Focusing on the good doesn’t come easy, we are a deficit oriented society. We are interested in bad news, we love to solve problems, we readily empathize with life’s difficulties. Anything negative calls our attention. The bad is like velcro – it just sticks to us, the good like teflon – it just rolls right off of us. There are many reasons for this phenomenon.

First there is something called the negativity bias. According to Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman we give greater weight to the negative than we do to the positive. We have better recall for the negative and the negative impacts us more than does the positive. Your boss tells you how well you did on the report you just presented, he was impressed with the content and found it very helpful. He asks, however, for the next time, that you summarize the findings better. What stays with you? The two compliments or the correction about the findings? For most people it is the correction. We give greater weight to the negative or what we perceive as negative than we do to the positive, the negative just calls to us and sticks.

Why is this the case? According to Evolutionary Psychology this is the case because focusing on the negative served a purpose. Primitive man would have not survived if he didn’t focus on the negative. The positive offers no survival information, the negative does. You ignore the positive, nothing happens. You ignore the negative, potentially you don’t live another day. Hence our focus on the negative.

Having said all of the above, we know that our attention is like a spotlight, we can choose to place it anywhere we want. It’s not easy, but it can be done. We can actively drag our attention to wherever we want to put it. We can do this in many ways. We can practice mindfulness. We can practice gratitude. We can change our questions. Or we can simply make a conscious effort to hunt the good stuff. Whichever method you choose attending to the good in our lives offers a slew of benefits.