Did last week seem like a doozy? Here’s some great stuff that happened. Let’s celebrate.

Two great forces collude to make it easy to focus only on the negative: the media and our own minds. Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report. If we then take into account the Negativity Bias, our mind’s tendency to weigh negative things more heavily than positive things, gauging the actual state of reality becomes even more difficult. Dr. John Gottman, renown psychologist, counsels that to overcome our Negativity Bias — that is, for equal events to just feel equal — we need a 5:1 ration of positive to negative events/interactions. Think about that for a second: what we’re getting is a 1:17 ratio of good to bad but what we’d need to account for our Negativity Bias is a 85:17 ratio of good to bad.

Here’s a visual, a graph from a TEDxUCDavid talk by Professor Alison Ledgerwood. It shows how getting an academic paper accepted by a journal gives her an emotional high that lasts about as long as lunchtime, whereas getting a paper rejected by a journal makes her energy dip down…and stay there all day (at least). So we return more easily to our baseline after positive events than we rebound back to our baseline after negative events.

Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck) | Alison Ledgerwood | TEDxUCDavis

What does this mean for us today? It means, my fellow insisters, persisters, and resisters, that we need to get good at celebration. We need to be intentional about recognizing and celebrating all of the wonderful things that happen in our lives, communities, country, and our world. If we don’t, it will be too easy to fall into despair. But despair is not a strategy so let’s heed the words of activist and politician Ruth Messinger who writes, “I realize the magnitude of the issues we fight for may seem daunting. But we must not retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed.”

Here’s what I’m celebrating this week — join me!

  • Tomi Lahren, a conservative commentator, publicly announced that she was pro-choice. It’s good to have pro-choice voices on the conservative political spectrum.

*We should celebrate the defeat of the AHCA, not the perfection of the ACA. While having the ACA is better than not having it, we can’t be lulled into complacence. Millions are still uninsured, and many who are insured cannot access care because of ever-increasing premiums and unaffordable co-pays and deductibles. So let’s celebrate our victory in the knowledge that, until we get a single payer system that provides Medicare for all, we still have work to do!

Note: I learned about some of these events from a weekly newsletter called “Small Victories”. You can sign up here.

--

--

Hospital chaplain, community organizer, writer. Shamelessly laughs at the same jokes over and over and believes there are gateways to holiness everywhere.

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Abby Brockman

Hospital chaplain, community organizer, writer. Shamelessly laughs at the same jokes over and over and believes there are gateways to holiness everywhere.