Fewer lows before more highs: why removing the negative comes first

The Short Version

Three people who came at the question from different directions land in the same place: a life usually gets better faster when you take away what drags it down than when you add more good things to it [1][2][3]. Adam Alter says the real return is in the lows, because bad things pull us down much more than good things lift us up [2]. Price Pritchett says less negative thinking matters more than more positive thinking, and that most of our negative thinking goes unnoticed in five everyday habits [3]. Mel Robbins says she was already doing the gratitude practice and the other happiness hacks, and that what stood between her and happiness was three ways she was blocking it herself [1]. None of them tells you to stop adding good things; they tell you where to start [1][2][3].

Table of contents

What They Said

Adam Alter: raise the lows first

Adam Alter, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, came on Mel Robbins's show to talk about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough and about being stuck [2]. The passage this article turns on comes after Robbins describes a time when her life held a great many good things and she still felt empty [2]. Alter picks up on exactly that: she had described a whole lot of positives [2].

He starts with the common assumption: "We often think that the way to make life better is to do more good things." [2] He does not call it false. "I think there's some truth to that. More good things is only better." [2] But he says the larger gain is elsewhere: "I think the real bang for your buck in life, if you want to make life better, is to take the lows, the friction points, the things that are hard and bad and smooth them out or raise them up if you can." [2] And: "I think that's where we should spend our time and attention." [2]

His reason is an asymmetry. If you have a lot of good things and also a lot of bad things that drag you down, the bad ones "do a much worse job of dragging you down than the good things can do dragging you up." [2] His one-line version: "We are often as good as the worst stuff that's going on." [2] In the episode's summary, the examples of the good things people reach for are flashy vacations and new purchases, and the conclusion is that time, attention and money are best spent smoothing out friction points [2].

Alter also explains why people do the opposite. The natural instinct is to turn away from friction, for example by giving a struggling relationship some distance and focusing on more appealing parts of life [2]. Those unresolved points then become traps that can linger for decades and create the repetitive sameness that makes life feel stuck [2]. Robbins gives her own case of turning toward one: couples counseling with her husband, four and a half years earlier, which she describes as painful, like digging up dead bodies everywhere, and which she says made their relationship better than she imagined possible [2].

The friction audit. Alter's main tool for raising the lows is one he originally developed for companies, borrowing the idea of an auditor going line by line through a company's books [2]. It has three steps [2]:

• Identify the friction: the part of your day you look forward to least, the biggest downward force on your well-being, or the particular step (a boss, a skill, a task) you can never get past [2].
• Intervene: find a way to weed out that friction point or sand it down, often by spending time, energy or money on it [2].
• Confirm that the intervention actually worked [2].

Robbins tells the story of her own first one. In 2019, with a good marriage, healthy kids, finances in order and work she liked, she still felt empty, and guilty about feeling that way [2]. Her friend and mentor Peter Sheahan told her to write down everything in her life that created friction, and it poured out of her: packing on Sundays, being away, missing her kids [2]. Every item became a project: remove it, get someone else to do it, or find a way to do it without complaining [2]. Alter adds a fourth outcome, which is that some things simply get accepted and boxed away, like having to pack on a Sunday [2].

Robbins says of the list, "I do it every year." [2] Alter's point about repeating it is the third step of the audit at work: "The one thing about doing it consistently every year is the list should change." [2] When you have intervened well, he says, the repeat is a moment of confirmation, when you can look at things you were writing down two or three years ago and see that you fixed them [2]. He suggests doing a friction audit at least once a year, perhaps on your birthday, and not waiting for a decade birthday to force the question [2].

The same logic runs through his corporate work. Companies are full of friction, from bureaucracy and bottlenecks to extra clicks, pages and calls that cause customers to drop out of sales funnels, and much of what he does for them is finding and removing those points [2]. And it shapes his advice for helping someone else. You cannot bully a person into caring about a goal; a friction audit is a gentle way in because it is not a confrontation [2]. Instead of telling them what their problem is, you ask what is annoying them right now, and offer to work on it together [2].

Price Pritchett: less negative thinking beats more positive thinking

Price Pritchett, a psychologist and business consultant and the author of the short handbook You², talked with Lewis Howes on The School of Greatness mostly about making what he calls a quantum leap [3]. In the middle of that conversation he puts a question that he says he asks audiences and that he says is not a trick: which matters more, more positive thinking or less negative thinking [3]?

His answer, according to the episode's summary, is that the studies are unequivocal: less negative thinking matters more [3]. The reasoning rests on how he says the two relate. Most people picture one line with optimism at the high end and pessimism at the low end, but he says studies show these are really two different scales [3]. That is what makes his advice two instructions and not one. On the first scale: "Positive thinking is important", and he says to keep it up and keep it high [3]. On the second, where he says the real gain is, the instruction is "Just cut down on the negative thinking" [3].

He gives the negative side a character. It is the villain voice, "the critic in your head", the demotivator, the discounter, the one that raises the doubts [3]. He says you can quiet it, and that "it takes practice" and some discipline [3]. Elsewhere in the conversation he describes a hero voice and a villain voice and asks "who are you going to give airtime to?" [3] He calls the villain voice a con artist, because it claims to be protecting you from failure and embarrassment while focusing on your weak points and all the reasons why not [3].

The difficulty, he says, is that people believe they are aware of their negative thinking and are not. By his figure about 70% of our negative thinking goes unnoticed, because "it is so embedded in our day-to-day behavior" [3]. That is why he names the forms it takes, which he calls the five C's [3]:

• Complaining: griping about things that griping won't change. His example is the Dallas heat [3].
• Criticizing: there is always someone to blame, as when the Texas power grid has brownouts [3].
• Concern: he is clear this does not mean empathy for others; it is garden-variety worry about inflation or the news [3].
• Commiserating: joining someone else's complaints. He says it does no one any good: "It's destructive to both of us" [3].
• Catastrophizing: when you are really down, "You just blow things all out of proportion" [3].

Lewis Howes gives the idea its image. You can keep adding positive thinking, he says, but if there is dirt in the water, "it's still going to be dirty" [3]. With news and social media all around, the two of them agree that removing the negative is where the real gain lies [3].

Pritchett has two further tools for the cutting. One is "manage your remembering." [3] He says he can pull up memories of every embarrassment and failure, or of the times he pulled something off and surprised himself, and that we are too careless about which ones we dwell on [3]. The other is behavior: "you get to choose how you behave", whatever your thinking is doing [3]. You can act as though you have what it takes even if it feels like faking it [3]. A line from his book that Howes reads out fits the same view of where negative thoughts come from: "Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking but habitual thinking" [3].

He also says when the five C's are worst. From decades of watching organizations go through mergers, downsizing and restructuring, he describes what happens when change hits, including change you impose on yourself: it registers as danger, trust drops (including trust in yourself, and the villain voice goes wild), self-preservation takes over, and the five C's flood in [3].

His father is his picture of the result. He lived to 102, a positive thinker without being naive, with a stiff left leg from a childhood injury that he never complained about [3]. Pritchett's favorite bumper sticker, spotted on a rusty old car, sums up the outlook: "no use being pessimistic wouldn't work anyway." [3]

Mel Robbins: the three ways she was blocking her own happiness

Robbins's solo episode is the most personal of the three and, in one respect, the strongest evidence for the point, because she had already tried adding [1]. She opens by granting that happiness hacks work: "There are a lot of hacks that you can use that will give you a big boost to happiness. But that's not what we're doing today." [1] And she says she had been doing them: "I was doing all the hacks." [1] "Like I had a gratitude practice. I was smiling at people. I was appreciating the little moments." [1]

It had not changed what life felt like. Three years before the recording, she says, "the baseline experience for me in my day to day life was I basically went through life feeling agitated, frustrated, or disappointed." [1] What she found when she looked for the cause is the centre of the episode: "The single biggest barrier to my happiness for Mel Robbins was me." [1] The epiphany she wants listeners to have is "how you are actively blocking your happiness right now." [1]

She is specific about what she means by happiness: "it's not a feeling of positivity. For me, when I use the word happy, it is a feeling of being content, present and okay with yourself in your life." [1] And she is specific about where she had been looking for it: "I was always looking outside of me." [1] She was miserable in high school, miserable at her dream school Dartmouth, miserable in law school, and still not happy with herself while working a job she liked and married to someone she loved [1]. A friend named Pete told her, about three years before the episode, that the more successful she became, the more miserable she seemed [1].

Her conclusion was that there were plenty of reasons to be happy, and that she was blocking happiness from getting into her [1]. In the summary's quotation of her: "The secret to being happier is realizing you have to let it in." [1] She goes further and says people are not just passively blocking happiness but actively fighting it, which she calls a "campaign of misery" [1]. Her image is two doors. One is a massive steel bank vault door with a code nobody knows: "Nobody can get in. That was me." [1] The other is the pair of swinging galley doors between a restaurant's dining room and its kitchen [1]. Happiness has to flow both ways; she had no trouble sending it out, and letting the doors swing in was nearly impossible for her [1].

Then she names the three blocks.

Block one: locked in your head. "When you're up in your mind and you're worried and you're distracted, you're not in your life." [1] Her example is recent. Over the holidays her family gathered for four days for her mother's 75th birthday, and on the last full day she spiralled into worry that her daughter Kendall, who lives in Los Angeles, might marry and settle there and have kids far away [1]. She was absent all day, woke every hour that night, and says she wasted the last 24 hours with her family [1]. She tells it to show that this is an ongoing practice and that old habits die hard [1].

Block two: picking up a sword. "This is where you go through life and you feel like you're constantly bracing for a fight." [1] Hypervigilant, on edge, assuming someone is mad at you or that everything will be a struggle [1]. An executive producer on her daytime talk show once asked her why she was always so mad at her production company, observing that she always seemed to need someone to be against [1]. Her everyday examples: mad at your boss, annoyed with your spouse, fired up about politics or the news, agitated because the next airport line is moving faster [1]. Her instruction, as the summary quotes it: "Drop the sword. There is no fight." [1] In her recap: "Just drop it. That energy blows and you don't have to go through your life like that." [1] She adds that if a real fight comes you will be ready, and that the bracing is a learned behavior that can be unlearned [1].

Block three: focusing on what's wrong. "You are so focused on what's wrong, what's not working, that you're not allowing the good to flow in." [1] She refers to the negativity bias, the brain's wiring to magnify negatives, and to how far people take it: fixating on the one person who has not texted back while ignoring the many who love them [1]. Her example is a Today show viewer, the mother of a young toddler, who wanted to exercise 15 minutes a day and asked how to improve because she was only 50 percent effective [1]. Robbins's reply is "50% positive is awesome. But when you are engaged in a campaign of misery, what do you do? You don't see the good." [1] The same happens when you meet your quota and dwell on what you did not do [1].

Of the three experts she is the one who says most plainly that the problem is not a shortage of good things. She sums up her old pattern in two sentences: "It's how I relate to myself that is the real problem. It's the energy that I create internally that is robbing me of happiness." [1]

Her practices follow from the diagnosis. Visualize the swinging doors, which she says she does almost every day: "When something good happens, acknowledge it. Let the good come in." [1] When someone pays you a compliment, look them in the eye and say thank you; when someone offers help, accept it, because saying no is "your bank vault door shutting out happiness, not allowing it to flow into you." [1] Tell people you love them [1]. And write a friction list: walk through a typical week on paper and list every place you pick up the sword, brace or close off, whether it is bills, health, a commute or loneliness [1]. When she did it three years earlier, nearly everything traced back to one cause: she was always traveling for work [1]. She argues that complaining is itself active participation in the campaign of misery, that we complain because it is easier than changing, and that her own hard truth was that she was more committed to her excuses than to fixing things [1].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

What they share. Each one states a version of the same ordering. Alter: the bang for your buck is in the lows, not in more good things [2]. Pritchett: less negative thinking matters more than more positive thinking [3]. Robbins: she had the gratitude practice and plenty of reasons to be happy, and the barrier was what she herself was doing [1]. Each also keeps the positive in the picture. Alter says more good things is only better [2], Pritchett says to keep positive thinking high [3], and Robbins calls the hacks great before setting them aside for the episode [1].

Each also says the negative is easy to miss or avoid. Pritchett puts the unnoticed share at about 70% [3]. Alter says the instinct is to turn away from friction toward more appealing parts of life [2]. Robbins says of her own blocking, speaking to the listener, that you do not even realize you are doing it [1].

And complaining appears in all three as part of the problem. It is the first of Pritchett's five C's [3]. Robbins calls it active participation in the campaign of misery [1]. In the story Robbins tells in Alter's episode, one of the three things to do with an item on the friction list is to find a way to do it without complaining [2].

Where they differ: is the low out there or in here? This is the real disagreement, and it matters for what you do. Alter's lows are mostly things in your life: a boss, a task, a skill you lack, a struggling relationship, the worst part of your day [2]. You fix them by spending time, energy or money on them [2]. Pritchett's negatives are habits of thought and speech [3]. Robbins sits between the two and, in her solo episode, leans hard toward the inside. She says that after she worked to fix her marriage, the family's debt and her kids' struggles, solving the outside problems only magnified what was not working inside [1]. In her words: "Once you solve all the things that are wrong around you, the hurricane is supposed to disappear, right? Wrong. Because the hurricane when it comes to happiness is inside of you." [1]

Read strictly, that is a challenge to a purely external friction audit. Alter holds his view because he studies sticking points, and a sticking point is often a concrete thing that can be weeded out or sanded down [2]. Robbins holds hers because she lived the case where the concrete things had been fixed and the agitation stayed [1]. The two are less far apart than they look, for three reasons the sources give. Robbins herself uses the friction list in both episodes, and her own list traced back to something external, her constant work travel [1][2]. Her list is defined to include the inner items, every place you pick up the sword or brace [1]. And Alter's audit has an exit for what cannot be changed: some items are accepted and boxed away [2]. Robbins also grants that outside conditions count up to a point, because being unable to pay your bills creates crushing stress [1].

Where they differ: how much friction is bad. Robbins's instruction is to drop the sword [1]. Pritchett, in another part of his conversation, says some friction is healthy, like a workout, and argues that constraints help [3]. Alter says that when you are stuck you crave freedom, but what actually helps is constraint and clear, prescribed steps [2]. These are different kinds of friction. Robbins is talking about bracing for fights that are not coming [1], and Pritchett about effort and structure that build something [3], so they do not contradict each other, but the word needs care.

Where they differ: how much adding belongs in the plan. Pritchett's whole conversation is about adding something large, a stretch goal you love [3]. Alter recommends adding too: a signal goal, such as a marathon, a language or a creative project, chosen from a second column on the friction audit that lists things you would love to be able to do but cannot yet [2]. Robbins adds the least, and her practices are mostly about receiving what is already there [1]. So "remove first" describes an order of work for Alter and Pritchett and something closer to the whole method for Robbins [1][2][3].

Why It Works

Bad outweighs good. This is Alter's stated mechanism: bad things do a much worse job of dragging you down than good things can do lifting you up, so a person is often as good as the worst thing going on [2]. Robbins names the same tilt from the inside when she refers to the negativity bias, the brain's wiring to magnify negatives [1]. Pritchett cites a related finding from Daniel Kahneman, in a passage about why people resist change: "As humans we weigh losses twice as heavily as we do gains" [3]. He offers it to explain why people size up all the ways a change could go wrong, not as proof of the five C's, but it points the same way [3].

Positive and negative are separate dials. Pritchett says studies show optimism and pessimism are two different scales and not the two ends of one [3]. If so, raising one does not lower the other. That would explain Robbins's experience of a real gratitude practice sitting on top of a baseline of agitation [1], and it is the logic of Howes's dirty water [3].

The negative hides. Pritchett's 70% figure means most of what needs cutting is not visible to the person doing it until it is named [3]. Robbins makes the same case for the friction list: writing it down gets the problems out of the vault of your mind and onto paper where you can work on them [1]. Alter's audit goes line by line for the same reason [2].

Avoided lows harden. Alter says friction points that people turn away from become traps that can linger for decades and produce the sameness that makes life feel stuck [2]. Robbins says that when she has been stuck, "it becomes part of my identity and I argue to stay where I am." [2]

You cannot receive what you are braced against. Robbins's argument is that the good was arriving and not getting in: you cannot let happiness in if you are not present, if everything has a sword to it, or if you discount the half that is working [1].

Removal can be confirmed. Alter's third step, and his reason for repeating the audit yearly, is that seeing items disappear from the list is itself reaffirming [2].

On the stakes, Pritchett cites a 50-year study of nuns in which the optimists lived 10 years longer than the pessimists, which he says makes pessimistic thinking more dangerous than smoking [3]. That is his reading of the study as he reports it; the conversation gives no further detail [3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies most clearly to someone whose life is good on paper and who still feels flat. Robbins in 2019 had a good marriage, healthy kids, finances in order and work she liked, and felt empty [2]. Alter describes the same diffuse kind of stuck, where life seems leached of what makes it rich [2].

It applies when the low can be changed or accepted. Alter's audit ends in one of a few outcomes: remove the friction, sand it down, hand it to someone else, or box it away [2]. Pritchett's father and his stiff leg are the example of the last [3].

It does not mean adding is wrong. All three say so [1][2][3]. Alter's signal goals exist because proving to yourself that you can pursue something and succeed restores a sense of efficacy [2].

It does not mean avoiding everything hard. Raising a low can be painful work, as Robbins's couples counseling was [2], and Pritchett counts some friction as healthy [3]. He also warns about effort aimed the wrong way: in his story of a fly beating itself against a window pane while a door stands open ten steps away, "Ironically the struggle is part of the trap." [3]

It does not make money or circumstances irrelevant. Robbins says not being able to pay your bills creates crushing stress, and that it is once the bills are paid that more money stops fixing the underlying problem [1].

And it is not a reason to blame yourself for being stuck. Alter's first point is that "getting stuck and being stuck is universal." [2] He also reports that ages ending in nine bring a spike in questioning life's meaning and, with it, a small rise in the suicide rate [2]. Low mood that persists, or thoughts of self-harm, call for a qualified professional, not a list.

What To Do With It

1. Run a friction audit before adding anything new. Write down the part of your day you look forward to least, the biggest downward force on your well-being, and the step you can never get past [2].

2. Walk through a typical week for the inner lows too. List every place you pick up the sword, brace or close off, from bills and health to a commute or loneliness [1].

3. Give every item one of four outcomes. Remove it, get someone else to do it, find a way to do it without complaining, or accept it and box it away [2]. Spend time, energy or money here before spending it on new highs [2].

4. Turn toward the item you have been giving distance. Alter says the points we avoid are the ones that linger for decades; Robbins's example is the counseling she found painful and worth it [2].

5. Catch the five C's by name. For a while, notice each time you complain, criticize, worry about the news, join someone's griping or blow something out of proportion, since by Pritchett's figure most of it goes unseen [3]. Keep your positive habits going while you cut these [3].

6. Manage your remembering. Choose which memories you dwell on, the embarrassments or the times you surprised yourself, and decide which voice gets airtime [3].

7. Drop the sword in one recurring place. Pick the boss, the slow line or the customer service call where you always brace, and practice not bracing [1].

8. Count the half that is working. When you catch yourself saying you only managed 50 percent, name the 50 percent first [1].

9. Let the good in when it arrives. Say thank you to a compliment while looking the person in the eye, and accept help when it is offered [1].

10. Repeat the audit every year, and then add. Check which items have gone from the list [2], and choose one signal goal from the things you would love to be able to do but cannot yet [2].

Sources

1. Mel Robbins on Happiness as an Inside Job: Drop the Sword and Let the Good In · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. Dr. Adam Alter on How to Get Unstuck: Friction Audits, Signal Goals and Minimally Viable Actions · The Mel Robbins Podcast
3. Price Pritchett on Quantum Leaps, the Five C's of Negative Thinking, and Why Trying Harder Fails · The School of Greatness