image by mrhayata

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the hypercritical part of me went on overdrive the first week or so of my trip. Everywhere I went, I saw stuff to judge and snark upon, and I realized that this was both limiting my experience and making me mean, so I decided to stop.

I did pretty well with this overall—not perfect, but pretty good—and I noticed something interesting as I chose to put my attention on lovelier things. Not only did I have a much better time with my fellow tourists; I also saw much more of what was around me and had many more ideas. When I focused on how annoying everyone was, I saw many more things to be annoyed by. But when I opened up to all the beauty around me, creative possibilities seemed to flow through me.

Could it be that a positive attitude makes us more creative? That’s not how I usually think of creativity—the paradigm is “tortured artist” for a reason. Isn’t it the awful gap between what they see in the world and what they see in their minds that fuels their creative power?

Turns out that’s not the case at all. In fact, recent research shows that bad feelings restrict your attention—like when an eyewitness to a crime can remember what the gun looked like but not the person holding it—while good feelings literally expand what you are able to take in.

I read about this research in Rapt, a book by Winnifed Gallagher which looks into the essence of attention and how cultivating it can improve our lives. Here she describes one of the experiments that shows the power of focusing on positive or negative feelings.

Subjects ... are first asked to look at a visual display’s central object. However, if they’re then prompted to feel a positive emotion, such as gratitude, they proceed to take in significant peripheral material, despite the earlier instruction. In contrast, subjects remain in a neutral or negative state continue to focus on the display’s central element and tune out the surrounding stimuli.

Of course, it makes sense that negative feelings would pull so much focus—as she goes on to explain, “in a potentially ominous situation, homing in on and reacting to any trouble quickly is more important than taking your time to get the big picture.”

And this makes sense if the trouble is a wild boar or a speeding car bearing down upon you. But for big picture problems like the ones we are facing today, this laserlike focus on what’s wrong functions only to limit our options and create despair.

Intuitively many of us have known this for a while, but it’s good to have scientific evidence to support the fact that maintaining a positive focus is absolutely crucial to creating new, clean, just ways to live, both in our individual lives and collectively.

How do we cultivate this positive focus? Like math, skateboarding, and playing piano, it’s easier for some of us than it is for others. My natural optimism set point is quite high, even though my Gen X conditioning also makes me a little too fond of the snark.

But it has more to do with intention and desire than whether you were born a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think it’s possible for all of us to become more grateful, more open, and more hopeful. We’ll explore different ideas for how to open up the positivity valves over the next few weeks—Rapt has a lot of great ideas.