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Key points
- The mind attempts to explain, solve problems, and protect.
- The normal activity of the mind can be turned into a destructive process.
- The more people value specific outcomes, the greater the risk of inflexible thinking.
- Observing mental activity is a step toward reducing its destructive power.
Why do we so easily upset ourselves? We wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying about the future, regretting the past, and asking, “What if...?” until we have made ourselves miserable.
Understanding the mind and how it works starts with knowing what the mind wants to accomplish.
The mind has three primary tasks. First, it attempts to make sense of all the information it receives by creating a reasonable explanation for our experience. Second, the mind is a problem-solving machine—it wants to determine how to meet our needs and overcome any barrier to making that happen. Finally, the mind needs to protect us from harm. It lets us know when there is a potential threat by creating negative emotions, adverse sensations, and physical symptoms that get our attention.
Explaining, problem-solving, and protecting are three skills we excel at beyond any other creature on Earth. This means we can survive in the cold, heat, desert, mountains, and jungles in the worst circumstances, including drought, floods, famines, and blizzards.
The Normal Mind
Our ability to link ideas and events together is lifesaving.
A farmer looks at the winter sky, tests the soil in the early spring, reads about regional weather patterns, and predicts that it will be drier than usual next summer. Based on this prediction, he can adjust how and when he plants, select different seeds, and modify how he cares for the crop while it grows. His ability to make comparisons, see events from a future perspective, and understand cause-and-effect relationships allows him to adapt, survive, and overcome problems that have not yet occurred.
The Destructive Normal Mind
Just like that farmer, we can use this fantastic language ability to either make our lives safe, pleasant, and satisfying or to create misery.
We can imagine our upcoming presentation at an important meeting going poorly. We can even sense, as if it is happening now, our embarrassment and the discomfort that others would feel in the room. After such a poor performance, we reason that a demotion within the company will follow, and we will eventually lose our job. Within the year, we will be unable to pay the mortgage and end up homeless.
Destructive normality means we can misuse the mind’s ability to explain, problem-solve, and protect and turn those same mental processes against ourselves. Without any evidence or facts at all, we can create tremendous misery in which we believe we are unlovable, our problems are unsolvable, everything is our fault, and life is unbearable. It is thoughts like these that create the mental environment for anxiety and depression to develop.
Our mind’s ability to predict outcomes and create unsolvable problems is not a sign that we are unhealthy or broken. It is simply what the mind does—it uses language to explain what we experience. This power of explanation is impressive, but we should not trust it.
It is our job to look at the activity of the mind and ask ourselves, “Is this helpful? Does this explanation and prediction help me go in the direction I want to go? Does it help me solve my problems, or does it make things worse?”
Anxious and Depressed Thinking
Among the many unhelpful activities of the mind, irrational beliefs are one of the more destructive. Irrational beliefs are inflexible demands that insist that we should conform to a certain standard of perfection. There are three core irrational beliefs that each insist that life must be a certain way:
- I must do well and have specific desirable characteristics.
- Other people should treat me well and approve of me.
- Life conditions absolutely must be easy, comfortable, predictable, secure, and essentially as I want them to be.
These core beliefs produce three secondary inflexible attitudes that compound our misery and interfere with our ability to solve problems:
- My experience is unbearable, intolerable, and too burdensome.
- On a rating scale, my experience would be the worst. It is awful, terrible, and the end of everything.
- I am not just a little bit bad, but totally bad. You are totally bad. Life is totally bad.
When put together, our core beliefs and inflexible attitudes lay the foundation for anxiety and depression. They also create an emotional rollercoaster of moments of happiness when we think we have measured up and found approval, followed by distress when our fortunes change:
- I must do well (or have specific desirable characteristics) and win others’ approval, and I am an inadequate, undeserving person when I don’t do as well as I must.
- Other people should treat me fairly and kindly. If they don’t, they are no good and deserve punishment.
- I ought to get what I want and not get what I don’t want from life. If I don’t get what I want, life is terrible, and I will be miserable.
Our minds are constantly making comparisons—this is normal. One person is taller, shorter, prettier, more intelligent, poorer, funnier, or quieter than another. The mind can then add a value rating to these comparisons—“I am not as smart as she is, and that is bad.”
According to Albert Ellis, Ph.D., one of the founders of cognitive psychology, we have two flaws that make us vulnerable to irrational beliefs. The mind treats threats to our ego as if they are threats to our lives. The mind should warn us by producing anxiety and fear if a large dog is charging, but not treat the prospect of not sounding smart at a party as an actual threat. Similarly, we assume a threat occurs when life does not go as we expect. Rather than accepting life as it is, a mixture of good and bad, we insist that life ought to be as we would like it, not as we don’t. Unfortunately, there is no rule that states life should be a certain way. Life can be incredibility difficult, mildly inconvenient, and everything in between.
We simultaneously believe that we should be superhuman, outstanding, and perfect and that life should be as good as we can imagine that can be. According to the principles rational emotive behavior therapy, the more we value something, the greater our risk for irrational thinking.
When you catch yourself saying, “I must…” “Others should…” and “Life ought…” know you are in good company. We all do this. Your mind will make comparisons, and when it does, you will come up short. Others do have it better than you. You do mess up. Not everyone likes you.
Changing Perception
Knowing how our mind works against us will help tackle the problems the unhelpful mind creates. We can monitor, evaluate, and modify our mental activity, putting us back into the driver’s seat of our lives.
- Monitor — Get to know your observing self. You are not your thoughts; you contain them. Practice standing back and observing the mind’s activity for what it is—a powerful word-producing machine that creates stories, explanations, predictions, and judgments. Mindfulness skills can help.
- Evaluate — Look at your beliefs, the meaning you ascribe to situations, and the value you assign to what you experience. Where do your ideas of what is important, valuable, and worthwhile come from? Are these beliefs and values helpful? Do you tend to see yourself as a mistake if you make a mistake? If so, is that type of global rating helpful?
- Modify — Learn to accept yourself, others, and life unconditionally, a mixture of qualities you like and some you don’t. Change your demands to desires. You want to perform well and prefer that others treat you well. Who doesn’t? Change the script that goes through your mind: I would like to perform well, and it is disappointing when I don’t. I prefer the approval of others, but it is not terrible if I don’t receive it; it is just frustrating. I am a flawed, fallible human and a mixture of good and bad. I am unique but not special.
These steps are easier said than done, but you can start today. If that does not go well, start again tomorrow. You can keep starting until you have some momentum.
