“The Story I Tell Myself…”

There are moments when you feel securely tethered to the truth. These are the times when you are more confident in your knowledge about how the world works and how to best move through it. Within this mental comfort zone, your stress response is diminished, and your social engagement system becomes more active. This felt sense of internal security thus motivates calculated risk. However, as you begin moving toward your desired goal, subjective and objective realms begin to collide in new and unfamiliar ways, challenging perception and generating different choice points along the way. In these moments, when certainty becomes less certain, what is your habitual response pattern?

According to cognitive psychology, every brain is pre-wired to engage in logical fallacies, heuristics, and mental biases. These are ubiquitous thinking patterns that, in certain circumstances, enhance your ability to cope effectively with the complex and dynamic world around you. Under less ideal circumstances, these same patterns lead to cognitive errors with wide-ranging consequences. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the confirmation bias as one example.

The neuroscience of belief teaches that, “Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs [while simultaneously ignoring evidence against those beliefs], which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation” (Shermer, 2011, p. 5). This dizzying definition explains why, when we are thinking about buying a particular make of a new vehicle, we suddenly notice that vehicle everywhere. It helps to explain why stereotypes persist and why placebos and algorithms work. It’s why we tend to think a referee made a good call if it’s in favor of our team, and a bad call, if it’s in favor of the opposition. Simply stated, the confirmation bias is perception through a filter (McRaney, 2011).

The trouble with the confirmation bias is that it hinders an ontological exploration of facts and blinds us to possibility. In the following excerpt, Terry Pratchett (2000), through the character Lord Vetinari from his fantasy novel, The Truth, makes this point more artistically:  

Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things … well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds … Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true. (p. 99)

It’s perplexing and humbling to think that within the neurological mush inside our skull lies a vast network of circuitry for self-deception, but it’s true. Our worldview is, in part, a product of erroneous cognitive procedures designed to maximize individual survival, not veracity. To make matters worse, humans enter this world as babies, with a long developmental road ahead.

Babies and children, by nature, are egocentric and concrete thinkers (Wadsworth, 2003). Consequently, the mental maps they form about themselves, and the world they live in, are also self-regarding and literal. As you know, you were once a child, indicating that you historically made meaning out of your own experiences, in similar ways. Fortunately, you eventually made it to adulthood, where your cognitive abilities became more sophisticated and abstract due to neural maturation. Nevertheless, much of what you concluded as a child, has remained preserved in your nervous system as implicit knowledge. This knowledge is stored in the form of generalized beliefs, along with the emotional and sensory components of memory. 

These early beliefs, combined with logical fallacies, heuristics, and mental biases, can result in an interesting array of behavioral trajectories. In the absence of metacognition, these behavioral trajectories gain momentum and become repetitive patterns bound by inertia. For this reason, feeling stuck, as if walking up a downward moving escalator, is a common human experience. So, in those moments when certainty becomes less certain, practice the pause and get curious about the thoughts priming your trajectory. Try using the sentence stem, “The story I tell myself…” to gain more objectivity. From there, begin to question your assumptions, identify the beliefs that shape the premise of your conclusion, fact check your data, and recognize how perspective informs individual opinion. Try pivoting to something new, novel, and unautomated. And don’t stop at your intellect. Invite emotion and body-based sensation into the change equation. “To capitalize on the body in therapy calls for a shift in emphasis from conversation to mindful exploration; from a sole focus on emotions and thoughts to the inclusion of body sensation, posture, and movement; from discussing new possibilities to experimenting with new actions” (Ogden, 2015, p. 53).

Change is, by and large, antithetical to our survival instincts. It takes a willingness to get uncomfortable. To slow time, engage in a process of introspection, and to risk the unknown. So be patient with yourself, and with one another, whenever you feel trapped on that proverbial escalator. As Shakespeare so wisely stated, “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees? Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft, And wit depends on dilatory time.”

References

McRaney, D. (2011). You are not so smart. Penguin Group, Inc.

Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Pratchett, T. (2000). The truth: A novel of Discworld. HarperCollins.

Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain. Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Wadsworth, B. J., (2003). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development: Foundations of Constructivism (5^th ed.). Pearson College Div.