#240: 3 Reasons Your Brain Clings To Negative Thoughts, By A Psychologist

Just one week off social media can improve young adults' mental health, study finds

Author

Jenae Spry
December 05, 2025

Productivity Stacks Newsletter

(Formerly Productivity Express)

Issue No. 240

The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity

for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders

Helping You Work Smarter and Live More

The Rundown

  • 3 Reasons Your Brain Clings To Negative Thoughts, By A Psychologist

  • 'Cognitive Legos' help the brain build complex behaviors

  • Just one week off social media can improve young adults' mental health, study finds

  • I ditched Notion for a tool that fits my creative workflow

  • Gemini is here for Android Auto: 5 things to try

🔥Quote/Prompt

❝

Be willing to trust your instincts, especially if you cannot find answers elsewhere.

Brian Koslow

Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.

A bit from mine:

(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)

Sometimes this is easier said than done (all the time?). But our subconscious or that "gut feeling" actually has a […]

Did someone forward this to you?

📈 Performance

Those negative thought patterns that seem to run on repeat in your brain aren’t a personal failing—they're a feature your brain developed to keep you alive. Understanding why your brain defaults to negativity can help you stop beating yourself up about it and start working with your wiring instead of against it.

"Over thousands of years, this led the human brain to prioritize negative or threatening information. Even today, the brain uses the same ancient alarm system, treating social rejection, criticism, financial fears or uncertainty like potential threats to one's survival. Research also confirms that the amygdala, a critical brain structure for emotional processing, responds strongly to emotionally arousing stimuli. While it's active for both positive and negative stimuli, evidence shows an especially strong prioritization when threat is perceived."

Key Insights:

  1. Your brain treats modern stress like ancient threats—missing a potential danger could have been fatal for our ancestors, so your brain still responds to a critical email or social rejection as if it's a life-or-death situation.

  2. Negative memories stick better by design—research shows people pay more attention to central details in negative emotional events, which is why you can remember one critical comment from years ago but struggle to recall five compliments from last week.

  3. Stress creates a feedback loop that makes negativity worse—dwelling on negative thoughts triggers cortisol release, which makes your brain more sensitive to negative information, leading to more negative thoughts in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Read the full article for specific techniques to break negative thought patterns, including the 10-20 second practice that helps positive moments encode more deeply in your brain.

⚙️ Optimization

AI might beat humans at individual tasks, but your brain still has a massive advantage: flexibility. While AI systems struggle to learn new things without forgetting old ones, your brain effortlessly reuses cognitive building blocks across different challenges. This research reveals exactly why humans can adapt so much faster than even the most sophisticated AI—and why you should lean into that advantage. don't realize.

"State-of-the-art AI models can reach human, or even super-human, performance on individual tasks. But they struggle to learn and perform many different tasks. We found that the brain is flexible because it can reuse components of cognition in many different tasks. By snapping together these 'cognitive Legos,' the brain is able to build new tasks."

Key Insights:

  1. Your brain's superpower is compositionality—you can quickly learn to use new project management software because your brain repurposes existing skills like organizing information and setting priorities, while AI would need to be retrained from scratch.

  2. AI suffers from catastrophic interference that humans don't—when machine learning systems learn something new, they literally forget previous knowledge, like an AI that learns to write emails forgetting how to write reports.

  3. Use this insight to delegate smarter—let AI handle repetitive, single-task work like data entry or generating first drafts, while you focus on work that requires adapting to new contexts, combining skills in novel ways, or applying lessons from one situation to another.

Read the full article for details on how understanding cognitive building blocks could help develop better AI systems and potential treatments for conditions that impair cognitive flexibility.

⏲️ Time Management

Just one week off social media can improve young adults' mental health, study finds

If you've ever wondered whether your social media scrolling is actually affecting your mental health, this study has your answer. Researchers tracked nearly 400 young adults and found that cutting social media use for just one week led to significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and insomnia symptoms—results that typically take months of therapy to achieve.

"Hey, it usually takes eight to 12 weeks of intensive psychotherapy to see those kinds of reductions in mental health symptoms. So if you can get those with just one week of changing behavior, wow."

Key Insights:

  1. Even a partial reduction makes a difference—participants cut their social media use from two hours daily to just 30 minutes, which was enough to reduce anxiety symptoms by 16%, depression by 24%, and insomnia by 14.5% in just one week.

  2. It's specifically social media that's the problem, not screen time overall—participants' total screen time didn't decrease during the detox, yet they still saw mental health improvements, proving that scrolling Instagram is more harmful than other digital activities.

  3. The best part? Eighty percent of participants chose to do the detox—this isn't about willpower or extreme measures, just a one-week experiment that most people are willing to try once they understand the potential benefits.

Read the full article for details on how researchers used the MindLAMP app to track actual usage data rather than relying on participants' estimates, which are notoriously unreliable.

💻 Tools & Technology

If you're paying for Notion but finding yourself fighting with databases when you just want to capture an idea quickly, you're not alone. This writer switched to Tana after realizing that building structure before working doesn't fit everyone's workflow—especially if your work shifts between different roles and projects that don't follow predictable patterns.

"Where Notion is based on fixed pages and rigid databases, Tana is a note and knowledge tool built around tiny building blocks. They're called nodes and supertags. I would say it's an outliner that behaves like a living graph without you actually seeing the graph. The whole time, you're mostly pressing Enter to make a nest. You'll write a short note, capture images and videos, record voice memos, or upload files. Then label them."

Key Insights:

  1. Tana lets you capture first and organize later—instead of designing databases upfront, you quickly document ideas and tag them with simple hashtags, making the tool work more like your brain actually thinks rather than forcing you into rigid structures.

  2. One piece of information can live in multiple places without duplication—a voice memo from a meeting can simultaneously appear in your daily notes, meeting notes, and task list just by tagging it appropriately, eliminating the need to copy information between different databases.

  3. The tool works especially well for solopreneurs who wear multiple hats—if you're writing content one day and managing client projects the next, Tana adapts to whatever you're doing without requiring you to pre-build systems for every possible scenario.

Read the full article for details on how the Daily prep supertag works for voice-based planning and how the referencing system changes the entire experience of organizing your work.

🤖 AI

If you've been using Google Assistant in your car, Gemini is about to make your driving time significantly more productive. Instead of remembering exact voice commands, you can now have actual conversations with AI while driving—finding restaurants, managing emails, creating playlists, and even rehearsing presentations, all hands-free and without pulling over.

"Gemini will continue to provide the hands-free features you rely on, but goes way further as a truly conversational AI assistant. This means instead of having to remember the exact phrase to say what you want, with Gemini you can just speak naturally, have a back and forth conversation and get more complex tasks done."

Key Insights:

  1. Your commute can actually become productive time—Gemini can search your Gmail for buried information like hotel addresses, summarize unread emails, and help you respond to messages with proper context, turning drive time into done time.

  2. Natural conversation replaces rigid commands—instead of saying the exact right phrase, you can ask follow-up questions like "Is that barbecue place dog-friendly?" or "Can you add my ETA and a sorry emoji?" just like texting a friend.

  3. Gemini Live lets you rehearse and brainstorm while driving—you can practice presentations, brainstorm gift ideas, or learn about your destination through continuous conversation, making long drives feel less wasted.

Read the full article for details on music playlist creation, message translation into 40+ languages, and how to activate Gemini in your car once it rolls out.

🎉 Celebration Corner

Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!

  • 21.4 hrs of tracked billable work !!! 🦾🤩

  • Refined offer and messaging on LinkedIn, updating profile, featured links, content, and offer tiers.

  • Bookkeeping is on track!

What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

  • Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 1️⃣ Strategy & Mission  RSVP here

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  • Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party

  • Accelerators: December 12 is your Office Hours RSVP here

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)

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