A 2001 paper by psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues, bluntly titled "Bad Is Stronger Than Good," reviewed decades of research across memory, relationships, and decision-making and found the same asymmetry everywhere: negative information consistently outweighs positive information of equal size. A single harsh criticism outweighs several compliments. It isn't pessimism — it's wired directly into how the brain processes information.
The reason traces back to threat-detection. For most of human history, missing good news cost almost nothing; missing bad news — a predator, a hostile stranger — could cost your life. So attention evolved to scan for danger first, and stay relaxed about everything else. Modern news and social media didn't invent this bias, they just learned to feed it: negative stories get reported more, shared more, and clicked more, because that's what the threat-scanner was always going to prioritize.
The fix isn't willpower, since this fights biology rather than working with it. What actually helps is limiting exposure deliberately — a set window for checking news instead of leaving it open all day, and noticing when a story has zero real relevance to your life, which the scanner was never built to ask on its own.