Why the Mind Remembers Fear and Forgets Joy

One fine morning. The kind of morning that quietly promises a good start. Soft light slipping through the window, the house still half asleep, that familiar comfort of the first coffee of the day. I sat down with my cup, opened the newspaper, and expected the usual mix of updates, opinions, and everyday information that eases you into the day.

What stared back at me was something else altogether. Page after page carried stories filled with shock, pain, anger, violence, and despair. One headline after another pulled the mind into places it never planned to visit that early in the morning. The warmth of the coffee stayed in my hands, yet the warmth of the moment slowly drained away. Somewhere between the first sip and the last page, the calm of the morning quietly collapsed.

This feeling didn’t stop with the newspaper. It extended far beyond it. Television debates, breaking news banners, social media feeds, endless reels and notifications — the same emotional tone everywhere. Loud, disturbing, unsettling. Over time, I have felt that media carries a responsibility here. What we put out enters homes where families live, where children sit nearby, where minds are still forming. A simple rating system, even something as basic as one to five, feels like a sensible idea to me. Some stories deserve careful handling, context, and restraint. Exposure shapes thinking, especially when it happens daily.

Here is what truly stayed with me. Even on days when the paper carried good news, inspiring stories, human victories, and progress, those moments quietly faded away. When the paper closed and the coffee cup emptied, the mind replayed only the darker stories. The heavier ones. They lingered. They occupied space. They shaped the emotional aftertaste of the morning. This pattern repeated itself often enough for me to notice it clearly.

That observation became the starting point of this blog. Why does the mind hold on so strongly to negative information? Why do painful stories settle deeper than positive ones, even when both are present together? While reflecting on this, I came across a concept that put words to what I was experiencing. A simple yet powerful idea explained by Rick Hanson. An idea that quietly influences how our thoughts form, stay, and shape our inner world. This blog begins right there.

Rick Hanson

Rick Hanson is a neuroscientist, psychologist, and teacher who has spent most of his life trying to understand one simple question: why does the human mind remember pain so easily and forget goodness so quickly. He studied at UCLA and later worked with the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, where the focus was on happiness, compassion, and emotional balance. His work stayed close to real human problems, especially stress, anxiety, and emotional suffering that people carry silently for years.

While working with patients and studying the brain, Hanson noticed a clear pattern. One harsh word stayed in the mind for a long time. One kind word disappeared fast. Fear, embarrassment, and pain left deep marks, while safety, love, and success barely left a trace. This pushed him to study the brain’s survival wiring more closely. The brain evolved to protect us, and for that, it learned to hold danger tightly. That wiring still runs the show today, even when our lives are far safer than those of our ancestors.

This understanding shaped his work and his books, especially Buddha’s Brain and Hardwiring Happiness. In these, Hanson explains a key idea using simple neuroscience. For a thought or feeling to settle into the brain, it needs time. A positive moment that passes in a second fades away. When the same moment is gently held for around twenty seconds, the brain begins to register it. The hippocampus helps store it, and the nervous system starts recognising it as something worth keeping.

The twenty-second practice grew from this insight. Hanson teaches that by staying with a good experience slightly longer, the brain slowly learns a new habit. Calm, confidence, and contentment begin to leave a mark, just as worry and fear once did. This small practice became central to his teaching, his courses, and his books. It is simple, quiet, and powerful in its own way. A reminder that the mind can be trained, one moment at a time, to remember what is good.

Evolution

To understand why negative or fearful news grips us so strongly, we need to step back into our evolutionary past. Human beings did not grow up in safe, predictable environments. For thousands of years, survival depended on constant alertness. A rustle in the bushes could mean a snake. A shadow could mean a predator. Pain, fear, and threat were signals that demanded immediate attention. Those who noticed danger quickly lived longer. Those who ignored it often did not. Slowly, across generations, the brain learned a clear lesson: what threatens life deserves priority.

This survival wiring shaped how the mind works even today. Fear creates a stronger imprint than pleasure. Pain carves deeper memory than comfort. A warning shout mattered more than a gentle compliment. From an evolutionary point of view, this made perfect sense. Missing a positive moment carried little cost. Missing a threat carried a deadly one. Books like Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky explain this beautifully, showing how stress responses evolved for short-term danger and now stay switched on in a very different world.

Life today looks nothing like the past. Lions and tigers rarely cross our paths. Yet the brain inside us still runs on old software. Evolution moves slowly. Bodies and brains change over millions of years, while societies change within a few generations. Technology, media, speed, and information exploded faster than biology could adapt. The ancient mind still scans for danger, even when danger arrives as headlines, notifications, and scrolling feeds.

This is why praise feels light and fear feels heavy. This is why bad news stays longer than good news. Daniel Kahneman speaks about this bias clearly in Thinking, Fast and Slow, explaining how the mind gives more weight to losses than gains. Even Osho spoke about this tendency of the mind to cling to pain and fear as a habit of survival, long after survival stopped being the main struggle.

The problem is not the brain itself. The problem is the gap between the world we live in and the brain we still carry. Understanding this gap is essential. Only then does it become clear why practices like holding a good thought for a few seconds matter. They help balance an ancient system that still believes danger deserves more attention than peace.

New age Negativity

In today’s world, this ancient pull toward negativity has found a powerful amplifier. Media, especially social media, thrives on attention, and attention is easiest to capture through shock, anger, fear, and outrage. Violent clips travel faster than calm conversations. Heated arguments spread wider than thoughtful dialogue. Painful headlines invite more clicks than steady progress or quiet success. This pattern plays out daily across news platforms, apps, and timelines.

Social media has sharpened this tendency even further. Many influencers and content creators open their videos with disturbing statements, alarming claims, or emotionally loaded words. The aim is simple. Stop the scroll. Create curiosity. Trigger emotion. Research across digital platforms consistently shows that content carrying anger or fear generates higher engagement, longer watch time, and faster sharing. According to studies referenced by the Pew Research Center, a large portion of young people today receive most of their news through social media feeds, where emotional intensity often decides visibility more than depth or accuracy.

Corporates and media houses understand this human weakness very well. Algorithms are designed to reward content that keeps people hooked. Toxic debates, polarising opinions, racial hatred, and exaggerated conflict rise quickly because the mind is already wired to notice danger. Books like The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu describe how human attention has slowly turned into a traded commodity, shaped and sold using emotional triggers rather than truth or balance.

The real concern lies with the younger generation. Repeated exposure to hostility and fear begins to feel normal. Curiosity slowly shifts toward shock. Sensitivity dulls. What once disturbed now feels routine. When negativity becomes the entry point for learning about the world, it quietly shapes beliefs, attitudes, and emotional responses. The mind absorbs what it sees most often.

This is not accidental. It is a system built on understanding human psychology. The same evolutionary bias that once protected us is now used to hold our attention for profit, popularity, and influence. Recognising this pattern becomes important, especially in a time where information flows endlessly and quietly trains the mind every single day.

Exceptions

So a natural question arises. Are these negative stories fake? Are they imaginary? Are they made up? The answer is simple. They are real. They do happen. Pain, crime, loss, and injustice exist in the world, and denying that serves no purpose. Yet another question matters just as much. How often do these events actually appear in our own lives, inside our homes, families, streets, and neighbourhoods?

If we pause honestly, the answer becomes clear. Very rarely. Most people have never witnessed such extreme events firsthand. Many have never even come close to them. These stories stand out because they are exceptional. They are rare occurrences pulled out of a massive population and placed under bright lights. Media houses know this well. Rarity creates attention. Unusual events create shock. Stories often get sharper edges, emotional colouring, and dramatic framing to make them travel faster. In the process, everyday reality quietly disappears from view.

The human mind struggles with probability. A rare event shown repeatedly begins to feel common. A one-in-a-million incident starts feeling personal. Take the fear of child kidnapping. The actual likelihood is extremely small, yet a single story can keep parents awake at night, replaying worst-case scenarios that may never come close to their own lives. Awareness has value. Constant fear does not. There is a difference between staying alert and living under imagined threat.

These stories work on the same principle as a lottery ticket. People buy it knowing the odds are tiny, yet the mind briefly imagines being the chosen one. With negative news, the imagination turns in the opposite direction. The mind places itself inside the rare tragedy, even when reality offers no such evidence. The cost of this habit shows up as anxiety, restlessness, and unnecessary mental strain.

Worrying endlessly over exceptional cases brings no protection. It only drains attention from the life actually being lived. The world carries both risk and safety, pain and normalcy. When rare events dominate daily thought, the mind loses its balance. Recognising this helps us step back, breathe, and return to what truly surrounds us here and now.

Mind Flow

As this blog comes to a close, it naturally circles back to MindFlow. At its core, MindFlow begins with one thing above everything else: awareness. Before solutions, before techniques, before tools, there has to be clarity. If a person is not clear about what is shaping their thoughts, moods, and reactions, any solution remains cosmetic. Awareness changes the game. Once the mind starts seeing its own patterns, half the work is already done.

This is why the idea shared by Rick Hanson fits so naturally into the MindFlow way of thinking. The problem is not negativity alone. The real issue is how easily it slips in and how long it stays. Positivity, on the other hand, behaves like a shy guest. It comes quietly and leaves early unless invited to stay. MindFlow believes that this needs conscious correction. Negative thoughts deserve quick exits. Positive experiences deserve longer stays. Simple rule. Tough execution. Very human problem.

Hanson spoke about holding a good experience for around thirty seconds. MindFlow happily raises the bar. One full minute. Sixty seconds of staying with a good taste, a warm conversation, a beautiful song, a peaceful silence, or a genuine smile. No scrolling. No rushing. Just staying there. The mind may protest initially. It always does. With time, it learns. Slowly, memory begins to carry more light than weight.

This is not about changing the world overnight. Evolution took millions of years to shape this brain. A few minutes a day will not reverse everything. Still, personal change does not need permission from evolution. One person changing their inner experience already shifts something real. MindFlow works exactly there. One day at a time. One person at a time. The world can wait. Your mind does not have to.

So let 2026 be a small experiment. Stay longer with good moments. Exit faster from unnecessary fear. When you look back, let your memories feel balanced, human, and kind to you. And yes, MindFlow may sound strict at times. That is only because your mind has been getting away with too much nonsense for too long. A little discipline, a little humour, and a lot of awareness usually do the trick.

Have a beautiful year ahead. Stay aware. Stay lighter. And give happiness at least one full minute before you move on.1

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