In his book The Mindful Way Through Stress, mindfulness teacher Shamash Alidina reminds us that the level of stress we experience is linked to how much we believe our thoughts about a stressor.
Through mindfulness and meditation, we learn that we can choose to empower specific thoughts while ignoring others.
This is important because of certain cognitive biases — errors in thinking that occur as we process and interpret information in the world around us.
One cognitive bias particularly relevant to resilience and well-being is the negativity bias: the tendency to give more attention and weight to negative experiences and information. Another is confirmation bias: the tendency to seek out, notice, and remember information that supports our pre-existing instinct or point of view, while avoiding or ignoring information that contradicts it.
