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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER Learn to transform your perspective and lead with positivity In The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success, sales leader and strategist Anthony Iannarino delivers an exciting and effective new take on creating and sustaining powerful sales processes. You'll learn to lead with positivity as you harness negative emotions to make lasting changes for the better and explore the power of gratitude to transform your mental outlook. Discover how to reframe the negative events of your life into the ways they made you stronger and prepared you for future setbacks. The author also offers: * Concrete advice on perspective-taking and strategies for avoiding being triggered by people with different beliefs * A thirteen-week Negativity Fast, in which you'll eliminate sources of negativity for 90 days and introduce positivity into your mental diet * Discussions of the necessity for optimism in a difficult world An inspiring and exciting take on leadership, The Negativity Fast walks you through how to cultivate a positive attitude and perspective you can pass on to the people who follow you.
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Seitenzahl: 290
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
We Are the People We Are Waiting For
Disclaimer
Acknowledgments
1 Why You Are Negative
What Science Teaches Us About Negativity
The Evolutionary Value of Negativity
The ACDC Environment: Stress Under Constant Change
Negativity Is Biological
Negativity Is Psychological
Negativity Is Sociological
Permission to Be Negative
Notes
2 Talking Yourself into a Negative State
How to Examine Your Fears
Whose Voice Is It?
Strategies from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Talking Yourself Out of a Negative State
The Science of Inner Dialogue
Notes
3 Empathy and How to Lie to Yourself
Maybe It Isn't Road Rage
Empathy Without Knowing Why
Albert Ellis's ABC
Seeing What Is Invisible
Radical Acceptance
Assertive Communication
Avoidance
How to Let Go
The Science of Empathy
Notes
4 How to Stop Complaining
The Psychology of Complaining
Complaining in the Workplace
Complaining and Poor Problem‐Solving
How to Stop Complaining About Monday
The Stoic Solution
Steps to Stop Complaining
Solving Complaining at Work
The Quality of Your Life
The Science of Complaining
The Upside of Complaining
Notes
5 The Awesome Power of Gratitude
Gratitude and Attitude
How to Start Practicing Gratitude
Using a Grievance Journal
Building a Fire Board
The Power of Saying Thank You
Small Things Are Big Things
How We Live Poorly
The Science of Gratitude
Notes
6 Reframing Negative Events
Why a Cancer Diagnosis Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
What I Learned from Two Brain Surgeries
Freud and Adler
Two Ls: Losses or Lessons
Post‐Traumatic Growth Syndrome
How to Become a Hydra
Adversity and Traumatic Growth Syndrome
Notes
7 How to Live Happily with Political Divisiveness
A Short History of How We Got Here
Removing the Sources of Negativity
Memetic Infections
Why No One Wants to Sit Next to Uncle Enrico
Our Life with Two Warring Narratives
Liminal Thinking
How to Live with Other People's Politics
Preventing Political Negativity
Notes
8 Wanting and the Perils of Social Media
The Cyber Bullies
Social Media and the Spread of Negativity
More Positive Communication
More Contacts, Less Connection
We Sold Our Attention
The High Cost of Social Media Usage
Choosing in Real Life
How to Live Without Negative Social Media
The Science of Social Media and Negativity
Notes
9 How to Change Your State
Running Away from Negativity
Nutrition and Hydration
Remember to Breathe
Talk to Others
Turn to Music
Your Gratitude Journal
Positive Affirmations
Yoga or Tai Chi
Nature Therapy
Acts of Kindness
Avoid Alcohol and Drugs
The Evolution of Laughter
Emotional Freedom Technique
Pet Therapy
Power Nap
Take Better Care of Yourself
How to Be an Optimist
Positivity Is a Choice
Optimism Can Be Developed
Notes
10 Minding Mindfulness
Practicing Mindfulness
Taming Drunken Monkeys
Daily Life with Mindfulness
The Importance of Mindfulness
An Easy Way to Practice Mindfulness
The Science of Mindfulness
Notes
11 How to Forget Your Problems and Concerns
Why I Buy All the Dogs
Why Give to the Homeless
Helper's High
Altruism Is Important to Society
The Science of Helping Others
Notes
12 The Negativity Fast
Identify the Sources of Negativity
Negative People
Identifying the Sources of Positivity
Journal Your Negative and Positive States
What to Do When You Fall Off the Horse
Stay the Course and Double Down
Notes
Recommended Resources
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Disclaimer
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Recommended Resources
About the Author
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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ANTHONY IANNARINO
THE NEGATIVITY FAST
PROVEN TECHNIQUES TO INCREASE POSITIVITY, REDUCE FEAR, AND BOOST SUCCESS
Copyright © 2024 by Samuel Anthony Iannarino. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 750‐4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119985884 (cloth)
ISBN 9781119985983 (ePub)
ISBN 9781119985907 (ePDF)
Cover design: Paul McCarthy
The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. The accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological consequences. … Unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.
—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
Our newfound knowledge leads to faster economic, social, and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future.
—Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite, but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history.
—Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Preface
As your guide for the Negativity Fast, my goal is to help you reduce the time you spend in a negative state and increase the time you are positive. At one time, I was terribly negative. To improve the quality of my life, I decided to remove the sources of negativity, including my own mindset. It helped me feel better and improved my outlook on life. I called this process the Negativity Fast. It worked, but I made a series of mistakes that I eventually corrected, including not fasting for long enough, not replying to negativity with positivity, and not recognizing that it is okay to be negative—but not all the time. Since then, I've developed a more structured approach to guide a 90‐day Negativity Fast that anyone can adopt.
I've wanted to write this book for a long time. After the pandemic, I felt I had no choice but to write it for people who recognize that we are increasingly more negative than positive. It seems that the stress and anxiety of that tumultuous period are still present. Perhaps it has always been this way, and we needed that event to amplify how prevalent negativity is today. Our time on earth is short, and you don't want to waste it being negative. Negativity can harm your mental health, your physical health, and your relationships with others. In fact, sometimes we infect other people, including those we love, with our negativity, spreading it to them.
Our seven dominant emotions are anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Five dominant emotions are negative, with happiness being the only positive one, unless the surprise happens to be positive. When you pay attention to the people around you at home, at work, or at your local Applebee's, you notice many folks are angry, contemptuous (especially around politics), fearful, or sad. You may also notice you are more negative than you used to be.
Before you start your Negativity Fast, you will need to learn strategies that will help you succeed with your fast. Without the chapters that come before the instructions at the end of this book, it will be more difficult to reduce your negativity and replace it with positivity. Each chapter provides practical, tactical strategies that will help you remove your negativity. There are several strategies in each chapter because some will fit you better than others. Different people will find different approaches work better for them.
It is also important that you know that I am not a medical professional, and nothing here is medical advice. Instead, you will find practical, actionable changes you can make to feel better. All the recommendations and strategies are supported by science. At the end of this book you will find a list of books and citations to scientific papers if you are so inclined to follow the science. I studied these strategies and adopted them so I could feel better and more positive, and now I want to share them with you.
We Are the People We Are Waiting For
When you are getting ready to take off on an airplane, the flight attendant announces that should there be a change in cabin pressure, you should secure your own mask before helping others. You will not be helpful to others if you don't take care of yourself first. If there was ever a time to help each other, this is it. We need each other to make things better. The more of us who can reduce our negativity and replace it with positivity, the more we can help others feel better.
Here is an outline of what you'll read in this book:
Chapter 1
: Why You Are Negative:
Without being overly scientific, we will start by looking at the science of why we are negative and how our current environment causes us to be more negative.
Chapter 2
: Talking Yourself into a Negative State:
Here we will start to understand how we talk ourselves into a negative state and how to talk ourselves out of that state. Your inner voice isn't always helpful.
Chapter 3
: Empathy and How to Lie to Yourself:
You will learn to lie to yourself in a way that can remove your negativity, especially when it comes to other people.
Chapter 4
: How to Stop Complaining:
If you want to feel better more of the time, you will have to train yourself to stop complaining. Listen, if I can do it, you can do it.
Chapter 5
: The Awesome Power of Gratitude:
This practice can help deal with depression. But don't take my word for it. Instead, we'll follow the example of the father of positive psychology.
Chapter 6
: Reframing Negative Events:
You can loosen the hold that negativity has over you by reframing the negative events you have experienced. You did learn something that can turn a negative into a positive?
Chapter 7
: How to Live Happily with Political Divisiveness:
Politics made me negative. It makes a lot of other people miserable. Here you will learn to be positive despite our extreme political divineness, no matter which party you support.
Chapter 8
: Wanting and the Perils of Social Media:
After I wrote this chapter, I deleted the social media apps from my phone. You may want to share this with your children, especially teenagers.
Chapter 9
: How to Change Your State:
There are a great number of things you can do change your negative state to a positive or neutral state. Your state is in your control.
Chapter 10
: Minding Mindfulness:
This is short chapter about the benefits and strategies to practice mindfulness, something I learned from two Zen masters.
Chapter 11
: How to Forget Your Problems and Concerns:
If you need to feel better fast, the easiest way to change that state is to help someone else, a strategy that will give you something called a helper's high.
Chapter 12
: The Negativity Fast:
You'll identify your triggers and remove them as much as possible and replacing them with positivity.
You will find additional resources at www.negativityfast.com.
Disclaimer
I am not a doctor or a medical professional. Nothing in this book is medical advice because I am not qualified to provide advice on medical issues. What you will find here are practical ways to reduce your negativity and spend more time being positive, making this a self‐help book. I have practiced everything in this book myself and helped others with the advice and recommendations you will find in The Negativity Fast.
If you are depressed, overly anxious, or have thoughts about harming yourself or others, please reach out to a health‐care provider for help. Here is a list of resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1‐800‐273‐TALK (8255)
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
SAMHSA's National Helpline: 1‐800‐662‐HELP (4357)
Veterans Crisis Line: 1‐800‐273‐TALK (8255)
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Cher, my wife and best friend. She suffered years of me being angry and negative before I turned the corner and started to remove the sources of my negativity. No one supports me more than Cher.
I owe a debt and an apology to Aidan, my son, for teaching him to complain. I hope this book will undue the harm I caused. He is a better person than I was at his age or any age. He is a good man. Mia, my tall twin, and Ava, my small twin, are both positively positive girls, the result of their mother's influence far more than mine.
I am grateful to have a mom who never gave up on me. She is a wonderful mother, and even though I will never be able to match her contribution, I do my best to follow her example of charity and caring. Both my mom and my dad supported me from my teenage years playing rock ’n’ roll in bars I was too young to be allowed in, to writing books like this one. I was never told that I couldn't do something, but when I was told not to do something, I was certain to do it. I am also grateful to my sisters and brothers, Mike and Rachel and Mike, Thada and Rich and Josie, Molly and Jack and Max, Tara and Lindy and Abbigail, and my brother Jason and his outstanding contribution to Chapter 3: Empathy and How to Lie to Yourself.
My family at Solutions Staffing, Peg Mativi, Matt Woodland, and all the many people who help people who need work. Iannarino Fullen Group including Geoff Fullen and Brandy Thompson. My friend Beth Mastre. Jeb Blount, my partner in the OutBound Conference, where I previewed this book on the greatest sales stage of any sales conference. Victor Antonio for helping me be a better speaker and for allowing me to tease him, Mike Weinberg for his friendship, and Mark Hunter for always showing up. Andy Paul for being such a great host and thinker. Seth Godin for his friendship, influence, and his outstanding example.
When Shannon Vargo of Wiley acquired me as an author, I pitched her on the Negativity Fast. Shannon agreed to allow me to write something outside of sales, leadership, and business. This is my first book for a wide audience. I hope she forgives me for missing my due date, but some books are harder to birth, especially when one is overwhelmed with work. Christina Verigan straightens out my sentences and paragraphs and pushes me to make things clearer for the reader. She makes me a better writer. Deborah Schindlar, who produces my books with Wiley, is kind enough to chase me down and keep me on time. Thanks to Michael Friedberg for his help marketing Elite Sales Strategies, Leading Growth, and now, The Negativity Fast. John Acker has edited every book I have done with Wiley. John matches my irreverence and playfulness.
Most of all, I am grateful for you, the reader, who cares enough about the idea of going on a Negativity Fast and being more positive.
1Why You Are Negative
It's not just you. Unless you've been sound asleep for the last quarter century, I'm sure you've noticed that most people are negative, grouchy, angry, and occasionally violent. Maybe you, like me, remember being more positive a few decades back. But it seems everyone around us is a lot more cynical and skeptical. Some people are even mad as hell. What happened?
Some of it is historical. The 21st century started with a terrorist attack on the United States, sparking a 20‐year war in Afghanistan, which rolled right into the dot‐com bubble, the Great Recession, sharper political divisiveness, a pandemic, supply‐chain issues, a hot war in Europe, record inflation, and worst of all, reality television. And you wonder why everyone is a bit crabby.
To understand why we are negative and what to do about it, we must look to science to learn about the biology and psychology behind negativity. We'll also look through the eyes of a 20th‐century futurist whose predictions about rapid social change are coming true. But if negativity wasn't helpful in some way, it wouldn't exist.
What Science Teaches Us About Negativity
I hesitate to talk about “the science” after the recent debates on masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and the like. But you need to know why you and I are wired for negativity. We'll start by exploring what psychologists label negativity bias. There are four components of negativity bias that you should know—but don't worry, I promise there won't be a quiz at the end of the chapter.
Negative Potency:
Our negative emotions are stronger than our positive ones. If you've ever wondered why your negative emotional states seem to last longer than your positive ones, this may be part of the reason.
Steeper Negative Gradients:
This intimidating term simply means that the closer a negative event, the faster your negativity about it grows. If you are anxious, it's likely you are focusing on some potentially negative future event. The odd thing is that this gradient is not nearly as steep for positive events.
Negative Dominance:
Combining negative and positive events results in evaluations that are more negative than is logical or even justified. Guess what? You lost $100! Guess what else? You won $150. You sigh, more upset about the loss than happy about the $50 profit.
Negative Differentiation:
In the real world, negative events are more varied and complex than positive events. Your brain uses more resources to think about, reflect, and process negative events. This leads to differences in the language we use to describe them and how we attend to, learn from, and remember them.
Because these elements work together, all humans have a negativity bias, even if some wallow in that negativity more than others. But psychologist Robert L. Leahy believes that evolution would not favor a trait that wouldn't help us survive: negativity is a feature, not a bug.1 At the same time, we also have a bias towards optimism—a version of yin and yang. Yin and yang are chaos and order, light and dark, cold and hot, and up and down. Even though negativity is dominant, our optimism causes us to persist in pursuing our goals.
The Evolutionary Value of Negativity
Say you and I are cave people living tens of thousands of years ago. As we are walking around one day, you tell me you want to make a list of all the things that may cause serious problems. I like it: the reason you are my best friend is because you are always inventing new games like this one. “Okay,” you say, “first question: Will this kill me?” I argue that the category is too broad since almost everything in our primitive environment is likely to kill us. Heck, half the things we eat would eat us if they had the chance.
Still, it's an important—and serious—question. How can we stay alive by avoiding things that might cause us to expire prematurely? So I propose a more specific test: “If I eat this, will I die?” You agree that food is difficult to come by, even if we aren't counting prehistoric carbs. I remind you that nine of our tribe members died after eating those enticing and delicious‐looking red berries that grow near the waterline.
Since we know those berries are trouble, you suggest painting pictures of poisonous plants on the cave wall, as a warning to our friends and families. I remind you that five of our friends still ate the berries after the first group died. We agree that our tribe might think the drawings are a menu, so we decide not to publicize the berries any further. But we do need to be concerned about what we eat.
Next, you ask, “Will this person or persons try to dominate us?” Most of the cave dwellers close to us are real savages. Some of them don't bother to wear the fur from the animals they kill and eat, or even to follow Adam and Eve's cue and cover themselves with leaves. You and I are more civilized than these barbarians, and we also have a greater sense of fashion. We've been eating meat and our brains are expanding, even though the effects are not evenly distributed across the tribe.
As you are talking about the savages next door, I interrupt to suggest that whenever these neighboring brutes visit us, the first thing we should do is offer them those red berries. You object to taking their lives, as murder is wrong, perhaps even beneath us. I suggest keeping the berries around, just in case. Even if some of our neighbors are actually more friendly than violent, odds are that a bad egg will turn up eventually.
That point leads us to our next test: “Will this person copulate with me?” I think it's a crucial addition. As far as I can tell, this is our number‐one priority, particularly since we enjoy spending more time with friends and less time with brutes. Our tribe tends to grow larger over time, but no one, even us, knows why half the tribe keeps finding crabby, loud, lazy, and squeaky people. It's a mystery, we decide, and chances are that no one will ever be able to explain it.
Before we head back to the cave, though, you make one final observation: Our optimistic peers don't seem to live very long. The ones who survived their impetuous actions have a lot of scars and broken bones. They often have trouble finding food, especially since they can't outrun anyone or anything. The few of us with gray hair tend to avoid rushing into things. We seem to be more pessimistic, skeptical, and cautious than the rest of our clan. Well, what's left of them anyway.
The ACDC Environment: Stress Under Constant Change
When I was a young kid playing rock ’n’ roll, I was a dead ringer for Bon Scott, the legendary voice of AC/DC. Perhaps the future shock that Toffler predicted won't necessarily put us on the proverbial highway to hell, but it's worth thinking about another kind of ACDC: “Accelerating, Constant, Disruptive Change.”
One reason that this change skyrockets our stress levels is that we weren't designed for this kind of environment. In the distant past, most of our immediate threats were high‐grade stressors, like a saber‐tooth tiger attack. Either you escaped or you became the tiger's dinner date. We didn't have the low‐grade stressors of a boss, taxes, or car insurance payments for teenagers. Currently, however, most of our lives entail low‐grade stressors, which we're ill‐adapted to deal with.
At the time of this writing, for instance, our ACDC environment includes the following:
The highest inflation numbers in more than 50 years
High gas prices due to production and capacity issues
Russia's war in Ukraine
An increasing number of countries, led by China, choosing autocracy over democracy, making the world more dangerous
An unchecked political divisiveness some suggest could lead to a US civil war
The boomer generation retiring without enough workers to replace them, which is why you have bad service almost everywhere
A low birth rate, just 54 births for every 1000 women in 2021
Constant staffing challenges in health care (including nursing), despite having more than two jobs available (in the United States) for every person not presently working
Speaking of work, technology's promise to help with work‐life balance has instead exacerbated the problem, with people working day and night to keep up with their work
Some in the sandwich generation who must take care of their children and their aging parents at the same time
Increasing income disparity that may threaten our way of life.
A decreasing life‐span, largely due to suicide and drug overdoses
These major stressors often affect us directly, and they form the backdrop to our daily lives. While it may be possible to ignore at least of few of these, it's virtually impossible to forget them all completely. On top of these social and geopolitical issues, personal stressors add even more pressure. Even though these events may happen on a smaller scale, they loom larger in our lives because they are direct threats to what is most important to us. Here are a few examples:
You are up for a promotion at work, and you're counting on the extra income, but your boss is considering promoting his current favorite ahead of you.
Your seventh‐grade daughter is being ostracized by the mean girls in her class, simply because she is a sweet, thoughtful, adorable, and bookish girl. She doesn't want you to intervene, but you can't stand to see her suffer.
You feel an uncomfortable tickle at the back of your throat. Is it a cold? The flu? The latest pandemic? You can't afford to miss work now, but you can barely get out of bed.
Three of your neighbors have reported break‐ins this month. You wish you had the extra funds to upgrade your security system.
Your 11‐year‐old wants a cell phone because all of his friends have one. You notice that his friends and your older kids are addicted to their phones. Even you have trouble putting your phone down. You want to do what is best but can't decide whether it's better to give him the phone so he can fit in or hold out until he's older and listen to him complain until then.
The neighbor's kid with the long hair and the loud stereo drives too fast, and you're sure that one of these days he's going to hit one of the kids in the cul‐de‐sac. When you asked his parents to make him slow down, their “boys will be boys” defense didn't do your blood pressure any favors.
Your car needs major repairs, but you can't afford a rental and the mechanic is fresh out of loaners.
Your accountant called to say that the tax refund you were expecting was a miscalculation, and instead you owe money that you don't have.
Some of these smaller stressors stem from larger events, like inflation increasing a household's financial strain or political disagreements damaging personal relationships. Other stressors can simply be bad luck or part of a wider pattern of human behavior. Regardless of how stress enters our lives, we are all paying a price for the accelerating, constant, disruptive change. We feel the chronic stress and the toll it takes—not just in mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression, but in physical challenges like insomnia and heart disease. Couple that with ongoing psychological damage from technology and social media. We are bombarded daily with constant information, disinformation, and misinformation. A single “check out my vacation” picture can cause unhealthy social comparisons and ratchet up our fear of missing out.2 It's even worse for young people, who often live on social media at a time when they are most developmentally vulnerable to comparison.3,4
Stress can cause problems with cognitive functions, like memory, attention, and decision‐making. It can lead to a lack of productivity and efficiency in different aspects of our life. People with higher levels of neuroticism, including from genetic features, can be extra vulnerable to the negative effects of stress.5,6
One way to combat stress is to build resilience, so we can better cope with the challenges of living in an ACDC environment. Mindfulness can help, and so can building a strong social support system, to develop effective problem‐solving skills. Later, we'll look at cognitive‐behavioral therapy, along with tips for exercise, relaxation strategies, and finding work‐life balance. It's also worth knowing that there are positive effects of stress, a concept called eustress (positive stress). Eustress can cause growth, greater creativity, and stronger performance, even in everyday people like you and me.
Negativity Is Biological
Your biology is sometimes the source of your negativity. Let's get real. You stay busy, often because you're taking care of everyone else. But failing to take care of yourself can multiply your stress and negativity. Our most basic animal needs are food, water, sleep, and movement. When we neglect those needs, we cannot effectively make decisions or use our higher‐level cognitive skills. When our body is stressed, we aren't able to work on other important aspects of our lives.
Waiting too long to eat can send your body into a “hangry” state, inviting the three‐pound, grayish‐pink meatloaf that is your brain to unleash your inner Mr. or Ms. Hyde. Or perhaps you settled for an Oreo lunch because you were too busy to find a healthy meal. The sugar rush, you figured, was just what you needed to power through an afternoon of meetings. But just about the time John and Susan are rehashing the same argument they've had at every meeting for the past three months, your sugar high ends and you crash. For next time, I prescribe a small salad with some protein—and perhaps an urgent matter that requires you to miss the meeting. There are studies that suggest that a salad and protein for lunch can ward off negativity. They also suggest that a healthy food can cause a positive mood.7
