As states continue to reopen following coronavirus-related shutdowns, many are finding they’re not as excited as they expected to be but are instead feeling anxious and conflicted.
Jen Hartstein, Yahoo Life Mental Health Contributor and a practicing psychologist, says these emotions are more common than you might think and may be caused by a concept called negativity dominance.
“We tend to look at the whole more than we look at the parts. Our brain is automatically wired to look at the negative more strongly than the positive,” says Hartstein. “If we’re looking at the whole we see fear, we see anxiety, we see worry instead of breaking it down to the smaller parts of ‘I might be able to see my family’ or ‘I might be able to go to a store,’ or ‘I might be able to sit at a restaurant.”
She continues, “We want to break it down into smaller pieces, smaller bites, find the positives and see if you can wrap yourselves around them and then the positives build on each other and the negatives slowly go down.”
