How Negative Thoughts And Feelings Change The Brain

14.8 million people in the United States suffer from depression. In Germany, absence from work due to depression has increased almost 70% from 2000 to 2013, and the country is on the list of the most depressed countries in the world. We know that depression and anxiety change the way we live our lives, the way that our relationships with people develop and even the quality of the works and products we produce. However, we know little of how negative thinking (which doesn’t go hand-in-hand with depression) can actually affect the chemistry of our brain, in the short and long term.

Not only do people who tend to have automatic negative thought reactions to multiple situations daily (such as getting angry about traffic, thinking what they do is not good enough, always expecting a bad outcome, along with worrying and stressing in general) tend to get sick more often (of both minor illnesses such as flu and major ones as cancer), for their immune systems are far lower than the average. These people also age faster and, as recently found out by 2017 studies, the pain receptors are exaggerated, which means that what you would feel as a little pinch when having good thoughts, the brain perceives as a distressing stabbing pain when negatively thinking. Not only this, but we lose our empathy almost entirely, becoming not unaware but uncaring for other people’s suffering, however great their pain is compared to ours.

'These results obviously have real-world implications. If a person in power, say a boss, has been exposed to something negative in their lives — even something as simple as a negative movie — they could be less sensitive to a colleague in pain and even view them more negatively. Our bad moods literally make us less receptive to others’ feelings.'