The Negativity Virus
Refuse to entertain negativity. Life is too big and time is too short to get caught up in empty drama.
After scurrying through the maze-like monastery, I eventually found a fellow swami I had conversed with earlier. Again, he called out to me, as I turned to see him sat on a bench with a scripture in his hand. Upon approaching him, I smiled and sat on the floor (as a sign of respect).
There was silence for a minute before he put the scripture aside and asked, “Vinay, is everything okay?”
With a deep sigh, I opened up, “Swami, I try to remain positive in everything that I do, but it’s so difficult. I always seem to have a negative view of everything. Even when I am working with other people, or just simply being around others, my mind is drawn to focus on their faults, and then I keep on thinking about them. I really don’t know what to do.”
This is where I learnt a life-changing exercise in which I had to keep a tally of every criticism that I spoke or thought about in regards to another person, at any point in the day. For each criticism, I had to write down five good things about that person. I called it the guna-diary (diary of qualities), based upon a practical teaching taught not only at the ashram but continuously emphasised by my guru too, called gun-grāhak drashthi (recalibrating focus to see the good in others). It is a difficult exercise, especially when you observe people close to you, and then, having to write about their good qualities. But the point of the exercise was simple, it helps us to see that everyone has more good in them than bad. This not only helps us to see others in a positive light, but it also allows us to be critical of our behaviour.
The swami continued, “You see Vinay, when you set out to find faults in others, you notice the faults in yourself. This will do more harm than good unless you are critically evaluating yourself. On the other hand, if you begin to look for the good in others, you will start to see the good in yourself too.”
Everywhere, every day, we are surrounded by negativity. It’s probably the reason why the majority of us do everything with a sense of negativity, and feel that others are negative towards us as well. Rather than focusing on the good things, we talk about the troubles, aches and pains of the day. Most of the time negativity comes from within, springing from fears linked to thoughts of bad things happening, not being loved, or the thought of being disrespected. We manifest these negative feelings through behaviours like complaining, comparing, and criticising.
Okay, we can all agree that bad things do happen, and at some point, we are all victims. But if we constantly adopt a victim mentality, we are more prone to behaving selfishly, arrogantly, fearfully, and sometimes even with a sense of entitlement.
Psychologists at Stanford took 104 subjects and split them into two groups; one was told to write a short essay about a time they were bored, and the other to write about a time when they felt life seemed unfair or when they were ‘wronged by someone’.
After the experiment, the participants were asked if they wanted to help the researchers with a simple task. Those who had written about the time they had been wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers. In a similar study, participants who identified with a victim mindset were not only more likely to express selfish attitudes afterwards, but were also more likely to leave behind rubbish and even steal the pens belonging to the researchers.
The monkey mind can adjust to any positivity or negativity. It is up to us what we feed to it. Unconsciously, in everything we do, we try to please others again and again. We also want others to be pleased with (and agree with) us. Repeated studies have confirmed that most humans value social conformity so much that they will change their own responses, behaviours, and even perceptions to align with a group, even if the group is wrong. Humans are programmed to conform. The monkey doesn’t like to deal with conflict and debate—especially with other monkeys, and so it conforms. At times it prefers to sit back, relax, and allow the Tesla to run on autopilot. This may be a bit easier (or arguably harder) if we all had to stay among the swamis, in the serene village of Sarangpur, but we don’t. We live in a constantly changing society, surrounded by gossip, drama, conflict, and negativity, so this is how we begin to perceive the world too.
The more that we are surrounded by negativity, the more negative we will become. Complaining and ‘venting’ anger is also not a solution to process our anger. Research confirms that even people who reported feeling better after venting are still more aggressive after venting than people who did not engage in venting at all.
Studies also show that negativity increases our aggression towards random people who are, most of the time, not even involved. The more negative our attitude is now, the more likely we are to follow on with that negative attitude in the future. Chronic, long-term stress, like that stemming from compulsive complaining, has been shown to shrink your hippocampus—the part of your brain that affects memory and reasoning; through this, the immune system is also impaired by cortisol (the stress hormone). Think about it this way, remaining positive can keep you fighting off disease.
I noticed that this is where the swamis at Sarangpur stood out. Detaching from material life, leaving behind everything, they didn’t see themselves as having relatively achieved something compared to the rest around them. Regardless of their background (socially or economically), they lived harmoniously with a collective purpose. Senior swamis often reiterate the example that in a hospital everyone is a patient, we don’t judge anyone based on their symptoms, disease, or illness. Likewise, we shouldn’t judge anyone based on their background, flaws, or good or bad differently. Don’t expect that anyone is perfect. Don’t think that you are perfect either. Everyone is on their own journey, and perfection is a lifelong journey…
This post is an excerpt from my first book The Keshav Way, available everywhere online.