The Mind’s Deceit

Challenging our mental distortions – By Stacey Huget

For anyone who relies on thinking their way through life, it can be a bit unsettling to learn that many of our thoughts – especially those half-conscious, automatic ones – can be heavily biased, distorted, and misleading. The thing is, our minds are playing tricks on us.

Friedrich Nietzsche was right: The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to oneself.

Many of our thoughts and judgments, our instincts and even that cherished “gut feel” we use to navigate our way through the world can be nothing more than the faulty residue of past experiences and conclusions – squeezed through mental filters our minds have constructed over time.  This short-hand of our sub-conscious tricks us into perceiving reality in a way that reaffirms core beliefs and so-called truths about ourselves and the world, many of which are questionable at best.

Now as Daniel Kahneman explains in his landmark book, Thinking Fast and Slow, there’s a prudence and economy to us having so many automatic thoughts.  We wouldn’t want, for example, to have to consciously think through the mundane acts of tying our shoelaces or waiting for green lights or turning off the stove when the pot boils over.  But when it comes to discerning truth from fiction in complex relational situations or drawing conclusions about the meaning of consequential events and experiences, it serves us to be a bit more deliberate and mindful.

Why? Because these arbitrary mental filters and automatic thoughts are keeping us stuck in some pretty miserable ruts. They’re like cognitive scar tissue built up to protect us from imagined slights or delusions or to somehow help us believe we’re safe in the world – but more often than not, they just deaden us from fully engaging with life.

Don’t believe me?  See if any of these limiting thought patterns resonate:

All or Nothing Thinking: I’ve already eaten half the bag, I might as well finish it off … or… I can’t even do a half-lotus, I might as well quit yoga.

Over-Generalizing: People just don’t understand me; I’m destined to be alone in the world … or… Meditation is for flaky people, so why would I want to waste my time on it?

Labelling: He’s just a jerk … or … I’m useless at math.

Personalization: I’m sure it was the way I said it that put her off … or… He always makes me feel like a loser.

Most if not all of these thoughts are untrue – and they aren’t conducive to feeling happy or at ease in the world.  And that’s the key thing about thoughts: they drive our emotional experience. Distorted ones like these leave us discouraged, angry, and hopeless – and (double hit) they keep us hooked to deeper beliefs that are also not true: that we’re a loser, that people are out to get us, that the best of what’s on offer in life isn’t on offer for us.

Whole books and articles have been written about these unhelpful cognitive filters. But more likely than not, our minds dismiss what we read and relegate them to the habits-not-worth-breaking corner of our brains. Or the too-much-to-deal-with heap. Whatever. We go on filtering.

Granted, it’s a bit terrifying to consider our minds working against us – especially after putting so much store on their ability to make meaning of the world for us. What would we know of our experience without all our judging and avoiding and dodging and summing-up? And who would we be if our minds were washed free of all that sticky auto-muck that bogs us down?

Well, for one we’d be liberated, better able to enjoy our lives and make sound choices based on how the world around us actually is.  We’d awaken.

Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings, and actions, said Henri Tracol, the French sculptor.

Right. So how do we wake ourselves up and shake off these false assumptions?

Well, first, we can bring mindful awareness to our thoughts – and stop taking their truth for granted. We can pause the constant nattering going on in our heads long enough to catch ourselves in the act and call ourselves on some of these self-limiting tricks-of-mind.

Second, we can begin to trace back the source of some of our biases, the logic behind our mental filters. How are our patterns of automatic thinking serving us – and how are they getting in our way, tripping us up?

Third, once we’re able to better understand the why-and-how of the ruts we’re in, we can re-assess and re-shape or even let go of some of the driving beliefs we may be holding about ourselves, other people, and the way the world works.  The reality is we don’t always have a handle on truth – we’ve just been telling ourselves we do.

That’s the surprising thing about so-called truth: it can be a slippery, shape-shifter of a beast, a shades-of-grey rather than black-and-white animal. When our hunter minds are in their meaning-making haste, they can stab wildly and miss. Much better we train them to slow down, pan back, and lay down those old weapons. Maybe then we can let whatever truths are out there roam freely across a clear and open mind.