Do Not Raise The Roof: negativity bias and “raising the floor”

Today we’re going to focus on the negative.

The bad days, the blunders, the lapses in judgment, the cheat days, the days when you don’t adhere to your routines or follow your own advice.

Everyone has them: I do, and so do my heroes. So, surely, you do as well.

In today’s newsletter, the subject of discussion is something I like to call Raising the Floor: elevating the lowest point that defines one end of your life’s ups and downs. The other point, of course, being your best days.

We’re not going to talk about how to have more good days, but, rather, how to make the bad days not nearly as bad.

In just a moment, I am going to prove to you, both mathematically and psychologically, why raising the floor will do far more to benefit your life than raising the ceiling, so to speak.

Once I provide you with both persuasive evidence and reasoning for my claim, I’m going to outline very simple strategies for you to implement. It will not take a long time for you to see this working in your life.

And, further proving my point, the good parts in your life will provide you with significantly greater benefit without having to improve directly.

Bad hurts more than good helps.

I said I would prove this point mathematically. Let’s suppose you have $10. You lose 20% of it. Now you have $8. You rebound and gain 20%. Does this put you back to $10? No, it doesn’t. 20% of 8 is 1.6, not 2. You need a 25% increase for $8 to become $10 again. This only gets worse the more you lose. If your $10 takes a 50% loss, bringing you down to $5, you need a 100% increase to make it back to $10. Clearly, the more you lose, the harder it becomes to get back on track.

The psychological equivalent of this is called negativity bias. According to a study published in 2013 at the Leipzig center for Evolutionary Anthropology by Amriha Vaish,

“specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.”

Vaish goes on to explain that negative reinforcement is more efficient than positive reinforcement: lessons are learned more quickly, and are forgotten more slowly.

Furthermore, negative information carries more weight than positive information, and requires less “cognitive processing.” This makes negative information easier to focus on, and even appear to be more “sophisticated” than positive information.

Finally, negative information is weighted more heavily in decision making.

Negativity bias is first demonstrated in infancy, and continues into adulthood.

What this amounts to is something very close to what was shown by our mathematical example: negative hurts more than positive helps.

Bad days, bad behavior, bad feelings: they all seem more important to you and others than the positives. Negativity feels like the truth, whereas positivity feels like a fairy tale.

Negative experiences are not easily forgotten, whereas it can be harder to focus on, and later recall, positive experiences.

I could say more but I think you get my point: negative experiences are much better at defining your sense of self and the world than positive experiences. For that reason,

The decrease of bad is more important than the increase of good.

Think of this as an example of the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your experiences determine 80% of your feelings about your life.

If you improve the nature of those negative experiences,

if you make them less costly,
easier to recover from,
less demoralizing,
and less painful,

You will, by definition, receive a greater benefit to your quality of life than by making equally significant improvements to your positive experiences.

Think about it:

Do you need to buy the perfect gift more than you need to not forget the birthday?

Does your partner need to hear something that makes them feel good more than they need to know that you’re telling the truth?

Do you need to do a perfect job more than you need to not be late to work?

Do you need to perfectly adhere to a nutrition plan more than you need to stop abusing drugs and alcohol?

So what do you do?

As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “simplify your problems.”

STEP ONE: TAKE INVENTORY

Don’t think about your entire life. Break it up into categories. Take four sheets of paper. Label them, respectively,

Health
Finances
Relationships
Work

Pertaining to each category, simply ask yourself, “what am I doing that I need to stop doing?” The answer will come immediately. Write it down. Just one problem at a time. One, and only one, problem per category.

STEP TWO: STRATEGIZE

Are you consistently late for work? You strategize by time-blocking the day backwards from your arrival time.

By what time do you need to be on the road in order to arrive 10 minutes early?

If you want half an hour to enjoy breakfast before leaving, when do you have to wake up, shower, and prepare food? How loud does my alarm need to be? What’s the minimum amount of sleep I can get without sleeping through my alarm?

Get granular. Solve the problem. Leave nothing to chance. Account for the time, but don’t make a plan that requires you to be heroically effective. Your only goal is to not be late!

Similarly, if you forget birthdays, just put them into your calendar, with a reminder occuring one week and then one day in advance. All you gotta do is call or text the day of.

Overspending on dining out? Buy bonehead meals you can prepare at home.

Overspending on Lyft/Uber? Set the departure time that allows you to use public transit.

Make the plan.

If you need to quit smoking, drinking, drugs, even caffeine, this is more complicated. But make step one a thorough investigation of the withdrawal symptoms, how long it takes to detox, and which methods of quitting have long term success. Treat it seriously as though you expect to succeed. No more halfhearted empty promises. Square up like you’re about to get into the ring with Tyson.

STEP THREE: EXECUTE AND REVIEW

You need a weekly check-in when implementing these kinds of things. Run your plan to the best of your ability for a week.

On Sunday evening, spend an hour reviewing your performance. What was it you failed to account for the first time around? What did you learn about yourself that you couldn’t have known before making the initial effort? Redesign, or, and this is often the case, simply refresh your mental picture of what you’re trying to do.

Don’t let the entropic forces of time and fatigue compromise your efforts. Just review, and remind yourself. Think of every day like it’s the first time.

STEP FOUR: RINSE AND REPEAT

Do all this all over again every 3-6 months, with new problems. If you’re really good at this you can break a bad habit a month for a year. Twelve months later you have twelve fewer holes in your canoe. Notice how you’re barely spending any time bucketing water out of the hull, and the oar is almost entirely being used to drive you forward?

That’s what we’re talking about here: freeing up energy for better things. You’ll get better at life, without even trying to, simply by resolving the problems that split your energy.

Identity them, draft solutions, implement them, and then review them often until you get the behaviors right. Put in enough time and energy that you become intolerant of your mistakes, until you feel deserving of victory.

You will have so much respect for yourself if you do this.

That’s all for now. Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.

Jas