Great post. I'd like to expand on your point on how your brain is plastic which is important when it comes to positive/negative thoughts.
Positive Psychology is a really new but active area of psychology. One of the things they have found is that certain jobs are more oriented towards negative thought. For example, auditing is mostly about looking for mistakes. The interesting part is that people in these "negative" professions end up thinking negatively about everything in their life, not just their profession. As you point out, this is because the more we fire a certain set of neurons, the easier it is to fire and less energy it consumes.
But what is even more interesting is that there are certain professions like software development that are neutral on this negative to positive spectrum. In these cases we can actually influence how we think and build these neuron pathways just by context framing. i.e. instead of looking at a bug as fixing a mistake, look at it as an opportunity to improve the product.
Positive Psychology is a really new but active area of psychology. One of the things they have found is that certain jobs are more oriented towards negative thought. For example, auditing is mostly about looking for mistakes. The interesting part is that people in these "negative" professions end up thinking negatively about everything in their life, not just their profession. As you point out, this is because the more we fire a certain set of neurons, the easier it is to fire and less energy it consumes.
But what is even more interesting is that there are certain professions like software development that are neutral on this negative to positive spectrum. In these cases we can actually influence how we think and build these neuron pathways just by context framing. i.e. instead of looking at a bug as fixing a mistake, look at it as an opportunity to improve the product.