Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host Corey Muscarra and in today's episode we're going to talk about dwelling on your kens versus dwelling on your cants.

More to come on that in a moment, but first, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. So as we've discussed on this podcast before, the brain has this built in negativity bias, which means it is more inclined to focus on what can go wrong rather

than what can go right.

From an evolutionary perspective, I think we can understand this.

It paid to have a deep sensitization to pain

and to see something that could potentially be dangerous,

think about all the things that could go wrong and have this

quick reactivity in our nervous system that causes us to run away.

And then to think about that thing more into the future so that we don't get caught in it again.

This negative rumination, however, seems to also carry over

with our perceived sense of self and what we're capable of versus what we're not capable of,

meaning we tend to focus more on our weaknesses, that is what we can't do rather than our strengths. That is what we can do. And I think many of us

are familiar with this, a dwelling and a ruminating about all the things we're not good at and why

we didn't get that right and why we won't be able to do that and we can't do that because I can't do this and I can't do that and I would do that but I can't because I can't do this and I can't do this and I tried that last time but I couldn't do that.

Blah blah. We dwell on our can't. Rarely though when we think of

dwelling do we think of dwelling on our kens, our strengths, all the things that we're good at at all the things we're capable of

and even think about it in the context of like a little kid on a playground

and they were they were dwelling on something.

It would make more sense to assume that they're dwelling on something that went wrong

or something that they don't like about themselves.

It would kind of be weird if we went over there and we said, what are you thinking about it?

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