Don’t be a pillar of salt: 7 methods to help you overcome negativity bias, stop dwelling on failures and strengthen your mental resilience.

Negativity bias: why the brain “sticks” to bad memories

As time, years and experience have passed, it has become increasingly clear to me that our brain remembers negative experiences more strongly than positive ones. Scientists call this phenomenon negativity bias, which is one of cognitive errors.

Researchers distinguish several components of this phenomenon:

1. Unpleasant stimuli are more “important”,
2. The closer the event, the faster the negative intensity increases,
3. The mixture of good and bad elements is judged to be worse than the sum of the parts,
4. What is difficult is described and remembered in more detail than what is good.

The effect can be seen every day. One critical remark can be more memorable than five compliments.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The cost of overlooking a threat was greater than the cost of missing an opportunity, so our “alarm system” responds faster and stronger to signals of risk. A similar mechanism can also be seen in decision-making – losses are more painful than gains of the same magnitude. Such an arrangement is conducive to survival, but in modern life it can sometimes be a source of trouble, as it is easier to get stuck in the memory of failures than to build on successes.

Dr Rick Hanson of the University of California, Berkeley, illustrates it this way:

“The brain is like a Teflon pan for positive experiences and like Velcro for negative ones”

This metaphor is particularly close to my heart because, having lived with a severe form of hemophilia, I have seen firsthand how easily the mind can cling to painful memories, such as hospitalizations, unsuccessful attempts at treatment, or limitations imposed by the disease.

In one of my articles about my illness, I mentioned how haemophilia and the complications from it caused me to miss out on many opportunities in my life.

I had to give up attending many events, being on stage, giving lectures and workshops, participating in panel discussions, working at the university, working with the government, participating in interviews and TV programs, traveling abroad, and meeting inspiring people.

Over the years, my inner “Velcro” has held on to those moments more than anything else.

You probably know this principle well from your own experience. At work, you are able to analyze situations based on hard facts (even the uncomfortable ones) and learn from them for the future. If a project derails or an action doesn’t meet the expectations of your stakeholders, you and your team probably don’t collectively despair over the failure, but instead draw conclusions and lessons for the future in a decent retrospective.

Why, then, do we often do the opposite in our personal lives? Why is it that personal failures – e.g. a broken relationship, a failed exam, an argument with your spouse, the look on your mother-in-law’s face when you serve underdone food, the look on your child’s face when you forget to introduce them, or any missed opportunity – can haunt us for months or years? We keep asking ourselves questions like:

• “Why was I so stupid?
• “What would have happened if I had behaved differently?

Unfortunately, such questions are a trap. They lead us into an endless cycle of despair that does not lead to constructive conclusions, but only deepens negative emotions. This vicious cycle causes us to waste energy analyzing a situation that we cannot change anyway, which ultimately undermines your self-esteem. Experts point out that this habit is not completely indifferent and increases the risk of depression and reduces your ability to solve problems.

Bad experiences are stronger than good ones

A comprehensive review study entitled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” analyzed a wide range of psychological phenomena. The paper’s main thesis is that

Negative events, emotions, and experiences have a stronger impact on people than comparable positive ones.

Researchers analyzed dozens of studies and discovered a universal pattern. It turns out that one unpleasant event can cancel out the effect of five positive interactions in a relationship.

Not only do negative memories last longer, but we also pay more attention to them and dwell on them more often. Interestingly, even our language reflects this asymmetry, with up to 62% of words describing emotions referring to negative emotions and only 38% referring to positive emotions.

Feedback has an expiry date – talk about mistakes right away instead of tearing up wounds

Our human, biological predisposition can lead you into a trap, for example, if someone has behaved unpleasantly towards you, but you have not immediately told the person about it. “It’s just a small thing,” you will think at first, but over time (months and sometimes years) it will grow in your mind to unimaginable proportions. When you finally find the opportunity to bring it up, you unleash all your accumulated grief on the person in the process….who often doesn’t even remember the situation.

In business, you get a “yellow card” for this – because who wants a manager who opens old wounds instead of looking for solutions? This style of leadership quickly ends in the loss of team trust.

In this particular case, I propose a simple rule:

“Feedback has an expiration date”. If you do not share it in a reasonable amount of time, you are making a conscious decision to close the topic.

Treat past events as data for analysis, not as emotional ballast. Learn lessons, make changes, move on. This lightness will allow you to take on new challenges without being burdened by old stories – both in your personal and professional life.

Personal failures are stones in your pockets

Personal setbacks are not always easy for me to deal with. I feel that the big blows somehow work better for me. I know it’s a boulder that I just have to let go of, otherwise it’s impossible to go on, or it’s going to pull me into some abyss.

I am much worse off with “pebbles”. It’s a metaphor that refers to small failures, embarrassments, or unfulfilled promises that I’ve stuffed in my pockets and carried around like unnecessary baggage. These small failures have repeatedly managed to make me feel uncomfortable for weeks at a time. They held me back more than the big, obvious problems.

Over time, however, I have come to understand that there is no other way and that these “little pebbles” simply need to be shaken out of my pockets on a regular basis and not allowed to accumulate. Everyone can find their own way to do this “shaking off,” whether through conversation, exercise, reflection, or other methods. The important thing is to do it consciously, before the stones become so heavy that they prevent further steps.

Don’t look back – a lesson from Lot’s wife

When I think of this “shaking pebbles out of pockets,” another story comes to mind that illustrates the consequences of clinging to the past just as well. This time it comes from the Bible and has become for me a second powerful image of the same problem. Taken together, these two stories (about the stones and what I’m about to talk about) show why it is so important to let go of the past.

When I talk to one of my daughters about her stumbles and I see her dwelling too much on her failures, I tell her:

“Don’t be a pillar of salt”.

For us, this simple phrase is an abbreviated reference to a story from the Old Testament, whose protagonist is Lot (Hebrew: לוֹט, – nephew of the biblical patriarch Abraham), or rather his wife (name unfortunately unknown).

As they fled the doomed city of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s entire family was given a simple command: “Do not look back”. For Lot’s wife, however, the temptation proved too strong, and when she did look back (presumably longing for what she was leaving behind), she turned into a pillar of salt and never moved on.

Lot, on the other hand, fleeing from a city destroyed by a rain of fire and brimstone, looked straight ahead and did not even think about living in the past, mourning his losses, or looking back. As a result, he was able to move on and live another life.

In the New Testament, Jesus also referred to the above story and warned his disciples, saying

“Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever wants to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will keep it.”

These stories can easily be applied to our daily lives. If you dwell too long on the past, or have “stones in your pockets,” you will eventually freeze in place. You deny yourself the opportunity to move forward and the chance to grow. If you cling to past mistakes or past successes, you run the risk of becoming paralyzed and losing your ability to act.

Freud versus Adler – does the past define us?

From the perspective of my subjective observations, because (I emphasize) I am not a psychologist or a specialist in this field, modern psychology has long noted the difference between looking backward and looking forward. On the one hand, the Freudian tradition focuses on the past, i.e. finding the source of our present problems in childhood and past experiences.

Sigmund Freud believed that “the past lives in us” and that present fears or blockages are echoes of past traumas.

On the other hand, we have the approach of Alfred Adler, a disciple of Freud who nevertheless rebelled against the excessive burial of the past. Adler argued that people are driven by goals and aspirations, not by the demons of the past. He believed that we should use experiences (even painful ones) as lessons, but focus on where we are going, not where we came from. In a nutshell:

• Freud asked, “Why are you the way you are when you look at your past?”.
• Adler asked, “Who do you want to become and how will you use what you have experienced to get there?

Many modern psychotherapists are inspired by Adler – a forward-looking, problem-solving approach rather than dwelling on past mistakes.

I could probably see my illness as a trauma and an unfair judgment that defines my life and limits my possibilities. That would be my “cause” and justification for being, for example, rotten. But I have always consciously chosen a perspective where hemophilia is not a punishment for me, but an integral part of me, through which I have to plan my life differently, my travels, what sports I can do, how I manage my business and stress.

I believe that a good use of self-awareness (which I wrote about in one of my articles) supports the process of psychologically shifting one’s perspective and treating mistakes not as burdens but as fuel that will carry us forward.

Confirmation that this approach makes sense can be found in Liu & Feng‘s research, which clearly shows that people who focus on goals and future possibilities are more likely to feel satisfaction with their lives and are more resilient to stress. Additionally, an experiment conducted at the University of Michigan found that students who formulated their own ‘vision of future self’ and action plan felt 30% less fear of failure compared to a control group focused on analysing their past failures.

Techniques for treating failure as an event rather than our identity

Now that you know that the mind is more easily “glued” to negativity, and that it is more mature to stop being a “pillar of salt” and look forward than to get stuck in the past, it is time to put this into practice.

Over the years, I have observed and analyzed various methods (both in myself and in people close to me) that actually help to break out of the trap of despair. Below are some of them, which I hope will help you as well.

Reprogram your narrative – the thought restructuring technique

The first method to master is to consciously question your thoughts. It may sound trivial, but when used over a period of time it can work wonders. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) research confirms this.

When you make a mistake and think, “I’m hopeless, I’ve failed again,” stop for a moment and write that thought down on a piece of paper. Now look at the text and ask yourself questions:

• “Do I have concrete evidence that I am hopeless at everything”?
• “What are the alternative explanations for this situation?”,
• “What would I say to a friend who had this thought?”.

In my case, when hemophilia forced me to give up another public appearance, I first thought:

• “I’m unreliable, people can’t count on me!”.

However, when I subjected my thoughts to this technique, I was able to rephrase them as follows:

• “I have a chronic illness that sometimes complicates plans. This does not make me unreliable, but rather a person with limitations that I try to minimize.

Thought journal in practice – a simple tool to silence the inner critic

Before this habit gets into your blood, you might try keeping a “thought diary. Then, when you find yourself in a spiral of negative thoughts, write them down:

Situation → Automatic thought that occurred → Emotion you feel → Rational alternative.

For example, your journal might look like this:

Set a boundary for worry – ‘time window’ technique

This is one of my favorite methods, and I think it will be just as effective for people who, like me, tend to spin problems in all directions. The idea is to set aside a window of time each day (say, 15-20 minutes) for conscious worrying.

You give yourself the ‘official permission’ to worry and feel sorry for yourself, but only for that moment! You sit down with a notebook and for that brief moment you can worry to your heart’s content, writing down all your fears, analyzing your failures, predicting disasters. When the time is up, you close the notebook and say to yourself, “That’s enough for today. If anything else comes to mind, I’ll do it tomorrow!

At first this seems absurd, but over time the mind learns that it doesn’t need to monitor threats non-stop. It has a set time for this.

The GAIN method – see how far you have come

One of the most effective methods of changing our perspective, our perception of ourselves or a given situation, is described by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy in their book The Gap and The Gain. They distinguish between two ways of looking at your life:

• through the prism of the Gap (GAP) – that is, what we lack to the ideal,
• or through the lens of Gain (GAIN) – how far we have come from our starting point.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, there are two fairly straightforward ways to do it.

Inventory of progress

This is a simple ritual you can implement on Sunday afternoons. You sit down with a notepad, your favorite coffee or tea, and take a leisurely inventory of the past week. You write down everything you got done, what you learned, what came easier than usual. These can be seemingly trivial things like

• a difficult conversation conducted,
• mastering a new feature in a program,
• a project completed,
• or simply keeping a promise to yourself or someone else.

One of the most important elements of this method is the addition of a time perspective. For each item written out, it is useful to state what the same issue looked like one, two, or five years ago. This simple procedure will turn a simple list of completed tasks into a personal map of the journey. Suddenly you will see that what seems obvious and simple today was once quite a challenge for you. This will make you realize that your current challenges will also become routine in time.

Regularity is extremely important. A brief but systematic reflection is better than an in-depth analysis once a quarter.

Museum of self-development

A second very valuable method is to create your own museum (or archive) of evidence of your evolution. This can be a physical or digital place where you collect traces of the path you have traveled.

These can be:

• old CVs – showing the evolution of competences,
• first versions of your texts (to contrast with the current ones),
• acknowledgement emails,
• certificates,
• photos documenting events,
• notes of feedback you received at work.

This is not an encouragement to look back nostalgically (which I discouraged you from doing in the first place) or to polish your ego. It’s a controlled review of indicators, data, and evidence that you can use when the thought “I don’t know how to do anything” or “I’m stagnating” hits you.

Treat such an archive like a scoreboard where you see facts, not memories. It acts as a counterbalance to Imposter Syndrome and your weaker moments. It reminds you that today’s “not good enough” is often a level you could once only dream of.

Personally, I have two such museums. The first is my “wall of fame” at home – i.e. a place for awards and recognition, at least for my pro bono work. The second, interestingly enough, is the refrigerator. Today, it holds several months’ worth of medications, allowing me to take preventative measures. In the past, I could only dream of having a single dose factor at home. The sight of a refrigerator full of medications makes me realize how my quality of life and sense of security have changed.

Changing my relationship with my thoughts

This is an approach that a friend of mine told me about. The idea is that you don’t have to believe everything your mind tells you. It is especially helpful for people who find it difficult to break down their own thoughts or feelings when they are experiencing strong emotions. It does not require a cool rationalization, but a gentle shift in your relationship with your thoughts.

When the thought “I failed again” comes up, instead of fighting it or analyzing it, you can say to yourself, “OK, I have a thought that I failed, but it is just a thought, not a fact. Imagine it is flowing in a river. You see it, but you don’t have to jump into the water to follow it.

Techniques for breaking the spiral immediately

There are times when, despite your best intentions, you find yourself still having strange thoughts in your head. At such times, you can try the following methods, which, while they won’t remove the cause of your mood, can help you get back to reality. They work quickly, they are simple, and you can use them in the kitchen, in front of your laptop, or even in bed when you have trouble falling asleep.

Movement as a reset

If you find yourself analyzing the same thing over and over for half an hour, get up and move. Enough is enough:

• 20 squats,
• 5 minutes of brisk walking,
• a series of “spiders”,
• climbing and descending stairs several times.

Studies show that even short-term exercise sessions improve mood and reduce.

Grounding technique 5-4-3-2-1 (anchoring in the present)

When thoughts escape into the past, use your senses to return to the present. Describe:

• 5 things you can see (e.g., a lamp, a cup, a window, a book, a keyboard),
• 4 things you can touch (a watch, the warmth of a mug, the smoothness of a monitor screen, your hair),
• 3 things you can hear (computer noise, birds singing, traffic),
• 2 things you can smell (coffee, fresh bedding),
• 1 thing you can taste (alternatively, an emotion).

Verbal game (technique) before bedtime

When I find it difficult to fall asleep because I am processing millions of issues in my mind (or feeling pain or tension), I turn to a very simple verbal technique:

1. I say in my mind the first word that comes to mind (e.g. “joy”).
2. Then, for the first letter of that word, I come up with as many words starting with it as possible: “J…” (Jungle, Journey, Jewel, Justice, Joyful, etc).
3. When I run out of ideas for a particular letter I move on to the next letter.
4. When I reach the end of a word (which hardly ever happens to me because I fall asleep early) I choose a new word.

If you happen to let a thought slip, notice it and go back to the letter where you stopped. To make the task more engaging, you can also introduce additional assumptions, such as a category – like cities, animals, plants – or a combination of an adjective and a noun that start with the same letter.If you happen to let a thought escape to some extent, notice it and go back to the letter where you stopped. Additionally, to make the task more engaging, you can introduce additional assumptions, such as a category – such as cities, animals, plants – or a combination of an adjective and a noun starting with the same letter.

With this method, you fill your working memory with a neutral but also creative language task, so that less of your resources are left for worrying. After a few minutes, you will feel bored and calm. Interestingly, this method also works with children – a proven fact.

Your next decision is more important than your last mistake

Your worst presentation, your biggest business failure, or the toughest day of your life are just frames in a long movie. Don’t let one moment or one difficult time define your entire story. The past can be a source of valuable lessons and learning, if only you are willing to listen with analytical calm rather than emotional regret.

Accept → Learn → Move forward.

The point is not to pretend that failure doesn’t hurt. Of course they do. Sometimes hellishly so. But you can choose to carry them like stones in your pocket, or turn yourself into a pillar of salt, or use them as stepping stones to go higher.

PS When to seek help

Remember that there are situations when stand-alone methods are not enough. If:

• the distraction lasts most of the day for more than 2 weeks,
• it affects your work, relationships, sleep,
• is accompanied by thoughts about the meaninglessness of life,
• you feel you are losing control,

…don’t be a hero and contact a psychologist or psychiatrist. It doesn’t mean you’re weak, it just means you’re taking your mental health seriously.