[sstangl]

I'm talking about neutral perceptions, not thoughts. An example would be something like the visual perception of a sidewalk. Presumably you don't get an emotional reaction about the sidewalk one way or the other, it's just a sidewalk.

The majority of your sensory experience is neutral perceptions like that. Once you notice them, negativity seems small in terms of proportion of sensory experience. What actually happens is that negativity occupies the majority of attention, meaning that your mind is latching onto things you perceive as negative. Broadening the scope of awareness to include neutrality means that definitionally the mind is not as latched-onto the negative, therefore negative things seem smaller, therefore they are slightly more tractable to deal with.