Kyle MacDonald

So it comes back to how do we get to the truth of the matter, right?

Which is that actually we might have a really distorted idea about our abilities, which can sometimes motivate us to try harder, but a lot of times will actually just drive our mood into the gutter.

Well, medication and therapy is kind of, if we genuinely believe those things to be true to the point where they cause depression, then medication lifts our mood.

And interestingly, a lot of the antidepressants actually also enable our brain to be more flexible when it's learning.

So then the therapy comes in and helps us to hopefully learn some different mental habits and some different ways of understanding our story that shift that into, it's not that I'm bad, it's that I have come to believe myself to be bad for a story that makes sense to me.

Yeah, well, anything out of balance is a problem, right?

I mean, if someone has an absolutely unbalanced positive idea about themselves, you know, they can end up doing all sorts of crazy things and the self-belief that they're always right.

Yeah, that makes global headlines frequently.

Yeah, so that's a really interesting idea.

I mean, essentially what the negativity bias suggests is that we, on average as a species, have a tendency to be slightly off-centre in terms of how we interpret the world.

So there's been lots and lots and lots of studies done over the years.

I mean, one of the ones which is quite challenging is that people who experience depression tend to see the world more accurately, which has suggested actually to be optimistic is a slight stage of delusion.

Yikes, yeah.

which is kind of challenging but a little bit fun to play with as well when we really think about it.

The negativity bias comes from essentially that idea that when it comes to survival, as a species we've, over the millennia that we've evolved, been better off to be slightly negative and slightly anxious than

as a way to avoid threat.

And so the people who have a wildly optimistic idea about themselves and their own abilities are the ones who tend to fall off a cliff because they think they could climb it or don't see fear in those situations and so do the things that are frightening.

Now, obviously, variation means that we still have people like that in our population, but that on average over time,

Seeing the world slightly negatively and being slightly fearful is a pretty good survival strategy.

The problem, of course, now is that actually in a modern world we are, by and large, thankfully, in a place like Aotearoa, largely safe and largely protected from threats.