Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jam Black. Happiness is one of the topics we've explored a lot on Nobody Told Me. Happiness fascinates us and we'd like

to share with you some of the most intriguing and useful information about happiness that our guests have

given us. One of those guests was Dr. Rick Hansen, the author of several books including

hardwiring happiness, the new brain science of contentment calm and confidence which shows you

how to tap the hidden power of everyday experiences to change your brain and your

life for the better he says your brain has a built-in negativity bias which is

like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.

Right.

It's a very solid finding in science, and we've all had experiences of it.

Let's say you have a job review, and your boss tells you ten things about yourself.

Nine are good.

One is room for improvement.

What's the one you obsess about for the rest of the day?

Right.

Or maybe ten things happen in your relationship, and nine of them are good.

One of them is awkward, 10, something.

And what's the one you tend to think about when you're falling asleep?

It's the negative one.

And that's because as our ancestors evolved, it was really important for them to remember painful, difficult, stressful experiences and what they did to get through them because they may not have another chance the next time something bad like that happens.

So the brain has what scientists call a negativity bias.

We tend to overlearn from bad experiences, but we underlearn from good experiences, that might be really

good for survival under terrible conditions.

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