The User's Guide to the Human Mind: Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 1608820521
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Your mind is not built to make you happy; it’s built to help you survive. So far, it’s done a great job! But in the process, it may have developed some bad habits, like avoiding new experiences or scrounging around for problems where none exist. Is it any wonder that worry, bad moods, and self-critical thoughts so often get in the way of enjoying life?
Based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), The User’s Guide to the Human Mind is a road map to the puzzling inner workings of the human mind, replete with exercises for overriding the mind’s natural impulses toward worry, self-criticism, and fear, and helpful tips for acting in the service of your values and emotional well-being—even when your mind has other plans.
- Find out how your mind tries to limit your behavior and your potential
- Discover how pessimism functions as your mind’s error management system
- Learn why you shouldn’t believe everything you think
- Overrule your thoughts and feelings and take charge of your mind and your life
create distance from emotions. It helps us see them for what they are. For example, someone experiencing fear before an exam might say to herself, “I’m noticing that my mouth is dry and my heart is beating fast.” Doing so is a useful alternative to accepting the mind’s fear (I’m going to fail my test, get kicked out of school, and lose all my friends) as an accurate reflection of the world. In truth, she may fail her exam, but her life will not come to an end in the way that minds tend to predict
being ostracized. Fear and avoidance are just two of the things the mind uses to do what it does best: protect us. What could be simpler than fearing and avoiding dangerous things? There are no free lunches in life. We pay a price for the privilege of carrying these mechanisms that our ancestors worked so hard to develop for us. Fear and avoidance can take on a life of their own, as they did with Penelope. The mind sometimes seems to believe that the more things we fear and avoid, the greater our
rather than how you would like to benefit, how you would like to feel, or how you would like the other person to act. Once you have narrowed down your list to the most important domains, the next question is this: are you living in the service of your values? If your answer is no, have the demands of life, or the demands of your own mind, taken you off course? If so, how do you get back on track? 82 Values and Action Living in the service of values need not be a major production. Suppose you
us stay on top of our game—as long as they don’t consume us and create a paradoxical effect. Consider the mother who scolds herself harshly for losing track of her toddler when she would have been perfectly forgiving of that honest mistake in someone else. The immediate function of that double standard seems fairly obvious. It calls her attention to the fact that she made a mistake and forces her to reflect on it, thereby decreasing the chances that she will do it again. That is sound survival
experienced just that. Her primitive mind saw crab puffs and shouted, metaphorically, “I want it, I want it, I want it!” while her rational, higher mind pushed for longer-term, more meaningful goals such as maintaining a healthy weight. “I want it, I want it, I want it!” never goes away. The primitive mind is in constant pursuit of immediate gratification, and frequently it wins, as it did with Nancy. But now let’s get back to our original question—what would happen if we muzzled our rational