A friend offers you three apples but discovers they only have two to give. At another time, a friend initially offers you only one apple but then discovers they actually have two for you.
Now the question: do you feel differently about these two exchanges? The outcome is the same – from a simple numbers perspective. But in multiple studies, the loss of the former item outweighs the gain of the latter one from an emotional perspective. Not only has this reaction been replicated several times with humans, but our primate cousins also demonstrate loss aversion. In other words, this tendency to feel loss more than gain goes way back in our evolution!
We seem to have evolved to avoid loss. We can easily see how this would be of benefit to us when our very survival depended on getting adequate food, shelter and clothing. Loss could easily mean death. But despite our nice cozy homes and overflowing grocery stores, this evolutionary fear remains. The same neurological networks are applied to any loss, be it tangible (“Who ate my cookie?!”) or less tangible (“Why has he not called me?!”).
When these old emotional connections begin to ring out, we also have a multitude of well-honed coping tools (such as the cookie, a Friends marathon, or a deep dive into TikTok). While these habits offer short-term relief, the “loss” ping still rings deep in our emotional brain. What is a person to do?
Mindfulness creates a “one-step-back” stance to observe this old emotional reaction. Not only can we see it, but in this pause, a choice appears. Rather than the old knee-jerk “reach for the cookie,” we can hold both the reaction and our tendency to distract in our field of awareness. This holding space lessens the reverberations of the loss as well as offers us the opportunity for a new alternative – to go for a walk, phone a friend, feel the warmth of the sun or pet our dog. Each time we allow ourselves to be with the sense of loss, we discover we are more than that feeling and the feeling is transitory. Over time, we experience loss as an event in the moment, no more or less than a gain in another moment. Over time, we shed our evolutionary bias and arrive anew, in this moment.
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