Availability Bias
When a client approaches me, they’re generally ready to tell me what their problem is. Maybe they feel stuck at a dead-end in their life. Maybe they can’t seem to kick a destructive habit. Maybe they just can’t seem to live the way they want. So I ask them why they think they have this problem, and almost 100 percent of them name their current circumstances—their job, their relationships, their health, the weather… just about anything outside themselves. Of course, this is virtually never really the problem. Today, once again, we’re continuing our series of your top-rated spiritual laws of all time by getting to what I feel is one of the more common true sources of these problems: availability bias.
If you’ve ever been around someone extremely negative, you know how draining it can be just to interact with them. Maybe you’ve even been that person. But these people generally won’t see themselves as negative. They see their circumstances as negative or even the whole world! No one wants to be negative just for the sake of negativity, but these types of people will absolutely find the negative even in most positive situations. So here’s the million-dollar question: why?
Researchers recently discovered a mechanism in the brain that casts a new light on this tendency, called “availability bias.” Basically, our unconscious minds heavily prioritize negative memories over positive ones and tend to take negative events out of context. For example, if you see a news report about a local break-in, you might immediately start to worry that your own home could be burglarized, even when the crime occurred on the other side of town and there is virtually no chance of anything related happening to you.
This works even when we intellectually understand the statistics involved. See, our minds place more weight and more easily recall things that we have experienced ourselves or seen examples of, as opposed to more abstract concepts like probabilities and statistical analysis. This also goes to explain, for example, why people continue to buy lottery tickets even when it’s common knowledge that this is a bad investment. It’s not that they don’t understand the odds, it’s that the odds carry less mental weight than the winners we’re constantly seeing on TV.
In addition to this, I believe we have become burdened by what I call the “devolution of memory.” Once upon a time, there was only one definition of the word “die,” that is, eating the fruit of a certain tree. Fast forward a bit, and now we have to worry about rivals, predators, and starvation. Go on to the middle ages and we can add things like plagues and crusades from the list. Today, in my experience, the average person has hundreds of definitions for death. Many of these we think of as only metaphorical, as in, “This job is gonna kill me.” But the unconscious mind doesn’t make these distinctions. So the end result is that we may be living in fear every single day for no good reason!
This is why I believe it is so important to work with our subconscious. Awareness of these tendencies is the first step, but we need every tool we can get. That’s been the main purpose of my work for the last 30+ years, and much of it is available to you for free! Trilogy and Memory Engineering in particular are the best tools I know for treating the misconceptions in your subconscious and allowing you to live in truth and peace.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Alex Loyd
