The bright side of negativity

I stick to negative feedback very long.

So long that I feel like it’d take at least a week to pull me back to where I was. In fact, I created a vision board in Figma to collect all the positive feedback I received at work to keep me from going down the negative spiral.

Nobody likes being negative, and there’s nothing good about being negative. Just look at all of its synonyms:

Pessimistic, denying, refusing, cynical, against… nothing good but bad, huh?

But there’s actually one thing that’s good about negativity:

It gets attention.

Negativity bias is a psychological phenomenon in that people tend to pay more attention to negative information, even when an equal amount of positive information is presented.

For example, which of the following headlines seems more intense?

Community Joins Forces to Address Concerns about Crime Rates

Alarming Surge in Crime Rates: City Plagued by an Unprecedented Wave of Violence

The second one.

The expressions “alarming surge” and “plagued by an unprecedented wave of violence” signify a negative impression of the incident, which makes the headline more memorable than the…