The Power Of Bad

The Power Of Bad gives some excellent tips on how to become happier by identifying your tendency toward negativity and what psychology and research have to show you about how to beat it.

How do you measure whether you should stay in a relationship or not? The perfect one doesn’t exist, after all. Our partners are usually great but once in a while their dark side comes out. Does that mean you should leave?

One of the authors, Roy Baumeister, once asked himself this same question. To help him decide, he started tracking the good, bad, and neutral days. Months later the data showed that for every two good days there was 1 bad.

In other words, only 67% of days were good, so he left the relationship.

Baumeister’s efforts show the power of a positivity ratio, which is how many bad events there are relative to good ones. It’s an important number, too, because research shows that it has to be high if you want to succeed.

There’s a famous study by psychologist John Gottman that shows the truth of this. He had married couples track their positive and negative interactions. In the end, those with an even number of both broke up. But those who were the happiest had five good interactions for every bad.

If you’re trying to improve yourself, though, Baumeister suggests you shot for a minimum of four positives for every negative. So if you miss a run, for example, don’t be too hard on yourself, just try to make it happen for the next four days.

I recently saw a video while scrolling through Facebook that interested me because I could relate. It showed a woman standing between two large jars. One began filling slowly with jelly beans, which eventually reached the brim. The woman picked up the full jar and held it tight. Then one single jelly bean drops into the other jar and she immediately drops the full one and picks the other up. In this example, the jar full of jelly beans represents all of our positive interactions, while the other is a symbol for the bad ones. The lesson, then, is that we have so much good going on, but the negative takes over our minds, no matter how small. Sometimes we need to give people feedback though. You might have heard that you should say something nice, give the information, and then add another compliment at the end. This is also known as the feedback sandwich, but it doesn’t work. One psychologist did a study in which he told students they were reading words that described their personalities. Although most were positive, a few insults were scattered in there.…