It can be helpful to set a daily reminder to practice these mindfulness exercises to make them part of your daily routine. You can use YouTube to find examples of these practices or use apps like Headspace or MyLife (free!). Guided mindfulness meditations can specifically help you focus on the positive aspects of life for example, practicing gratitude or loving kindness. Yes, the situation with COVID-19 is scary right now, but it is also okay to take a moment to celebrate that good grade or promotion, or appreciate a nice meal or favorite movie. Purposefully attending to the positive does not have to mean avoiding a reality that sometimes feels negative. Remind yourself that you can acknowledge both the negative AND positive. Sometimes it feels inappropriate to appreciate the positive when we feel surrounded by negativity. Have people around you noted that tendency? Have you generally felt more pessimistic? Have you noticed yourself having higher, unrealistic expectations of yourself and feeling disappointed when you cannot meet them? Just being vigilant to negative filtering can help you take on less pessimistic perspectives.Ī next step can be purposeful mindfulness of the positive. Having trouble letting go of the negative or acknowledging the positive can become so automatic we barely notice. What can you do about it? The first step is awareness. Put simply, that bias towards negativity may make you more vulnerable to feeling sad or anxious as you get caught in a cycle of filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative. A negative filter can maintain low mood by intensifying or prolonging feelings of sadness (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004 Silton et al., 2010). Why does that matter? Research suggests having a negative filter promotes repetitive negative thinking, or “rumination,” which can make it difficult to disengage your attention from negative information. Numerous cases of racial injustice as well as the stresses and losses associated with the COVID-19 crisis contribute a great deal of negativity to our daily lives. In the current landscape, it can be hard not to let your negative filter take over. ![]() In other words, negative filtering is focusing on the negative while discounting the positive. In therapy, this bias towards negative emotionality is described as a “negative filter.” The negative filter can refer to preferential attention to negative information, the interpretation of ambiguous information as more negative, decreased attention to positive information, or a decreased ability to differentiate the positive from the negative. Biased attention to negative emotional information has specifically been implicated in psychological disorders like depression and anxiety. Because it is impossible to attend to everything in our environment, we have evolved to selectively attend to some information while filtering out other, less important information. The way we process emotional content is critical to the way we perceive information and navigate the world around us.
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