How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Troll
We’ve all witnessed social media trolls. They swoop in when they sense weakness or just for the sport of enjoying your misery. They pick fights with you and your followers, criticize, mock, attack, and put down. They are social media’s playground bullies. Their sole purpose is to annoy their victims as much as possible, either for laughs or because they, well… have mental health problems and/or empty, dull lives.
More often than not, they succeed.
They succeed because of your negativity bias.
Negativity bias is not your fault. It’s the way your brain is wired. In my article, How Not to be a Tiger’s Lunch, I alluded to negativity bias without calling it by name. Negativity bias (or negativity effect) describes our brains’ tendencies to fixate on the negative. When we were cavepeople, negativity often protected us. Scientists argue that negativity bias is an evolutionary adaptation that allowed early humans to protect themselves from danger. Chasing positivity, as many do today, would have landed our early ancestors in a tiger’s clutches, as its lunch. Fear and negativity helped us survive. While I am not touting toxic positivity, perhaps a topic for a later article, I do believe that the more we understand about how brains work, the better equipped we are to take charge of the neuroplasticity (ability to rewire our brains) we…
