We’ve all been there. Someone, even a random stranger, makes an offhand comment that irritates us. We initially shrug it off, but it gnaws at us. Rather than just moving on we stew about it all day. During the commute home its on our mind. We get home and tell our wife about it. Weeks later it still pops up in our head. The gall that person had.

We can’t get it out of our heads.

“Am I really like that?”

We moist robots are conditioned to have an bigger response to negative events versus pleasurable events. We’ve been conditioned this way for thousands of years to have an outsized response to trauma. We don’t treat pleasure the same way. While negative moments stay around, positive moments can be fleeting in our memory. It’s wired in our evolution. Our ancestors had to make intelligent decisions that in many cases meant life or death. As a result the impact of traumatic experiences or nearly traumatic experiences don’t easily fade away.

This outsized response to things is called Negativity Bias. No matter how good our life is we have a tendency to obsess about small slights or tiny imperfections. For many people a negative comment from a stranger or an argument with a friend about politics can send their day into a tailspin.

So how do we avoid negativity bias?

Be mindful of it. We need to understand it and the impact it can have. The worst thing we can do in these situations is to get caught up in the cycle of negativity. That comment that the stranger made to you? They’ve forgotten it already. In the grand scheme of things it means nothing. The worst thing you can do is let it ruin your day. It’s all about detangling the voices in your head. When you begin to obsess about something or overthink something you have to ask yourself if it’s really worth it. Does it move you forward? Because that is what life is really about, whether or not something moves us forward.