78. Overcoming Negative Bias When Starting Something New: Focusing on What’s Good

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives into the science behind why our brains tend to focus on the negative when we start something new. Whether it’s a new job, a workout routine, or a diet, our minds automatically go on high alert, looking for any potential problems or dangers. Dr. Stacy explains why this is a natural survival instinct, but also how we can overcome it. Learn how to rewire your brain with gratitude-like practices and intentional thought exercises to focus on what’s good in new situations. If you’re feeling stuck or negative about starting something new, this episode will give you the tools to shift your mindset and make change easier and more enjoyable. Tune in for a practical approach to overcoming negative bias, and start embracing the positive side of every new experience.

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Transcript

Welcome back, everybody! Today is episode number 78, if you can believe it. I’m your host, Dr. Stacy Heimburger, SugarFree MD, and welcome to the episode. If you are anything like most people, when you start something new, your brain has a lot of negative feedback for you. That’s what I want to talk about today—why that is totally normal and things we can do to change it if we want to.

So, this came up for one of my clients who had quite a lot of change happening, including a job change. I know from experience that when you change a job, it can feel a little much. What ends up happening is even if we think we’re going to love the job when we’re there, our brain starts picking up on all the things that might be wrong, all the things that may cause a problem later. And I have a hypothesis for this—maybe I spent too much time thinking, and then you guys have to pay the price, but I think this will be helpful, so stick with me.

I have a theory that when we are starting something new, our brain is on high alert. I think it goes back to a very, very primitive time when we were trying to ensure our safety and survival. Right? So, if we had to join a new tribe, we would really be on high alert to see if everyone likes us, whether we’re going to get kicked out, to see if we’re safe. It’s about acceptance and safety. So, when we start something like a new job, even if we think, “You know, going in, we’re like, ‘This is gonna be great. I’m gonna love it,’” our brain is just programmed to be on permanent safety scan, looking for anything and everything that might cause a problem or cause us to lose that safety.

So, what do we do about that? Well, we can just understand that that’s normal and natural and not do a thing about it. But we can also reprogram our brains.

These thoughts, this unease, this uneasy feeling, come from our thoughts about it, right? If we are feeling uneasy or insecure about a new thing, like a new job, it is because we are having thoughts like, “Maybe things are not gonna work out.” We get those thoughts from our brain seeing everything that might be wrong. So, what we can do is program new thoughts, and we do that by writing them down in the form of something similar to a gratitude journal.

This is kind of how a gratitude journal works. If our brain is constantly reminding us of what’s wrong with our lives, we feel bad. If we want to feel better and we want to feel happier, we know gratitude journals work for that. This is exactly how they work: when we start a gratitude journal and we write down things we’re thankful for, we are forcing our brain to look at things that are good, and the things that are good make us feel good.

When we make our brain pay attention to something, then it starts to look for those things. I think I’ve talked about this in the form of reprogramming yourself to really love your spouse all the time, right? If I remind myself and give myself intentional thoughts about how much I love my spouse, it is very easy to love my spouse. It is also then very easy to see all the good things about my spouse because my brain is programmed. I keep telling it to look for those things. If I let go of that practice and start to only see the things that I am annoyed by in my spouse, I will be annoyed by my spouse, and that is all I will see. We kind of reinforce our thoughts.

So, if I am nervous, insecure, or feeling unsafe, my brain is going to look for all the support for that argument. It’s going to look for proof. So, I have to tell it to look for something else. I have to tell it to look for all the reasons I do love this new job, that everyone does like me, that I like it, and that everything’s gonna be fine.

This survival instinct helped our ancestors avoid danger, so we thank them for that. But it’s really not as necessary in today’s world. So, this really is just about rewiring our brain. It’s very normal. It is very, very, very normal for our brains to have this tendency. It’s just hardwired to detect threats. I think one of my first coaches said, “An unmanaged mind will always be negative,” and this is the reason.

Okay, if we don’t manage and tell our brain what to look for, it will evolve into only looking at what is bad, threatening, and scary, and then that is what we will believe. It’s called negativity bias—it’s a thing. Some brains are more sensitive to it than others. Mine is very sensitive to it. I think that’s because I would survive, right? My ancestors obviously did. I am programmed to look for danger and to try and make a plan to escape that danger, and sometimes my brain doesn’t like to rest until I have a plan.

Okay, a little insight into me and how my brain works. So, it is very important for me to intentionally reset my brain and rewire it to look for good, to look for the positive, to look for things that show we are safe and everything is fine.

When we start a new habit, a new job, or anything—let’s take a new workout routine. I start a new workout routine, so I’ve told myself it’s a great idea. I want to get stronger. It’s one of my goals for this year is actually to put on some muscle and get stronger. When I start that new workout routine, my brain is like, “What are we doing? We were fine. We should not be changing anything,” and it’s going to start looking for the negative.

So, that little bit of soreness, right? That extra tiredness, maybe that extra hunger when you first start something new, and it’s going to go hogwild and tell me all the reasons that is awful and dangerous and terrible, and we should stop it right now. What I have to do is a form of a gratitude journal. I have to ask my brain. I have to intentionally, with effort—just like we talked about last week, this intentional brain and energy effort that we need to do—I have to, with effort, say, “What are the positive things for my workout today? Why is it good that I feel sore?” What are the positives?

I don’t have to think about it to find the negative—that is natural and easy. I have to think about it to find the positive. So, I have to put in some energy here, and this is everything in real life. This is just how our brain is programmed, and it’s great. It kept us alive. Wonderful. Love it. But now that we know that, we can hack it.

We can just start reprogramming with thoughts that will help us. Like, “I’m learning something new. I’m meeting new people. This discomfort will help me grow.” The longer I can sit in discomfort, the more successful I’ll be. So, the more I can... This is great that my muscles hurt. That means I’m making changes. If I were to go to every workout and not feel sore, I’m not changing anything, right? These are our thoughts that will help me think positively about my extra hard workout.

And how am I doing when I go to that new job? Right, I need to probably journal a little bit. I’m going to ask you to do some paper thinking here and write it down. Maybe I need to come down at the end of the day, take those two minutes of silence in my car before I start in with the family, and just write down a couple of things that were great about my new job. “I met a very interesting person. I got this very interesting task done. The OR turned over really fast today,” right? Point out the positive intentionally. That will start changing our brain. It will rewire us to look for the positive.

We don’t have to like... There might be someone who wants to argue with me that that’s not real, and I will argue back: it is real because whatever we think it is. And sometimes these rewiring practices can be very, very, very helpful, especially around things that are constant in our jobs.

So, I can tell you the story in medical school. I went to medical school at Tulane LSU in New Orleans. We trained at the same hospital, and so at the local public hospital, we were all seeing patients. And so patients would either get assigned to Tulane or they would get assigned to LSU. I was in internal medicine, so I was admitting patients to medicine, and one of the LSU residents— I really don’t remember their name, so I’m not protecting them for any other reason except I really just don’t remember—was very proud that he had kind of like pushed back on an admission. He said, “I was kind of taught we should fight back on an admission,” and I just thought that was weird because I’ve been taught by my program director that we should happily take every admission.

Right? My program director’s thought that he shared and implanted in me was, “You went to medical school to be a doctor. You should be somebody’s doctor, right? Why would you argue to not be their doctor?” And that just made sense to me. And so that thought completely changed my entire relationship with taking admissions from the ER. Right? Anyone in medicine knows there’s always this supposed contentious relationship between the ER and the hospitalist. I never really felt like I had that, and I think it was that thought, that rewiring of my brain, that was really influential and really helpful.

And we can do the same thing about call. Call is notoriously something we are programmed and told we should hate. “Call is awful! It’s the worst! We should hate it! We shouldn’t want a job that has call!” Right? We can absolutely rewire our brain around that. We can come home from every call, starting up at your next call, and write down three things that happened that were kind of cool or fun or like you were glad it was you.

One of my clients says that all the time. She thinks that all the time. And she’s on trauma call, so everyone’s having a bad day, right? If someone needs a surgeon because of a trauma, that patient is not having a good day. So why would she do anything to make it worse? But she doesn’t want to make that patient’s day worse, and she’s glad it’s her. If it had to happen, “I’m glad it’s me because I know how to fix it, and I can fix it well because I’m a great doctor.”

Right? What an amazing attitude to have. So, not only can we do this with new jobs, but we can do this with jobs we already have, and parts of our jobs that we don’t necessarily enjoy yet. We can sort of try to start this rewiring, this reprogramming.

I just really wanted to point it out with new jobs or new exercise routines or any new experience because the newness of it really puts your brain on high alert. I think the stuff we’re already dealing with is because we’re not being intentional, and we’re not managing our thoughts around those things that are annoying us, stressing us out, or feeling very draining.

An unmanaged mind is going to be negative. And once we’re in that negative space, that’s all our brain is going to look for, is this support for its argument that it sucks.

So, here’s just a couple of questions we can ask ourselves:

• What is one thing about this experience that surprised me in a positive way?
• What’s one small win I’ve had since starting this new thing?

Right? So, those are two really good questions we can ask ourselves. Just, “What one thing surprised me?” What cool thing happened? And, you know, showing my age, like, “What was cool that happened today?” Something really interesting.

So, I want you to think about this. I want you to know that you can rewire your brain not only in a way to reframe a new scary experience, but also in things you’re not really enjoying that much now. I think I’ve taught that similar concept when I talked about thought ladders. Right? Where if we’re thinking really negative and we want to start thinking more positive, we have to sort of find some new thoughts that feel true. I usually say we should get to like a neutral thought, but the other part—there’s another way to do this—and the other way to do this is sort of this gratitude journal-ask type exercise where we force ourselves to start to look for positives.

So, if it’s about call, if it’s about anything at work, if it’s about things at home, if it’s about your spouse, if it’s about a new workout, if it’s about a new nutrition plan, if it’s about going to sleep early, writing anything that we want to change and make more positive, we totally have the power to do that by finding thoughts that support that new idea. Right? We have to give our brain new evidence, and we do that by planting thoughts.

We have 40,000 thoughts a day, so we can just pick the ones that feel a little bit better, and when we start to look for the positive, we will find more positive. We will find what we are looking for. We will find the evidence to support whatever we want to support.

So, if we want to love our new job and we want to think people love us there, just look for that evidence and write it down. If we want to love our new workout routine and be consistent and keep doing it, we have to tell ourselves all the reasons it’s working and all the reasons we like it. If we want to stick to our new nutrition plan, we have to write down, like, “Oh, I just ate this. It was lovely.” “I was surprised.” “This is what surprised me.” “It felt great to come home at the end of the day and not have to worry about what was to eat. I had already taken care of myself.”

If we want to love our spouse more, here’s all the great things about my spouse. Anything we want to like more, we have the power to do that.

When we start something new, it is natural that our brain is gonna start telling us all the reasons it’s wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s just that’s what it’s looking for, and so it’s finding evidence. I do think that’s a problem with really smart people. We believe our brain with the first thing it says, and the first thing it says is always going to be negative. That doesn’t make it true. Okay? It just means that’s what it’s looking for because that’s what it’s programmed to do, and it’s trying to find evidence. We have power over our brain, and we can tell it to start looking for positive things, and it will. And it will find evidence, and if we write it down, we just reinforce it more.

So, the act of writing it down just reinforces it. So, we can reinforce that everything’s okay, and it’s good, and we like it, and it’s working. So, I encourage you to do that.

So, the takeaway: negativity bias is a thing—totally normal. Our brains are set up for that. It is a primitive safety system, but it doesn’t have to serve us now if we don’t want to. And just because our brain says negative things doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s just that’s not always the whole story, and if we want to change our experience, we have to change our thoughts. And we do that by being intentional and looking for the things we want to see, and then reinforcing that by writing it down. We have the power to shift our mindset to a more positive, constructive place, and we reinforce behaviors in those thoughts by writing it down.

Alright, I would love for you to start this and let me know how it goes. I think you’ll be surprised at how much more enjoyable new things can be. And trying new things and growing and, you know, evolving is kind of the whole point, I think.

So, I challenge you to start this gratitude-esq—I’m calling it a gratitude-esq because it might not be necessarily gratitude journaling the way you’re used to hearing it—but try this gratitude-esq practice for the next week. Write down some things you’re grateful for, some things that surprised you, some things that are going right, some things that are good, some things that you like and enjoy. And let me know how it goes. You can tag me on Instagram. You can email me. I would just love to hear from you.

Until next week, bye.