Quick Takeaway: Use the W.A.A. method below to contain your worry and track progress. Then start where you are and build toward more optimism. See how below.
You’re in a meeting, maybe, or driving home after a day that went reasonably well, and somewhere in the back of your mind a quiet inventory is running — what fell short, what you should have said, what’s still unresolved — and by the time you pull into your driveway the whole day has been quietly reclassified as not quite enough. Nothing catastrophic happened. You’re fine. And yet.
This is not a personality problem. It is, as best we can tell, a feature of a brain doing exactly what it was built to do.
The negativity bias is well-documented: we register, encode, and remember negative experiences more readily than positive ones, a pattern observed in healthy populations across attention, memory, and decision-making domains (Koster et al., 2020). The evolutionary logic is straightforward — a brain that remembered where the predator was last time survived longer than one that lingered on the pleasant afternoon — and the brain behind your eyes is, in most of the ways that matter neurologically, still running that same ancient software. The problem is that the threats have changed. The predator is now the performance review, the relationship that feels slightly off, the creeping sense that you are somehow behind.
Neuroplasticity research also tells us is that the brain changes in the direction of what we repeatedly attend to. Negative experiences consolidate quickly and deeply, because they were always survival-critical. Positive experiences require deliberate, sustained attention to build lasting neural structure. The brain isn’t biased against you. It has simply been trained longer in one direction than the other. That training can change. Slowly, with repetition, the brain will change too.
Research on dispositional optimism — the generalized tendency to expect that things will go reasonably well — establishes that this orientation predicts better health outcomes, stronger coping under stress, and ability to sustain effort when obstacles arise (Carver et al., 2010). Related research confirms that optimism is a modifiable cognitive variable, not a fixed trait: people who hold more favorable expectations about the future report less distress in daily life, even in the face of real challenges. And favorable expectations can be developed through targeted practice (Laranjeira & Querido, 2022). The story you tell yourself about why something went wrong matters quite a bit. Explanations that are permanent and global like “I always fall short,” “this is just how things go for me,” produce disengagement and a feeling that your efforts don’t have an impact. However, specific and temporary explanations leave room to try again and possibly succeed.
None of this means pretending the hard things aren’t hard. Sometimes our fears are warranted. Sometimes the situation genuinely calls for a clear-eyed look at what needs to change, not a reframe.
Optimism stays grounded in what’s true while holding space for what’s still possible. That is a meaningful distinction. It is also, perhaps, what separates genuine resilience from avoidance wearing a positive attitude.
Something to try: Here are four places to begin (WAA then R) as practices you can try on and adjust that will help with rewiring toward optimism
W– Schedule your worry. Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, but research consistently shows that trying to suppress worry tends to amplify it, while containing it to a designated time and place reduces its intrusion into the rest of the day. A 2023 meta-analysis of seven randomized trials found that worry postponement meaningfully reduced both the frequency and duration of daily worry (Dippel et al., 2023). Find 5-10 minutes — somewhere with energy (not your bedroom, not right before sleep) and let yourself actually think through what’s worrying you.
A -Write down action you can take. If there’s an action available, name it. If there isn’t, practice writing that down. Let this time of worrying and writing serve as a container for your worries instead of letting them sap your energy, playing at a constant low hum.
A – Track what you actually finish. As sense of self-efficacy builds through accumulated small evidence that your actions produce results. One of the most reliable sources of that evidence is noticing what you actually completed, not just what you planned (Carver et al., 2010). At the end of the day, write your accomplishments down. Include the things that don’t make it onto official lists: held a boundary, sent the hard email, showed up when you didn’t want to. The brain needs repetition to consolidate a new pattern, and this is how you give it the raw material. Let it be unglamorous. That’s the point.
R – Recalibrate what you’re asking yourself to believe. Research in Psychological Science found that positive self-statements reliably backfired for the people who needed them most. Those with lower self-esteem felt measurably worse after repeating aspirational statements they didn’t yet believe, while those with already high self-esteem showed only modest benefit (Wood et al., 2009). A more effective approach is to find the belief you’re already reasonably confident in and start there, working incrementally toward the harder one. Starting from belief you can actually access, and building from it, is what the evidence supports. Progress consolidates. Performance pressure or Pollyanna’s views don’t.
These are not feel-good exercises. This is a daily ritual that can be a mechanism of change. Your brain built its current defaults through years of repetition — and it can build new neural circuits the same way. We know optimism is trainable, that the negativity bias is not a life sentence, and that the brain you have today is genuinely capable of becoming one that reaches for possibility before it reaches for threat (Malouff & Schutte, 2017; Schutte & Malouff, 2024). Good news!
References
Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2010). Optimism. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 879–889. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.01.006
Dippel, A., Brosschot, J. F., & Verkuil, B. (2023). Effects of worry postponement on daily worry: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 17(1), 160–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41811-023-00193-x
Koster, E. H. W., Hoorelbeke, K., Onraedt, T., Owens, M., & Derakshan, N. (2020). Attentional bias towards negative stimuli in healthy individuals and the effects of trait anxiety. Scientific Reports, 10, 12489. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68490-5
Laranjeira, C., & Querido, A. (2022). Hope and optimism as an opportunity to improve the “positive mental health” demand. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 827320. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.827320
Malouff, J. M., & Schutte, N. S. (2017). Can psychological interventions increase optimism? A meta-analysis. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(6), 594–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1221122
Schutte, N. S., & Malouff, J. M. (2024). The simultaneous impact of interventions on optimism and depression: A meta-analysis. Mental Health Science, 2(3), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/mhs2.79
Wood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q. E., & Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860–866. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x