Leadership lessons | The right way to deal with negative feedback

In your darkest hours when you’re feeling low, there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced the same phenomena that has become the subject of an innumerable amount of jokes and memes at the hands of the Millennial generation.

It is a situation in which just when you need some positivity, your brain decides to mull over past instances of getting into altercations, being rudely shouted at or other such unpleasantries. It’s almost like your brain is set on sabotaging your own wellbeing.

This, according to Clifford Nass a Professor of Communication at Stanford University, is because negative information is storied more vividly in our brains. “This is a general tendency for everyone. Some people do have a more positive outlook, but almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail,” he recently told the New York Times.

“The brain handles positive and negative information in different hemispheres,” said Professor Nass, who co-authored The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. “Negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones. Thus, we tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events – and use stronger words to describe them – than happy ones,” he explained.