The Little Blue Book

EMOTIONAL BIAS AND ‘A WHISPERING CROWD’ It’s when we hear only negative thoughts - that return, and return again, and jam our thinking - that it can impact our mental health. It may also indicate symptoms of deeper mood disorders. Excessive worry, chronic and repetitive negative thinking, can distort our ability to process what’s happening in our lives. We see everything through a negative filter, a negative ‘emotional bias’, even when there may be little or no reason to worry. We all carry both negative and positive emotional biases that influence our interpretation of the world around us. In our everyday lives, our biases can sway our thinking and override logic, clarity of thought and objectivity. (We may, for instance, carry positive emotional biases for our football team – even when an objective analysis may suggest they will lose against a superior opponent, we’ll believe they can win… because… well, “just because”.) Negative emotional biases can also override objective analysis. When deep-seated, when crowded by gloomy self-talk and excessive worry, they can cause us to see only catastrophe and negative outcomes in stressful events, that ‘there is nothing good to come from this’. This then influences our responses, decision-making and coping strategies around them. Repetitive negative thinking and an overriding negative emotional bias – when we worry about even everyday things and struggle to control feelings of trepidation and nervousness – can indicate symptoms of chronic anxiety and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). 1 It can be associated with PTSD (a chronic anxiety stress reaction to extreme psychological trauma) and depression, and may also carry increased risk of self-harm and thoughts of suicide. With these disorders, negative intrusive self-talk can become a tangle of warnings – a ‘whispering crowd’ in our heads – that can overwhelm our thinking and responses, distort our ability for rational decision-making and trigger irrational fears and phobias. Excessive uncontrollable worry typifies social anxiety and is commonly associatedwith isolationand loneliness. Theproblemwithdark, negative self-talk – “this will fail”, “I can’t do it”, “they all think I’m an idiot”, “no- one likes me” – is that it destroys self-esteem and confidence, and just won’t shut up. 18 Towards Resilience - The Power of Positivity