Always Noticing the Negative - The Upward Spiral

THRIVE NOTES - Summarising Books on Wellbeing

Welcome to THRIVE NOTES, a series of articles where we’ll be summarising the key points of a range of chapters from self-help, wellbeing, and science-backed books. While we recommend that you pick up the book yourself (and each book that we cover will also be added to our Wellbeing Pit Stop in Senate House), we hope that these articles will offer you some guidance through the book’s key information and encourage you to pick it up for yourself!

What’s the Book About:

The Upward Spiral, written by neuroscientist Alex Korb, explains how downward and upward spirals work, through hormones and neural systems in the brain. Korb then guides us on starting those upward spirals that can move us closer to getting out of periods of depression, unlike downward spirals, which tend to keep us feeling hopeless, helpless, and stuck.

Summary of the Chapter: Always Noticing the Negative

What our brains pay attention to is very dependent on our emotional states. The attention circuit and emotion circuit are connected. We do have some conscious control over our emotion circuit, but it’s mostly automatic and unconscious.

How Does the “Emotion Circuit” Work?

Our emotion circuit is more easily activated by negative feelings and experiences, as opposed to positive feelings and experiences. Korb describes our brains as being “biased toward pain, loss, and the emotional toll of mistakes, and they often distort memories of the past and expectations of the future.” If you add having depression, or being at risk of developing depression, into the mix, this then makes the negative feel even more negative than it would if we aren’t depressed. But truly, reality is not as bad as depression makes it feel.

The brain’s amygdala and anterior cingulate affect how emotion and attention interact. Both of these regions communicate with each other and with the prefrontal cortex. Activity in one of these regions will then effect the others, changing one’s emotional perception.

Within the anterior cingulate, the dorsal anterior cingulate pays attention to experiences like pain, mistakes, and worrying. Whereas, the ventral anterior cingulate tends to mediate feelings of optimism and can help calm down the emotionally sensitive amygdala.

Depression and Negativity

People with depression are more like to experience the neutral as negative. Just because someone isn’t smiling at you, it doesn’t mean that they hate you. They’re just not smiling. But the depressed brain understands it as hurtful. Those with depression also hang on to negative emotions for longer, as found when studies noticed prolonged activity in the amygdala.

Experiencing negative events increase activity in our medial prefrontal cortex, our insula, our amygdala, and our hippocampus. So, we relate these experiences to ourselves, taking them more personally. So, in our day-to-day life, it’s very beneficial to have more positive experiences than negative ones. It’s thought to be a positive-to-negative ratio of three-to-one, on average. Those who are depressed may need an even higher ratio to help pull them out of a downward spiral, because they’re brain’s more likely to ignore the positive.

Why Are Some of Us More Likely to Have Depression?

Some people’s brains are just more sensitive to emotional information than other’s – and then it takes more effort to calm the brain down. This can be due to multiple factors, like genetics or learned behaviours, as mood disorders run in families. Another reason could be that experiencing more and more negative experiences, creates a worse mood and an increasingly negative bias. After that, we're more likely we are to notice the negative, rather than the positive.

This mood bias doesn’t just come in to play with negativity. It works for positivity too. If we practice seeing the positive more, the more our brains will just… do that. And this leads to a lifted mood, and take us from a downward spiral, to an upward one.

The dorsal anterior cingulate helps us notice our mistakes. It’s not malicious but is meant to help us improve in the future. In people with depression though, it tends to be that their dorsal anterior cingulate is more reactive. So, what’s supposed to be a helping hand from that part of our brain, makes us feel more pessimistic instead.

Then, when it comes to pain, the sensation of pain can be increased when we’re depressed. Pain is not just a physical experience, but an emotional one too. We have an automatic emotional response to pain when we shut our hand in a car door, stub our toe, or take a fall.

Pain signalling is when pain signals are brought to brain by neurons called nociceptors. That does not mean that we perceive the pain. Pain perception happens when our dorsal anterior cingulate, insula and amygdala become activated. Meanwhile, our prefrontal cortex and ventral anterior cingulate become less active, so our ability to be optimistic and think more rationally decreases and the part of the brain stem that releases pain-killing endorphins decreases in activity too.

Depression and Memory

As depressed people are more likely to be sensitive to pain, they are also more likely to develop chronic pain. We hold onto pain and the negative memories associated with it, as our amygdala communicates with the hippocampus, which we associate with long term memory. If we perceive an experience as negative, we will store this, and associate future experiences as negative, leading to stress in the amygdala. It’s trying to prevent you from being in danger, but an overreaction in the amygdala leads to anxiety and continued pain. It then becomes harder to remember the happy memories and, unfortunately, easier to remember the bad ones.

When we remember our memories, we don’t remember them verbatim. Rather, we rebuild them as we recall. And a negative mood makes the memory more negative than the experience may have been. So, when it comes to experiencing future events, we may approach with caution or doubt or lack of hope, because our memories have been coloured negatively.

How Do You Start Noticing the Positive?

Anti-depressant medications are often manufactured to boost serotonin or norepinephrine because these neurotransmitters are known to be helpful in reversing our negative bias. It’s not that they improve mood, but that they help us shift our attention to the positive. And when it comes to pain processing and chronic pain, these same neurotransmitters can help decrease the dorsal anterior cingulate activity in our brain.

Anti-depressants, while they can be helpful, are not the only way to get us to focus on the positive. It takes practice. Korb says that even just imagining the possibility of positive future events is helpful. Anything is possible and being optimistic activates our brain’s ventral anterior cingulate, which then regulates the amygdala, reducing feelings of pessimism and moving away from a negative bias to a positive bias.

Next, you don't want to just believe that good can be possible, but that good things are a certainty. We should expect that good things will happen to us. This also activates the ventral anterior cingulate, again regulating the amygdala.

This all takes time and practice, but the effects can make it increasingly easy to move into an upward spiral.