Being Too Negative

I've noticed that as a group socially unskilled people tend be somewhat more susceptible to becoming too negative. Negative people more likely to focus on and bring up the flaws in situations, or talk about things they dislike. They generally have a cynical, pessimistic attitude. They may be straight up moody or grumpy, or they could more have a subtle prickly, sarcastic edge to them.

Negativity hinders people in two ways. First, it's just viscerally unpleasant to be around someone who's injecting unpleasant emotions and vibes into every conversation. It's not that their points are never valid, but it wears people down to always be subjected to that perspective.

Secondly, someone's a lot less likely to do things to further their social cause if they see the worst in everything. They're going to be held back in making friends if they keep finding flaws in everyone they meet, or they're too critical of their own efforts to improve their social skills.

Targets for negativity

People can direct their negativity towards a number of things. Everybody has thoughts like the ones below occasionally. It's more a matter of degree, whether someone is constantly dwelling on the bad side of things or not:

When someone is blatantly negative it's pretty obvious, but people can also do it in a more subtle manner, where they may not even realize how often you're acting that way.

Signs you may be too negative

Reasons people can be too negative

I think there are a lot of reasons someone can end up being negative too often. Most of these causes are reasonable. It's not like people intentionally set out to be gloomy downers, they just fall into it without realizing how they got there. I think there are two general ways people can become overly negative. The first is that a gloomy perspective is a side effect of other problems in their lives:

  • Their life isn't too great at the moment, and that naturally affects their outlook on things for the worse.
  • They're feeling depressed, and their negative view of the world is a symptom of that.
  • Someone hasn't had the greatest past, and it hasn't given them a reason to think the world is anything else than a disappointing, negative place.
  • Some may use negative observations as a way to prop up their shaky self-esteem. They criticize things to feel better about themselves, whether to knock everything down to their level and/or to boost their ego by feeling smart and capable for noticing the flaws in things.
  • Negativity can be used as a perverse coping mechanism. If you lower your expectations then nothing disappoints you. Or you may be mentally invested in the idea that nothing will work out, and your negativity unconsciously acts to keep things that way.
  • I think the other way people can become overly negative is when it's a behavior that becomes habitual, or it's a personality trait that gets over expressed. Someone may see their negativity as a good thing:

    The difficulty of breaking the negativity habit

    I said earlier that being too negative can be like a bad habit. It can be a hard one to break for a number of reasons:

    A few ideas on how to be less negative