You will see what you look for | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

26 Jun 2026 · 2 min

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1:31

Caroline Cavanagh runs a five-second game: count blue objects, then green ones. You'll miss the green ones even though they're everywhere. She uses this to show how negativity bias makes us overlook the good that's right in front of us.

Chapters

Right, play a little game with me. I would like you to, for 5 seconds, as I count from 1 to 5, look around the room and see how many blue things you can see. Ready? Go! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You got a number. But now, how many green things did you see? And this is something, a game that I often take into schools and play in classrooms, and there's always that one kid that goes— Oh, but Miss, you told us to look for blue things! But then you can see the pennies drop in other minds as they realise that there were green things around. And what this exercise does is it reminds you that what you look for is what you see, but you don't see other things that just are as readily available. And the reason that this exercise is so important is that we often will spend a lot of time looking for the negatives. We're surrounded by a media that focuses on negatives, and for some reason it's become a bit of a societal thing. Let's talk about all the bad things. They're like the blue things— there are loads of them around, but there's also loads of green things as well. So I encourage you to reverse that trend. Look for the green things, look for for the positives, because believe me, they are just as readily there, but they're a very different colour and they will give you a very different feeling.