wander, it’s not a problem, just slowly move your attention back to your body. 

Journaling is nother great way to create self-awareness. Just opening your brain up to what your experiencing through the perspective of your own written words. 

Some people/ experts will say practice gratitudes. Writing down three things that you’re grateful for each day, wither in the morning, before bed or both can be an amazing practice. It is something that I practice in my own self-coaching work as well. 

HOWEVER, some of us might be in a place where gratitude is a little bit of a difficult emotion for us to access. Maybe we’re going through a really tough time and grief, pain, shame- things like that which can make finding, accessing, or expressing gratitude to be a very difficult thing. And we don’t need anything else to beat the crap out of ourselves about. So, let me share with you how I talked it over with my son, that night of Yoshi’s untimely death.

I didn’t want to force him to a silver-lining- if you know me, I’m not about that. I think, in many ways it diminishes the experience we’re having. 

So I asked him to tell me about his day. Like to list off the things that he remembers from the day. 

So we did. We talked about when he got to school and seeing his friends, when I came up to hang out with him and he played games, getting new clothes, going out to lunch with me, all the things that he remembered from the day. 

So, I think we counted them up, he came up with like 20’ish things and as he was recounting them he was starting to smile. 

So then I told him, “ok bud, so we had these 20 AMAZING things, and then this one REALLY, really hard thing.”

He said yea, “really hard” like emphasizing the REALLY as one does. 

So I said, do you think it’s possible, that even with one really hard thing, it can still be a good day?”

He thought for a second, and said “Yea, I guess it was a really great day and then a sad moment.”

And that’s exactly what it is. 

Your brain doesn’t have nuance. My 37 year old brain and my son’s 6 year old brain. Very little nuance. There’s only blak white, yes no, right wrong. 

But that’s not how the world works. There’s a TREMENDOUS amount of nuance in this world. 

Allowing yourself the space, opportunity, and compassion to acknowledge “wow, that was a really crappy 15 minutes, or an hour or whatever” without letting your brain do it’s unconscious thing of making that 15 minues, hour, two hours, or whatever mean the totality of what you are going through- that will offer you so much more peace.

And that is what I want for you my beautiful friend, peace. 

And that is what I have for you. Until next time. Have a beautiful week.