The other day I got upset at how negatively I was judging myself. Since I had been doing it for a while, I finally decided not to accept that from myself anymore. As I deconstructed my process of self-evaluation, I then imagined that what I was judging about myself was projected onto someone else. And I immediately realized that I would make an entirely different evaluation if someone else had that characteristic (this could also be a behavior).

Actually, I realized that for someone else in that situation, there would be no judgment. With someone else, it would not be something I would take note of—an indication that I wouldn’t give it the same negative interpretation.

I was surprised that I could be so negatively biased towards myself. But in fact, research has consistently found that our opinions of ourselves are consistently distorted and usually in the negative direction.

This distortion colors how we see ourselves and thus how we create our identity. And then how the negative view creates an underlying and ongoing nudge towards harm to our psychological and physiological health. It is as if we are wearing a sensory filter that magnifies our faults while minimizing our gifts.

This is an evolutionary development

In my work in resilience, I talk about the evolutionary mismatch between the environment in which our stress and survival response developed—around 50,000 to 100,000-plus years ago—and our present environment. We mobilize energy for fight or flight and then have to hold it in as we hear our boss or someone else say something we disagree with.

Noticing what’s wrong in the environment, what’s out of place, was an evolutionary advantage. It increased our chances of survival. We overshoot, therefore, in that direction.

Research on this negative bias

It seems that I’m not alone, something I suspected, and that we all have this negative bias. No matter what you look at, we learn much better from negative outcomes than positive ones. They trigger more detailed cognitive analysis. In research on this negative outcome bias by Baumeister and associates¹, negative events were shown to produce stronger behavioral adjustments in learning paradigms, even when positive and negative events were matched in intensity.

Negative self-beliefs are stickier and more resistant to being proven wrong. The research found that we are more strongly motivated to avoid negative self-identities than to pursue positive ones, shaping self-judgment and self-esteem. Interestingly, Eisenberger and Lieberman² found that self-criticism activated the same neural circuitry as physical pain.

This didn’t surprise me. For a long time, I have found that we tend to have a goal of getting to the end of the day without any disaster or crisis occurring. I refer to this as living in the bottom half of life, where success is being at neutral at the end of the day. I also found that the goal of winding up without anything terrible happening makes it more difficult to pursue great things happening during your day. You achieve what you set out to accomplish.

Whew, I’m glad today turned out OK. But here is where that becomes so compelling, and it goes back to the work of my early mentor, Donald Hebb, the neuroscience pioneer who said, “Neurons that fire together, wire together”. (Well, his statement was a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)

At the end of the day, when things turn out at least OK, the brain puts these two things together: When I worry and aim for just OK, I’m successful. You weren’t successful because you aimed low, but your brain put those two facts together and unconsciously experienced them as causal: When I worry and focus on what can go wrong, I avert crises. The pattern perpetuates focusing on what can go wrong and avoiding it.

How to shift into a more effective mindset

Being aware of the bias, I set forth to overcome it. Here was my approach and an outline of steps you can take to achieve the same goal of reversing negative self-bias:

1. I was now armed with the awareness of my bias. So, when I started to feel bad, I used that as my cue to check in with myself to see what judgments I was making.
2. I then performed an experiment: I imagined I saw in someone else the flaw I was focused on. How would I judge or respond in that situation?

Invariably my assessment was different and usually neutral: no particular judgment.

3. I realized there was no reason to treat myself any differently than I would someone else in the same situation.
4. The process forced me to adjust my self-judgment to the more neutral conclusion.
5. This experience told me that my filtering system was off when it came to self-assessment. I needed to readjust the filtering.
6. That process was how I began to examine and alter my filtering system. I’d experience the upset. That was my signal to check out my possible bias. I would go through the test of how I would experience someone else with regard to what I was judging as negative. And in that way, I began to correct the bias.

This wasn’t a matter of hitting the light switch and it was done. Early in the process, I’d do the experiment, come up with the correct and neutral assessment, but still feel uncomfortable. My body and emotions were still stuck in the old pattern. And any focus during the process on these old feelings could derail the shift in my thinking. This let me know that additional steps were necessary.

7. This next step was reminding myself that my cognitive reappraisal was accurate, while also reminding myself that my emotions will lag behind. “This is the right way, even though it doesn’t feel right, yet”
8. This last step was to remember to trust the new learning, the cognitive learning, while tolerating the old emotional reaction for the moment. Don’t trust my emotions yet.
9. Tolerate the emotional discomfort to give myself time for my emotional reaction to catch up to the new lesson.

Negative bias interferes with transformation

Because of the power of the negative bias, it serves as an anchor for the old pattern, keeping us stuck. There are other reasons we have difficulty moving away from identity and patterns and habits that don’t serve us, and I will address them in future posts, along with new steps for transformation.