Our negative bias steals our focus, but there are ways to counter this distraction and stay on track.
Psychologically, bad tends to be stronger than good.
“When making judgments, people consistently weight the negative aspects of an event or stimulus more heavily than the positive aspects…”
“…adults are far more attentive to and much more influenced in most psychological domains by negative than by positive information.”
(Vaish, Grossmann & Woodward, 2008)
This negative bias serves an important evolutionary function but can also be a major challenge to deal with when you’re looking to exercise more and improve/change health and fitness behaviours.
People use it as an effective marketing strategy. This helps them sell their methods, products, and to gain more attention around their ideas:
Examples include people telling you to stop eating ‘disease-causing foods’, telling you that ‘x’ and ‘y’ movement is going to destroy your body if not done correctly, and even communicating that there is this one optimal way of approaching all things health- and fitness- related and any other way will cause harm.
It also pops up when you’re trying to change your behaviours in the form of cognitive distortions (unhelpful thinking styles) such as all-or-nothing thinking, discounting the positive, catastrophising, “should” statements and so on.
Because negative bias is so strong and captures a large amount of your attention:
It’s important to understand that this negativity bias exists and that it will show up an awful lot in your health and fitness pursuits.
It’s also useful incorporating:
Pareto’s principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), in the context of this blog post, essentially states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your behaviours. This means that your efforts are best spent focusing on a few behaviours you can implement rather than attempting to listen to everyone’s opinions/advice/methods etc and do ‘the perfect thing’. The majority of information that is consumed (with the help of the negative bias) is not part of that 20% and just creates stress, barriers and distractions.
So, when it comes to exercise and movement, what would be part of this 20%?
A good place to start is the SAID principle, An underlying principle of sports and exercise science – “Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands”.
In other words, the stress you place on yourself during exercise has an effect where your body adapts to that stress and can handle it better in the future.
If you continue to progressively stress yourself over time, you adapt and become more resilient (the human body is very good at this).
The beauty of this is that this principle doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter how you’re performing the movement or what movement you are performing - try not to fall into the trap of thinking you’re fragile and have to move perfectly for it to be worthwhile.
As long as you’re progressively stressing your body within its limits over time, you are adapting and becoming more resilient and this is when all those benefits of physical activity are taking place.
That’s a great place to allocate the majority of your focus and efforts – getting moving, slowly progressing and doing it consistently.
The other stuff that steals your attention probably doesn’t make the cut.
Using behaviour change for this example, we discussed how your negativity bias results in unhelpful thinking styles popping up during your behaviour change process.
You’ve probably experienced some of them before:
...and so on.
Fighting and questioning these thinking patterns with a more optimistic view may be helpful. This would look like:
-“What am I doing well?” Have you worked out a little more this week? Have you made a few healthier decisions? What exercises are you performing really well and getting stronger at?
-”What have I learnt throughout this process and how have I overcome difficulties?”_ Incorporating a growth mindset. You always have the opportunity to improve things you haven’t/aren’t doing well and it’s never going to be perfect.
-”Is this just a feeling or is it a fact?” Are you really terrible at this? Are you actually failing? Or is it just a “should” statement popping up?
In other words, focus on your strengths, the solutions, what you’re doing well, and whether what you’re thinking is really a fact or is it just what you’re feeling.
Building upon your strengths and consistently challenging the unhelpful thinking styles will lend itself to the accumulation of positive behaviours over time.
The negative bias is going to show up everywhere, from scrolling social media to the thoughts and thinking patterns that your brain naturally generates. Due to its powerful nature, it can steal your attention and lead you away from the things that will move you in the right direction. Keeping Pareto’s Principle in mind, and fighting the negativity with some extra optimism should help keep you on the right track and ultimately progressing in your health and fitness pursuits!
References
Food choices that can drive your fitness and health outcomes beyond their calorie, fat, carbohydrate and protein content.
Read article >
How including both aerobic training and strength training improves different areas of your health and fitness (and how to go about it).
Read article >
Why everyone should consider supplementing with 'Creatine'.
Read article >
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