Neurons that fire together, wire together. Every single time we engage ourselves in negative thinking, our brains strengthen the neural pathways associated with those thoughts. The more we think negatively, the easier it becomes to continue thinking negatively. Studies show negative events have stronger and longer-lasting psychological effects than equally positive events, a phenomenon known as the negativity bias.
Engaging in negative thinking makes it easier to continue engaging with it. In fact, engaging with negative posts on social media increases the likelihood of negative content coming up on your feed repeatedly. Immediately after new music, shows or movies are released, people’s first thought is to turn to various social media platforms, and what often comes up first is bad reviews, hateful comments or mockery. The human tendency to feed into this is what keeps it coming, since the algorithms used on these platforms track click rates and engagement. Outrage and negativity become profitable to these companies, while users are stuck in an endless loop of comment-section arguments. Studies from Yale found that posts that are morally outraging have a higher rate of being liked and shared. Every click, repost and second each user is active on these posts is tracked and brings similar content back to your feed.
We’re literally training ourselves to find a reason to be unhappy, one negative remark at a time. Happiness rates around the world are decreasing. In 2025, the U.S. dropped to its lowest-ever spot on the World Happiness List. Thinking negatively has become habitual and natural for us, yet we’re failing to realize the impact it has on our relationships and overall well-being. Not only is negativity killing our souls, but it’s also having an extremely negative impact on our health. Negative brain activity can cause a weakened immune system and affect your ability to think critically. Our prefrontal cortex, which manages higher-level thinking, becomes less active with prolonged negative thinking. It’s easy to think that being a bit cynical at times won’t have long-term effects, but every time we say something negative, we’re training our brains to get used to that, which has long-term effects on our health, both mentally and physically.
It’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to never think a negative thought, speak a negative sentence or fall into a pit of despair every now and then, but simply making an effort to disengage from negative conversations, both in real life and on social media, can make huge differences in our happiness and our health. If it’s possible for us to find things to be unhappy about and for us to strengthen our neural pathways to be accustomed to negative thinking, it’s also possible to do the opposite and find things to be happy about.
Positive thinking has the opposite effects, as it increases your likelihood of living a healthy life and strengthens your prefrontal cortex. Being stuck in a cycle of negative thinking really is that deep and being negative shouldn’t be a way for us to cope with day-to-day life. It takes effort to shift our thinking, but it’s necessary to make a conscious effort to do so. Something as simple as changing our phrasing from, “I hate ___,” to “I’m looking forward to ___” can create such a huge shift in our lives. Taking a moment to think before we speak, post or engage with negative content to ensure that we’re not mindlessly falling into this cycle. These tiny steps add up.
As a community, it’s easy to find common ground with others by finding a shared hatred. Whether it be a certain class at school, the actors cast for an upcoming movie or something as simple as the weather, we default to starting every conversation with “I hate ___,” simply because it comes naturally to us. It’s easy to discount this as just human cynicism, but it goes much deeper than that. We’ve trained ourselves to automatically look for the negatives in anything and everything, but power truly does lie in our words, and we fail to realize that the little negative comments we say every single day add up and shape the way we see the world around us. It’s easy to default to complaining, only because we’ve trained our minds to find things that are going wrong. Making a conscious effort to look for things that are going well instead will slowly get rid of this mechanism that we’ve built.
