Recently, I travelled to Brainerd, Minnesota for a keynote. The temperature was a bit bone chilling, but the people couldn’t have been warmer.
I was happy to be there. Thanks to my small-town Midwestern roots, I always breathe a sigh of relief when I’m in that part of the world, because everything feels a little kinder.
Indeed, because the wider world is stuck in an epidemic of incivility, moments of kindness might matter now more than ever.
Recent research by Christine Porath (my friend and collaborator) shows that almost 80 percent of frontline workers reported more bad behavior in recent years. As she notes, “rudeness is like the common cold: it’s contagious, it spreads quickly, and anyone can be a carrier.” (One need not look further than airplanes for countless examples!)
Of course, there are real reasons people are losing their cool—from rising levels of stress and uncertainty to falling levels of community and self-care.
But understanding why incivility is happening doesn’t dampen its impact on our well-being. Why? Because we’re hard wired to fixate on bad things.
While humans enjoy positivity, we pay more attention to—and are more affected by—negativity. Put simply, our ancestors experienced a higher cost when minimizing negative situations (e.g., a grizzly bear attack) than they did with positive ones (e.g., a fun evening by the campfire).
As a result, for example, the joy of a good day doesn’t carry over to the next, but the agony of a bad one does. We pay more attention to negative news than positive news (i.e., “if it bleeds, it leads”). We react more strongly to bad smells than good ones.
In modern times, then, what was once a survival advantage (“That guy killed a bunch of my fellow tribesmen! I’d better stay away from him”) can cloud and complicate our lives (“My boss just sent me a nasty email! I’d better stew about it for the next three weeks”).
So if positive experiences are fleeting, and we want to create more of them, it requires conscious engineering. For the good to outweigh the bad, we have to outsmart our instincts.
Here are three scientifically supported hacks to ensure that, in our lives, good is bigger than bad.
- Banish energy vampires. We all know people who suck the energy right out of us. Just being around their negativity can kick us down the rumination rabbit hole. Indeed, research confirms that we actually “catch” the emotions of people around us (both IRL and online).
The practical implication is simple, but critically important: to the extent that it’s possible, we have to eliminate—or minimize—the time we spend with energy vampires.
- More “reciprocal interactions.” The human nervous system craves reciprocal interactions with others—that is, eye contact, calming tone of voice, engaged facial expressions. Why? These cues operate outside our conscious awareness to tell us we’re safe, which activates systems supporting “health, growth, and restoration.” For example, reciprocal interactions with doctors mean faster recovery from colds.
What if you find yourself alone but craving calmness? Research shows that prosodic music (e.g., folk songs, soothing classical) creates similar physical effects as reciprocity. Try curating a soundtrack.
- Be a reciprocity role model. We already know that we crave reciprocity from others… but what happens if they don’t get reciprocity from us (because we’re testy, busy, etc.)? Their nervous system immediately and massively shifts to a state of defensiveness—which can start a “biological cascade of rudeness.” In other words, we have to be careful not to create energy vampires.
Alternatively, treating others with benevolence and empathy doesn’t just help us get something positive back, it independently increases our energy and vitality.
In sum, even though it’s easier to be a victim of circumstance, we can take ownership of how the world impacts our well-being.
As the great psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Victor Frankl once said, “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Here’s to choosing, and even engineering, our own way.
Dr. Tasha Eurich
is an organizational psychologist, speaker and The New York Times bestselling author of Bankable Leadership. Her latest book, Insight, delves deeper into the meta-skill of the modern world: self-awareness. Tasha’s life’s work is to help organizations succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders and teams. With a ten-year track record in the Fortune 500 world, her expertise has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur and Forbes.
