Reduce Gratuitous Negativity

"Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment.  This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath."...Charlotte Joko Beck

Increasing your heartfelt positivity is your key to unleashing flourishing possibilities in your life.  Positive emotions open our hearts and minds, making us more receptive and more creative.  By opening our hearts and minds, positive emotions allow us to discover and build new skills, new ties, new knowledge, and new ways of being.  Positivity transforms us for the better.  The emerging science suggests that once your ratio (positive to negative) rises above 3 to 1 you will have passed the "tipping point", the point where you may begin living a flourishing life.  Your positivity ratio makes a big difference.  It forecasts whether your life trajectory is leading you to languish or flourish.

Reducing negativity may be the fastest, most efficient way for you to increase your ratio.  If your current ratio is seriously low, this is where you'll want to begin.  This is also where you'll want to begin if your positivity seems fairly high already, but is matched by comparably high negativity.

We do have to bear in mind that the goal is reduce negativity, not eliminate it.  The ratio is not 3-0.  Nobody could flourish without some negativity.  At times, negative emotions are appropriate and useful.  It is proper and helpful, for instance, to mourn after a loss, to resonate on your anger to fight an injustice, or to be frightened by things that could cause harm to you or your children.  Appropriate negativity keeps us grounded, real, and honest.  The beauty of the 3-1 positivity ratio is that it's large enough to encompass the full range of human emotions.  There's no emotion that needs to be forever shunned or suppressed.

Our best goal is to reduce inappropriate or gratuitous negativity.  Gratuitous negativity is neither helpful nor healthy.  Does it help to snap at a cashier after we've waited in line longer than we expected?  Is it healthy to berate ourselves for not having dinner ready on time or not getting the laundry done?  What's to be gained when we dwell on an off-the-cuff comment our child's teacher or co-worker made?  At times our entrenched emotional habits can intensify or prolong our bad feelings far beyond their usefulness.  Like an out-of-control weed, gratuitous negativity grows fast and crowds out positivity's more tender shoots.  My message here is that gratuitous negativity can hold us hostage, and can keep us so constrained and smothered that we are simply unable to flourish.

I have in other posts written about ways to manage some our own gratuitous negativity, for example by disputing negative thoughts, and experimenting with mindful awareness, but suppose it's not us, but rather someone else.  Someone who reliably shows up in our own needlessly negative episodes each day, complaining about everything and everyone and regularly raining on our parade.  How can we deal with the negative people in our lives? 

The best advice that I've read recently, in the book "Positivity" by famous researcher Barbara Fredrickson, is to act on one of the three basic ways to curb needless negativity in any circumstance:  modify the social situation, attend to it differently, or change its meaning.  Although it may well be possible to limit your exposure to this negative person, doing so should perhaps be your last recourse.  The three other paths - described as "social aikido", may well teach you the most about yourself and your inherent capacity to change.

Aikido is a Japanese martial art described by its founder as the "art of peace."  The guiding principle of aikido is to neutralize aggression without causing harm to yourself or your attacker, which is the spirit underlying each of the three techniques for dealing with difficult people.  They are ways to neutralize negativity by extending compassion, love and openness to those who may well be suffering and lashing out.

Today I will briefly examine these techniques.

Technique #1 - Modify the situation.  In this technique you must consider how you might alter the typical situations in which you and this person interact.  Start by asking yourself some tough questions, is there any way that I inadvertently feed this person's negativity?  Might I somehow bait them with my own reactions or words?  Am I to any degree closed down when we interact?  What assumptions do I make about this person?

We all prejudge others now and then.  So it becomes useful to really push yourself to discover what you think you "know already" about this person.  Once you've located your hidden assumptions, explore how those assumptions might affect your behaviour toward that person.  In particular, might your assumptions make you less open, less curious, or less warm?  Some people will often use negativity as a bid to get your attention, however childish that approach may seem.  So try experimenting with how you act when you're together.  What happens when you give your attention and openness first and freely?  Express more warmth.  Ask more questions.  Show particular interest when the messages are lighter and perhaps less when they needlessly are dark.

Another way to modify the situation, once negativity surfaces, is to inject compassion, hope, or even humour.  Curb your tendency to respond "in kind" to gratuitous negativity with yet another helping of it.  You don't need to escalate the problem.  Be open to the truth in the messages delivered, yet consider whether you might gently offer positive reframes of them.  Is it possible to respectfully convert their "half empty" to "half full?".  When one partner somehow manages to break the cycle of negative reciprocity - by responding to negativity in a neutral or positive way - fare far better than those in which partners mirror each other's ill will.

Technique #2 - Attend differently.  I touched on this technique a while back in my post "getting along".  This strategy considers how you might attend to different aspects of this person.  Sure, there are things about her/him that you dislike, but what are her positive qualities?  What do you appreciate about him?  What does she bring to the table?  Consider how you might give voice to what you appreciate.  Scientific studies have documented that, in relationships, the areas where you choose to cast your attention and devote your words grow in strength and significance over time.

Technique #3 - Change meanings - Instead of seeing this person as bringing you down, revisit the quote by Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck that opened this blog today.  Could this person - or this situation - be a teacher in disguise?  They may well be, if you reframe your time with her as a challenge - a challenge to be more mindful, less judgmental, or more compassionate.  After all, you get to choose whether to react to the negativity this person spews.  Her negativity need not be yours.  Working on your own reactions in a mindful way may even remove some of the fuel that keeps this person's negativity flaming.  But even if it doesn't, you still come out ahead.  You'll have further developed your skill in mindfulness. 

Ridding our days of needless negativity, either our own or dealing with negative people in our lives better, is a great place to start in improving our positivity ratios.  Yet it's not the whole story.  We are always going to have at least some negativity.  That's life.  To provide a healthy counterweight to it, you also need to learn how to lift your heartfelt positivity.  This reminds me of a story I recently read which I feel is a fitting end to today's blog...

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.  He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.  One is Evil.  It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.  The other is Good.  It is joy, peace, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about this for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which one wins?" 

The old Cherokee simply replied "The one you feed."


I really love that short story! 


Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.
Cheers!


Linda