Life can be hard. Humans are not always kind. We face challenges every day. Some are manageable and we move through them without a thought; others are more burdensome and require additional resilience resources.
Adverse circumstances cause a survival response in our brains, and when we perceive circumstances as negative even when they are positive or neutral, scientists call this a negativity bias. Even though we don’t always face life-or-death situations, our brains still respond to everyday circumstances as if we are.
Barbara Fredrickson, a positivity researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suggests that both negative and positive emotions must co-exist and that positive emotions build the ability to cope with negative emotions. Fredrickson’s research has found that we need to experience at least three positive emotions for every negative emotion if we want to thrive in life instead of just barely holding on. The 3-to-1 ratio builds a collaborative relationship between our survival brain and our thriving brain.