And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this is episode 212.

It's titled The Negativity Bias.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hi, everybody. What's you been up to?

I've seen the news lately.

A bit rubbish, isn't it? I've pretty much given up on it. Did you know that, according to research, in order to get your emotional state back to where it was before you experienced a negative stimulus,

you need at least four experiences of something positive to erase the effects of that one experience of something

negative. It's because of what's called the negativity bias. And because of that, we really do

have to try and filter what we're exposed to on a daily basis. Not easy when we've got news input from every corner of the house, though.

Modern technology was supposed to make our lives better, wasn't it? Still waiting. The thing is,

we get carried away, don't we? Instead of being happy with simply being able to turn on our computer and catch up on the news whenever we wanted to,

rather than having to wait for the six o'clock news, we all went, ooh, what's next tomorrow's world? Tell me all about the shiny new future we're going to get.

And before we know it, we've got our phone in our hands and we're scrolling

through endless feeds of horror and fear. Were we happy with a exposure and frequency of

our news feed in the 1980s? I don't remember any conversation about being desperate for more

immediate access to information when I was 13 in

1988. I was too busy listening to Billy Idol and that seemed good enough. But to return to

those times seems a bit rubbish, doesn't it? Yet, even then, back in 1988, according to the author Richard Saul Vermin in his book Information Anxiety, which he researched and wrote in 1988, the information in just one newspaper, even then, was more than the average amount someone from 100 years earlier would get in their entire lifetime.

Just think about that. In 1988, our daily exposure to the news, even if we only read a newspaper, was more than what most 19th century people got in their whole life. In 1988. And now look at us. Some people

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