What’s the biggest trick your mind plays on you?
The answer might surprise you.
If you’re in the UK and on social media, you will have noticed that this week is Mental Health Awareness Week.
I think it’s great that society has made so much progress on people’s attitudes to mental health in recent years, that we can have a whole week dedicated to discussing how to maintain good mental health, and what you can do if you find yourself having mental health difficulties. I have no doubt that this change in attitudes has saved many lives over the years.
So how can we all help stay sane in these unusually challenging times?
One of the keys to maintaining good mental health is recognising the limits of your mind. All human minds are incredibly powerful, but they’re often incredibly and powerfully wrong!
Yes, our minds certainly play tricks on us. Plenty has been written about the extent to which cognitive biases direct our behaviour — or even those of entire civilisations — in unhelpful directions.
I’ve been examining this at a personal level with a psychologist — Dr Garret O’Moore — who’s been helping me with my own mental health since 2017. Here’s a personal discovery of mine that grew out of a recent discussion with him.
The biggest mind trick
Here’s what I regard as the biggest trick our minds can play on us all…
“The biggest trick that your mind plays on you is to convince you that it is you.”
Let that sink in for a minute.
‘I am not my mind.’
Personally, I’ve always tied my identity very closely to my mind. (My big old math brain pays the bills around here because my looks and charm certainly cannot!) So for me, this was a revolutionary discovery.
Dr O’Moore drove the point home by explaining that although we have hands, feet, lungs, kidneys and dozens of other organs, we tend not to self-identify with them. The average person doesn’t think they are a right hand or a left foot or a liver or a pancreas. So, in the same way that you’re not a hand or a foot, you’re not a brain or a mind either.
What are ‘you’?
So, if I’m not my mind, then what am I?
‘You’ are a consciousness, an awareness. ‘You’ are whatever you pay attention to.
Think of it this way…
Imagine you’re walking along the street and a complete stranger creeps up behind you and shouts ‘Boo!’. What happens?
You’re startled. You turn around. You look at the stranger and think ‘What a strange thing to do!’ (or possibly something less measured and polite).
If someone were to immediately ask you what just happened to you, you’d probably say “Somebody crept up behind me and shouted ‘Boo!’”.
While that’s true, it’s not the only thing that happened. You may have jumped. Your heart rate and breathing rate would almost certainly have increased. You probably tensed up. You may have started to perspire. But you didn’t mention any of those things. Why?
Because what happened to ‘you’ was that someone shouted ‘Boo!’ — that’s where your awareness, your attention, went.
‘You’ are whatever you pay attention to.
You get to choose, and that’s important
Knowing that ‘you’ are not your mind — that ‘you’ are your awareness — can be a life-changing discovery. It means that you get to choose.
You get to choose what you pay attention to; where your awareness is directed. And knowing that you are not your mind means that you can choose which thoughts and feelings you take heed of.
If your hand is mildly itchy, then you could choose to pay attention to it — scratch it lightly, or dig at it with such force that it bleeds — or you could choose to ignore it.
In the same way, if after making a minor mistake your mind is telling you ‘I can’t believe you just did that, you’re so stupid!’, then you can also choose how ‘you’ — your awareness — deals with that thought.
You could acknowledge that harmful, self-critical thought and dismiss it; you could ignore it entirely and get on with your day; or, you could focus on nothing but that negative thought for the rest of the day… the week… the year and let it spoil your mental health.
The ability to bring your attention away from your mind is — I believe — key to maintaining good mental health; knowing that just because your mind is telling you something, doesn’t mean it’s right.
This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week focused on kindness. Choose to be kind to yourself, and — of course — everyone else.
