Know your Mind

How Your Own Thinking Deceives You—and What to Do Instead

“I think, therefore I am.”
– René Descartes

“I think, therefore I am... driving myself crazy.”
– Emily Segal

Your mind is a dazzling, evolved, trillion-synapse miracle. It is also a mischief machine. It not produces not only insights and intelligence, but illusions and strife. Yes, it is a powerful tool, perhaps the most advanced product of evolution. But it is also riddled with vulnerabilities because it is designed to infer quickly, not accurately.

Your mind is a master of half-hints - partial truths disguised as certainties. Inference is a flawed feature that was forged in environments where hesitation meant death and quick pattern recognition meant survival. But what once protected us now often poisons us. We infer from fragments and draw conclusions from shadows. We spot a pattern and cling to it, even when disconfirming evidence stares us in the face. We don’t like to let go. Why? Because our brain prefers the familiar fiction to the discomfort of uncertainty.

Take the sun. It “always” rises in the east. It does but it doesn’t, not exactly. The margin of error is degrees wide, yet we don’t abandon the general rule because of an exception. And when the moon briefly eclipses the sun, we don’t rewrite astronomy. We understand that exceptions do not overthrow the rule. Unless we are thinking distortedly, like when we are depressed.

In depression, the rare exception becomes the defining truth. A momentary eclipse becomes the self-image: a dark center surrounded by illusionary light. What is objectively fleeting becomes subjectively permanent. You misinterpret harmless data (your boss’s glance, your partner’s silence) as existential threats. Your mind begins to catastrophize. This is not clarity. This is distortion.

Cognitive distortions are the mind’s shallow inferences that muddy the waters of deep logic. They are survival habits that have outlived their utility, clouding your perception and contaminating your decisions. Here are a few of their names, likely familiar if you've ever doubted yourself:

• All-or-nothing thinking – There is no nuance, only extremes.

• Mind reading – You assume others’ judgments without balanced evidence.

• Fortune telling – You predict disaster, and feel it as certainty.

• Catastrophizing – The smallest setback becomes the end of the world.

• Overgeneralizing – One loss equals eternal failure.

• Disqualifying the positives – You dismiss success as luck, and take pain as proof.

• Emotional reasoning – You feel worthless, therefore you must be.

There are plenty more that researchers have found. These are not harmless quirks. They are internal saboteurs. They ask that you trade in a favourable impression of yourself as secure and capable for a diminished underling.

Worse still, your brain doesn’t like being wrong. It doesn’t quietly correct itself. It doubles down. Enter confirmation bias, the art of seeing only what proves you right. Enter cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of contradiction, soothed only by mental sleight-of-hand.

If left unchecked, it becomes delusion.

But there is a remedy—prediction.

Test your mind’s authority. Make specific forecasts. Write them down. Observe the dissonance between what you think will happen and what actually does. Be forensic in your self-investigation:

• Event:

• Who:

• What:

• When:

• Where:

• Did it happen? Yes / No

Watch how little of your mental noise maps to reality. And then realize: if your brain was a mapmaker, has it been drawing monsters in margins of uncharted territory?

But why does it do this? Why such design flaws?

Because in a hostile past, it worked. The ancestor who assumed the rustle in the bushes was a predator lived longer than the one who waited for confirmation. Distorted inference kept us alive. These processes are evolutionary artifacts. They were once adaptive, now corrosive. If you grew up in chaotic homes, unpredictable environments, or emotional warfare, these habits of mind were reinforced, even rewarded.

But now? You’re no longer in the jungle. Yet the jungle is still in you. And letting it go means letting go of the wish that the jungle was other than what it was.

If you let these distortions govern your perceptions, you will overestimate threat, underestimate your value, and live in emotional exile from reality. Remember: your perception is not the world. But it is your world.

The old wisdom echoes: “Where attention goes, energy flows.” This is incomplete. Where attention goes, your life flows. If you attend only to the shadows, you will miss the light. If you believe every depressed thought, you will become its prisoner.

So do not worship every whisper of your mind.

Your mind is a tool. Learn how to use it wisely.

-E.S