No one is immune to experiencing misfortune. It’s bizarre how some minor unlucky accidents can ruin our whole day. Whether it’s the little things that go wrong the second you step out of bed or some inconsiderate remarks that send you into a downward spiral, sometimes we go from blissfully happy to plain miserable in mere seconds. 

It’s easy to start feeling irritated and full of self-pity. When you find out that such random things can become an immediate day-breaker, you might start feeling grumpy and even bring the people that surround you down, too. It turns out, bad stuff tends to stick because we are more likely to dwell on the things that went wrong.

We keep letting pessimistic thoughts in because of the negativity bias—our tendency to give more significance to the negative experiences than positive or neutral ones. Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, explained that humans evolved to be fearful.

“The nervous system has been evolving for 600 million years, from ancient jellyfish to modern humans. Our ancestors had to make a critical decision many times a day: approach a reward or avoid a hazard,” he wrote.

People needed to find food, have children, and cooperate with others to help them have children of their own. Also, they had to hide from predators in order to survive and avoid potential dangers. 

While both of them are important, there’s a key difference. If you miss out on food one day, you’ll have a shot to find more the next. But if you fail to avoid a hazard—there are no more chances for you to pass your genes to the next generation. That’s why we generally react “more intensely to negative stimuli than to equally strong positive ones.”

“The alarm bell of your brain—the amygdala (you’ve got two of these little almond-shaped regions, one on either side of your head)—uses many of its neurons to look for bad news: it’s primed to go negative in most people,” Hanson continued.

“Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences get quickly stored in memory—in contrast to positive events and experiences, which are not prioritized in the same way.”

While this is great for passing on our genes, it makes it hard to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. Understanding our tendency to focus on the negativities should help us to recognize that things are usually not as bad as we think. Of course, it’s important to share and discuss the problems we face in our everyday lives. But it’s also necessary to balance it out with the good stuff and remember to share a laugh or two.

Psychological resilience could be the key to dealing with negativity. “Although there has been a debate whether resilience, mental and emotional, is innate or something that can be developed, for me, it’s an innate condition that all humans have but needs to be developed and modeled well for it to come to the surface,” Vasia Toxavidi, a counselor and accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), told Bored Panda in a previous interview. 

“All humans are wired for survival, so resilience must be an innate trait for everyone for this to happen, but if it’s never developed, then it may not come out as a trait for someone.”

She added: “Resilience is the skill of adaptation, which for me is another innate skill of humans compared to other animals. Humans can adapt to situations easier. Having counseling or psychotherapy is an example of how resilience can be developed and learned and become a new way of living.”

Humor can be a helpful resilience strategy. Studies have shown that it can “decrease levels of stress hormones such as cortisol and increase the activation of the pleasure hormone, dopamine.” Plus, “just smiling without even finding anything funny can make the brain believe that you are happy.” So it seems that laughing can help us reconsider problems that we would otherwise interpret as “overwhelming and damaging.” 

“Another important key to resilience is to be part of a community and have external support from family, friends and others. As humans, we’re social animals so without having a strong sense of belonging, we cannot thrive or be resilient,” Vasia Toxavidi concluded.