Reel to Reel

Even when the plus signs are bright as day, we still tend to focus on the minuses. It’s not a character flaw, just the way we’re wired. Here’s one approach to changing it.

In the last month or two, I’ve taken to posting reels on Instagram. They’re quick videos inspired by themes from my forthcoming book and after so many years spent trying to summon words to the page, it’s kind of refreshing to just face the camera and speak.

It’s after I share that it gets complicated. While I’d like to pretend I’m immune to social media’s economy of likes and shares, the fact is that I’m very much not.

I’m painfully conscious when something I’ve posted fails to catch on or, worse, sinks without a trace. My conscious mind knows better, and yet I feel unseen, unappreciated, un-everything. Ouch. 

Now hold that thought for a moment. I want to share two excerpts from the messages I’ve received from readers in the last couple of days:

“Hello stranger, loving your written output these days… I happened to go to the holocaust memorial museum here and while checking out the bookstore I imagined your book here. I imagined you having a reading event here for your book release. I imagined attending said event. Hopefully my day dream becomes a reality.”

and

“This [post] is very relatable and insightful. It is indeed no coincidence that I am going through, or have gone through, some of these issues you bring up. Dare I say I even found it inspirational? I dare. Thanks for sharing this.”

Trust me: I’m not sharing these as a subtle from of humble brag, a practice I tend to react negatively to. My point in sharing these notes is that, even when presented with hard evidence that what I’m sharing resonates with others, I still choose—more on that word in a moment—to focus on the lack of likes, shares, restacks, and all the other dopamine-triggering bells and whistles I’ve become fixated on.

Put another way, I’m getting exactly what I asked for—heartfelt and personal confirmation that readers find my writing meaningful—and yet I feel like I’m failing.

What’s going on here? For a long time, I figured it was a flaw in my wiring, a defect predisposing me towards pessimism. As it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.

Welcome to the gloomy kingdom of confirmation and negativity biases.

Yes, they’re two separate things, but for the purposes of this highly unscientific examination, I’m going to lump them together. Confirmation bias is, in one phrasing: “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.”

Like its sidekick negativity bias—the asymmetrical weight we assign to inputs we perceive as “bad”—these tendencies lead us to favor the bad and the ugly over the good. I asked my wife, Julianna Bright—a coach and all-around Wise Person—to try and explain some of the underlying allure:

“For most of us, by the time we’re adults, we’re walking around with fairly specific ideas about how things are for us. Stories we tell ourselves what we’re allowed to be, have, do. Most of these ways of seeing are based on imprints we experienced when we were young. There were certain behaviors that secured attachment and safety—behaviors that were reinforced—and others that didn’t. So through a kind of unintentional trial and error, we learn which parts of us are welcome in the world, and which are not. Until we begin to wake up to this false definition of who we are, it’s as though we proceed into our adulthood along these pre-written pathways.”

Why would we home towards negative confirmation again and again? One interpretation holds that it’s an evolutionary adaptation—a mechanism to anticipate and thus avoid threat—and thus it’s hard-wired into us. But as the authors of a study entitled Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development argue, that’s an appealing-sounding theory not necessarily borne out by the data:

“Such an evolution-based theory seems to imply that the negativity bias is innate, i.e., built right into our neural circuitry and consequently into our psychology. Such reasoning would be flawed, however, because abilities that are sculpted by evolution need not be developmentally innate. Moreover, the data appear not to support this ontogenetic prediction, since infants seem not to show a negativity bias in the first few postnatal months, at least in the emotional domain.”

This suggests that our dung-colored outlook is more learned than hard-wired, and that means it can be rewritten.

Of course, there are challenges. In the same way it’s difficult to detect the smudges on your eyeglasses while you’re actually wearing them, exposing our learned habits as the choices they really are—I told you I’d get back to that word—isn’t easy, but it’s crucial to realizing our goals and, just as important, experiencing true satisfaction when we do. When we don’t, we default to “not enough” thinking and the false perception of scarcity, the twin engines that empower social media’s seductive pull.

Slowing Down the Reel: A Visualization

When I absorb a challenging input—a lack of social media likes, a difficult conversation, anything that stimulates a defensive reaction—I sometimes feel as though I’m watching a movie. In these moments, it can feel like I’m just reciting someone else’s lines, and it’s profoundly disempowering.

If this resonates with you, I’d like to suggest you visualize a different kind of reel (again, courtesy of Julianna, the aforementioned Wise Person). Not an Instagram reel, but an old-fashioned reel of film.

The next time you find yourself in an automatic negative reaction, try and slow down the film. I mean that literally: Imagine reaching up and placing your hand on the rim of the reel. What happens as the projection slows down? What do you see that you couldn’t before? Is there a subtle switch as you exercise agency? Can you feel your heartbeat slowing, your breathing becoming a little more regular?

If you’ve managed to slow the film down, study it more closely. Are the images of failure true to your life, or was this film shot years—perhaps even generations—before now?

Keep going; slow it down even further. Can you see between the cells of film? What’s there? Julianna envisions actual figures—she calls them “gremlins”—wrenching our perceptions back towards the negative. 

They’re not our enemies; they’re our protectors, and they’re merely doing their job. And trust me: they are tireless.

Here’s the important part: The point isn’t to wipe them out, deny them, shame them, or anything like that. It’s just to see them. That’s all you have to do. Just recognize that there are unseen fingers on the scale.

Try it. Recognizing those gremlins, or unconscious biases, or whatever you choose to call them takes time and attention, but it’s the first—and most crucial—step to breaking the pattern. Once you see them at work, they’re impossible to unsee. And once you see them, you can begin to change your previously unconscious behaviors. This simple practice may strike you as rote or pedantic. That’s fine; just a few years ago, I probably would have said the same. Guess what? It works.

Practicing Plasticity: Rewiring Ourselves

While it’s tempting to believe we just are who we are, very little about the human experience is truly static. Barring brain injury or neurological disorder, we never lose the capacity to learn, and the fact that the majority of our cells are constantly replacing themselves adds a poetic shading. That’s what makes neural plasticity such a powerful concept, on both the metaphoric and the practical levels.

Neural plasticity is the capacity of the nervous system to modify itself, both functionally and structurally, in response to experience and physical injury. It’s what’s behind some fairly profound rehabilitation protocols, such as the acclaimed Dynamic Neural Retraining System used by many survivors of various traumas.

I want to challenge you to make practicing plasticity as conscious as possible. The next time you manage to slow down the reel of film—even if just for a millisecond—remind yourself that you have a say in which neural pathway you choose. By engaging with perceptions we once believed to be static, we slowly start to rewire those well-worn paths.

The truth is that there’s plenty of positive confirmation coming at us each and every day. It’s up to each of us to see it, clearly, for what it really is.