HEALed from negative's power

Shocked and saddened to know this: the brain has evolved to prioritize negative input over positive feedback — psychologists call it the negativity bias, and it’s strong. 

There's more:

• we routinely scan for bad news, both internally and externally and when we find the bad news, we tend to focus down upon it.
• we overreact to unpleasant stimulus
• we’ve got a brain that’s like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good

But thank God all's not lost.  Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has come up with a method where we can refocus on the good and use it for our good. 

He has developed a technique he calls HEAL, an acronym for the four steps of the process: have a good experience, enrich it, absorb it, and (counterintuitively) link it to something slightly negative.

HAVE

Either create a good experience or call one up from memory. The important thing is to call up the experience, remember how it felt or imagine how it would feel again, and take time to let that experience in by holding it in the foreground of consciousness.

ENRICH

Once you have conjured up the positive experience, enrich it by 

• extending the time you think about it
• thinking about it with all your senses (sorry, I too don't know what this means)
• thinking how important or rare this feeling is in your life

ABSORB

Imagine how the experience affects you, linger on how it makes you feel, let the emotion sink into your body. Let yourself imagine how you're going to continue creating that feeling. Think specifically about why you feel so good about the experience, Let the good vibe warm you.

LINK (POSITIVE TO THE NEGATIVE)

The optional final step is to link that bolstered positive experience to a negative one, making sure to keep the positive experience in the foreground, so that the negative experience can be lessened over time. This step can be dangerous for  people with low executive functioning or who are highly self-critical. Proceed with caution.

Imagine all the nice elements of your positive experience in the forefront while thinking of a negative and one of its effects in the background.

One last word: The fourth step in HEAL may not be appropriate for people until they’ve done a lot of absorbing positive experiences first.

“As we repeatedly do this, we build up a trait that can help us meet challenges in life,” Hanson said.

Will be making time and effort to do HEA first.

(Note to reader: What you will read below is either copied from this article or inspired by it.)