How I Fight Negativity Bias with Pen and Paper

Hi Reader!

I recently wrote a post about negativity bias — the tendency to put more emphasis on negative events than positive ones. The post was titled Celebrating More — the title reflects that I wanted a positive outlook, and celebrating wins is one way to counter negativity bias.

Another approach is to work reflection into one’s routine. By reflecting I can force myself to notice achievements and other good things. If this sounds interesting check out my post on How I made reflection part of my routine.

When reflecting I tend to use pen and paper. The issue is that one can only hold 3 to 7 items in working memory. So when I have a lot on my mind, I find that my thoughts often run around in circles if I can’t write them down. However, there are other ways to deal with the limits of working memory and I outline some of them in Overcoming the limits of the human brain – lessons from software engineering.

In summary, I use pen and paper to help me reflect and highlight the good things in my life — and this helps me fight negativity bias.

Stay awesome! 😃

Best wishes,
Tjelvar

PS — On a personal note I think that pen and paper are amazingly powerful tools. They allow me to get thoughts out of my head more quickly and easily than using digital applications. Particularly during initial phases of thinking and brainstorming.

Using pen and paper I can:

Mix text, diagrams, and doodles freely without having to switch applications — or context — which means that I can focus on getting thoughts out of my head.
Give myself permission to write quickly, misspell words and make grammatical errors without the application distracting me by pointing out all the mistakes that I’m making.
Scribble in the margin, draw arrows and circle words as random thoughts pop into my head meaning that I can jump between writing and annotating without losing my train of thought.

How does this compare to your ways of brainstorming and reflecting? Do you prefer modern digital solutions or the ancient style of pen and paper?

PPS — Feedback is really valuable to me. Please feel free to let me know what could be improved, and what you would like to see more of, by replying to this email.