Previously, Bored Panda reached out to Vasia Toxavidi, a counselor and accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), to find out about ways of dealing with mishaps and developing psychological resilience.

According to Vasia, even the smallest mishaps like “throwing our morning coffee on us or even getting a text or an email we don’t like can affect the rest of our day.” A typical reaction is “Oh, great start to the day!” but according to the counselor, the negative bias can directly affect the course of events.

Scientists say that the reason we are all wired for ‘negatively biased’ thinking is because negative events and emotions have a greater impact in our brains than the positive ones. Even the smallest things that generate negative reactions can snowball into the forecast for the rest of the day, or even the week.

According to Vasia, we end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because we look at the world through lenses triggered by anger, fear, or the expectation that something will go wrong. And in that sense, the reality is only how we perceive it.

So as humans, we tend to not only forecast things to go badly because of otherwise meaningless mishaps, we tend to fixate on virtually any negative moments. Whether it’s recalling insults better than praise, reacting more strongly to negative stimuli than to positive, thinking about negative things more frequently than positive, it all contributes to our behavior.

This bias toward the negative leads you to pay much more attention to the bad things that happen, making them seem much more important than they really are.

It is thought that the negative bias comes from our ancestors who’d pay attention to bad, dangerous, and negative threats in the world. It was literally a matter of life and death. Those who were more attuned to danger had higher chances of survival.