The DU Lounge

And in order to do that, it’s got some built-in biases, including a negativity bias, that literally filters what you see, what you pay attention to, what you notice in your life.

This is why you might feel like everything is getting worse all the time. This bias fuels depression and anxiety.

There are always thousands of pieces of information that your brain could process at any one time, but it uses “attention” to choose what to focus on. Your brain is literally processing sensory stimuli, internal sensations, thoughts, and feelings, all at once. But you don’t notice the vast majority of the things around you, because you have selective attention.

Trouble abounds everywhere. But goodness abounds everywhere too.

Your assumptions create your reality.

What you pay attention to, you get more of.

Your brain literally makes more neural pathways about the things you pay attention to. So if you notice a lot of dangerous or anxiety provoking things, your brain is going to make more pathways for stressful, dangerous or anxiety provoking things.

Mental filtering literally changes your memory– you literally won’t remember positive things that happened.

Mental filtering directly impacts how you feel. If you don’t want to feel sad and bad and mad all the time, you have to take intentional action to see the positive. The habitual way we think is like ruts in a road, and to get out of the ruts, we have to work hard to change direction.

And because this is a bias, we don’t notice we’re doing it. We just think it is how the world is. We believe our filtered perspective.