Are You Discounting the Positive?
See the good in your life and yourself.
Discounting the positive is one of the mind’s trickier moves. It’s tricky because it gives you the illusion that you’re considering all the evidence, but really some of it gets dismissed out of hand.
The good that gets discounted is often about yourself. It’s especially common if you’re experiencing depression, and also if you just have a chronic, low-grade sense of not liking yourself. See if any of these examples sound familiar to you:
You get lots of positive feedback at work but you only remember the one or two critical responses.
You bat away compliments. For example, if someone says they like your outfit, you point out how the colors don’t quite go together, or you criticize your weight.
You might even turn a compliment into criticism, like if someone says you’re so patient with your kids and you say, “Ugh, I let them get away with way too much”—as if only the downside of your strength counts for anything.
You discount your expertise or the many things you do every day. They’re so familiar to you that they feel like nothing, leaving you with the impression that you know nothing and do nothing.
Someone invites you to hang out, and you assume it’s only because they feel sorry for you.
You reach a significant milestone like finishing a degree or getting a promotion and you write it off because you “had to work hard for it”—as if accomplishments count only if they’re easy.
Discounting the positive can also happen for the opposite reason: If something was easy for you, your mind could tell you that your achievement isn’t worth much because you didn’t have to work hard for it!
All of these examples are ways that the mind selectively weights information about you, giving importance to the negatives but not the positives. Habitual discounting props up an unfairly negative self-image, and it doesn't let you see yourself as you actually are.
When you address this distortion, you can see yourself more clearly, without the haze of negative filters.
It’s not easy to catch yourself discounting the positive because it often feels so right. So if you’re in the habit of discounting your successes and your strengths, it’ll take practice to recognize this distortion. So look for ways you might be discounting positive information about yourself:
Find one instance today when it makes sense to give yourself a little more credit.
For help with recognizing this mental bias and many others, check out this post on how to tame cognitive distortions, available to all paid subscribers:
Retrain Your Mental Habits
In this bonus post for paid subscribers you’ll find my 3-step plan for addressing the thinking errors that trigger distress. These errors are known as “cognitive distortions” because they distort reality in unhelpful ways.
With love,
It feels like we're being "responsible" or "accurate". In reality, we're often inaccurate when we discount the positive. There's a real cost to that, not just to our happiness but the effectiveness of our decisions.