There are many things that are different between different cultures and races, but there are also things that result from us all having common ancestors. Things that truly make us a human race and not aliens, are things we all have in common. A few examples may help illustrate key things that all humans share.
A number of research studies have pointed to the possibility that virtually all of us share a tendency to think negatively. In research studies, students in a number of different countries were instructed to write down their random thoughts for different periods of times. The thoughts were then recorded and rated as positive, neutral, and negative. The results, depending on the study, yielded anywhere from 50% to 75% negative thoughts. The question left for researchers was “Why would humans tend to think negative thoughts naturally, rather than, neutral, or positive?”.
What is your experience? Do you have to remind yourself to think negative thoughts all the time, or does it seem to come naturally? Do you ever experience telling your brain “Wait, you are having way too many positive thoughts brain, you need to start thinking negatively to balance things out”? If you do, please let us know how you do that! It seems that most people would report that they are always trying to think more positively, and that they rarely if ever, have to remind themselves to think negatively.
For those few that think mostly positive naturally, they have their own set of problems too. Positive thinking does not always match reality. Think of a death of a person you love, the loss of a favorite Pet, or a cancer diagnosis. How easy is it think of those things as positive?
The Blueberry Bush
The most compelling theory of the origin of negative thinking may lie in our common ancestors. A short experience may help explain this theory. Imagine that you live thousands of years ago, in a cave with a group of other humans. It is your turn to go to the waterhole, so you take two buckets and start towards the waterhole about a mile away. At first, you can only see the outline of the waterhole, and the bushes around it. You want to be careful, as the last person to go for water, encountered a lion behind the bushes. As you get closer to the bushes, you see that they are actually blueberry bushes with the blueberries newly formed. You carefully approach the waterhole and do not find a lion, so you decide to fill one bucket with water, and the other with blueberries. When you get back to the cave, everyone is happy, as the blueberries are delicious.
The next time that your tribe needs water, they beg you to go. Again, you find blueberries and return with another full bucket. You continue to bring back blueberries and over time you become known as a source of good luck. They write stories of you providing nourishment to the tribe in pictures written on the cave wall in blueberry juice. You become a Blueberry God”.
This is a good story with a positive ending. Maybe we would all think positive naturally if the story always ended here. But unfortunately, there were lions around your cave and eventually, the story had a different ending. It doesn’t matter how many times you returned with blueberries, it only takes one lion in life, to cancel out tons of delicious blueberries.
Which ancestors do you think survived and eventually made up our gene pool? The ones that were always worried about the lion, or the ones that always assumed there would be a positive ending to the story? The likely answer is those people that tended to assume that they would never be jumped by the lion, are no longer in the gene pool. It is just you and me, and the other ancestors that assumed there might be a lion every trip to the waterhole. When they planned the blueberry trip, they anticipated a negative ending as a survival mechanism.
If this theory behind negative thinking is true, it would make perfect sense that we would have a natural tendency to think negative. And for those of us that had experienced being jumped by a real lion (think trauma), we would likely have a natural tendency to think more negatively, than people that were never jumped by the lion. And it would also follow that people that had never been jumped by a lion, or had thankfully recovered naturally from trauma, might have a hard time understanding why we continue to see a lion behind every bush.
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