It’s only natural to feel like a failure after it happens. And to get down on yourself for permitting it.

For allowing a bit of bad news to take hold of you, upset your equanimity, and turn you into Mr. Negativity. Especially when the goal, so we’ve been told by society, is to possess Mr. Rogers’ positivity.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t blame yourself for these slip-ups.

Nor blame me for soon sharing what even the aforesaid Fred might see as a less than a beautiful day in his neighborhood. You’ll learn why neither of us are culpable as we go.

For now though, all you need to know is this deep-dyed downer from a study published in the January 2025 issue of Nature Medicine. That if you live past the age of 55, your chance of developing dementia during your lifetime is about 42 percent.

As that fact hits home, hone in on the gloom and doom it produces and let the negativity flow. Don’t fight it; allow it to enter your brain and take control.

For that domination is not you at your worst, but Darwinism at its finest, and summed up in one of Pearl Jam’s catchiest hooks. “It’s evolution, baby.”

For as we’ve evolved, something else has too, negativity bias, and for good reason.

Since the negatives the cavemen faced outside their dwellings were often a matter of life or death, those who didn’t pay more attention to them than the positives tended not to live too long. Those who lasted long enough to procreate passed the genetic trait of negativity along.

So you’re not really at fault for generating more negative thoughts than positive ones, or for having more of a reaction to negative news than positive news. Eddie Vedder’s right: “It’s herd behavior/It’s evolution, baby.”

And while evolution may not be directly linked to the increased risk of developing dementia, it makes sense for you to employ the negativity bias it’s produced to keep the disease from afflicting you. Because there’s nothing but negatives to developing dementia.

If you develop one or more of the most prevalent types — Alzheimer’s disease, vascular, Lewy body type, or frontotemporal dementia — it continues to progress, and your ability to communicate, concentrate, remember, and reason continue to regress. Eventually, you need a caregiver’s help during your expedited demise.

While proper intervention can delay all this, there’s still no cure for any of the most likely types of dementia.

So obsess upon that, feel the negativity flow, and then harness its power. For negativity is more powerful than you may know.

In fact, according to a paper published in a 2013 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, it’s more powerful than positivity when it comes to motivating people. The experiments that lead to that conclusion found “negative framing” used to avoid a loss produced better results than “positive framing” used “to accrue a gain.”

That conclusion lends weight to prior research done that discovered we place greater weight on the negative elements of an event than the positive ones. Which is why, for example, when I’m sitting on a bench with two heavy-for-me dumbbells situated atop my thighs and wondering why I should lie down and lift them, I’ll willfully create some negativity.

I might recall the absolutely brilliant English professor who taught me so much about the language and life — and who lived the last decade of her life as needy and sometimes terrible as the worst two-year-old. How utterly awful having a last decade like that would be for me and everyone I love.

And guess what?

Before I drop the dumbbells on the floor, I almost always eke out one or two more reps than the number I was hoping for.

So tap into the power of negativity occasionally to motivate or scare yourself into doing things you may not always want to do but keep you healthy. Like three uncomfortably heavy sets of dumbbell bench presses, followed by three more at a 30-degree incline.

Just be aware that being negative too frequently can be mentally draining and even toxic, and that being positive and benefiting from the comfort derived from it can also be helpful.

A comfort you can find in a study published in the February 2025 issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, for it offers a rather positive response to the question posed in today’s title.

The study followed over 60,000 United Kingdom adults for 12 years and broke the group into thirds based on the results of a six-minute submaximal exercise test used to gauge cardiorespiratory fitness and performed on a stationary bicycle. It was found that those who had a high enough degree of cardiorespiratory fitness to rank in the upper third lowered their risk of developing dementia by 40 percent when compared to the lower third during the length of study.

On an even more positive note, when the researchers isolated the scores of the participants who ranked in the upper third but also face an elevated risk of dementia based on DNA analysis, they discovered their risk was still 35 percent lower than those who had no such risk but cardiovascular fitness that ranked in the bottom third.