Re-architecting our mind

Every second, we rewrite reality. Every time we recall memories, we give them a new tint (the colors we’re feeling when we recall them are woven in). Instantly, our narrative of the past is different. And our self-identity, premised on the past, shifts.

A few months ago, I signed up for a course offering “complete healing in 4 days”. Part of me thought it was a scam, but most of me was extremely curious. In the lead-up to the course, we were told to make a vision board and meditate in front of it every day. “You’re going to be that person in a week,” the soothing voice of the instructor told us over a guided meditation. “Get ready to get your life back”.

Getting one’s life back is not an easy task. Many years of my life had been shadowed by what one might call perfectionist-overoptimization-neuroticism, manifesting as anxiety and depression. I had tried the litany of therapists: CBT when I was 14 with a therapist who told me to sit on the floor but refused to join me cause her skirt was too tight; talk therapy for 4 years in a warm room with potted plants and a ticking clock; couple’s therapy with a doctor of religion and psychoanalysis (yes, it was deep, intense, and really weird). Over the years, I became more and more fluent in the world of emotions. I learned how anxiety is a response to emotions I’m blocking, how dissociating from emotions causes memory loss, and how my relationship with men is defined by patterns I learned from my mother and brother and father.

Yet at the end of all of this, I still had anxiety. I still ignored my friends for weeks because texting them back was too stressful, and I still had debilitating breakdowns over the wording of an email.

Enter the crazy healing course. What intrigued me was how much it promised so quickly. The internet is awash in articles proclaiming that doing ‘this one quick trick’ will solve your problems. We’re drawn to easy, magic pill solutions. But, of course, we must be very skeptical of such claims. In the efficient world, there is no free money on the table. If it were really that easy, people would already have done it.

So my curiosity was piqued by the videos on the course website of real people standing up from wheelchairs and walking for the first time, or talking about their first meal they enjoyed in years because they had conquered their eating disorder. What was I missing?

What this course was promising wasn’t a magic pill, it was a leverage point: a part of a system where a small amount of effort has outsized effects. The leverage point this course had discovered was beliefs.

Ok. So here’s where I freak out about the power of beliefs. Sometimes you come across something that feels like the key to everything – beliefs are one of those things.

Beliefs are the architecture of our mind. In the physical world, the structure of a house subconsciously affects our behavior and emotions. If the hallway is narrow, we’ll feel suffocated. If the windows are small, we’ll feel gloomy. If the living room is large and beautiful, we’ll spend more time hanging out with our family. Similarly, beliefs are the pillars and walls and roofs that we mentally inhabit every single waking moment.

Beliefs moderate our perception. We perceive the world through two streams: bottom-up processing, which is the sensory data we get from our environment, and top-down processing, which is our context and models of the world. To make sense of the jumbled mess of sensory data, our brain is constantly predicting what it *expects* to see based on all the prior knowledge we have. As Scott Alexander says in this great review, “You’re not seeing the world as it is, exactly. You’re seeing your predictions about the world, cashed out as expected sensations, then shaped/constrained by the actual sense data.”

Let me just say that again. Your brain *predicts what it expects* based on your beliefs, and this determines *what you actually perceive*. This is why beliefs are so powerful – we can predict experiences into existence. When we develop beliefs like “I am not good enough”, we throw blankets over our mind and it contorts the data to fit them. We stop noticing times we were good enough, and fixate on times we thought we weren’t. We stop interpreting events as “maybe it was just an accident” and start interpreting them as “it was because I wasn’t good enough”. Our brains are habit-machines, and we run the same thought patterns over and over. Eventually, we forget that we were the ones who created the beliefs. This is how we trap ourselves: by forgetting our fundamental utter freedom, and by forgetting that we constructed the beliefs we feel trapped by.

Beliefs can develop in a second. You forget your books at school and a teacher tells you off. “I must be forgetful,” you tell yourself. Then, we experience what we expect. The next time you forget something, it reinforces your belief. “I forgot my books again. That just proves it.” This particularly happens when we’re young, because we don’t have much evidence either way. Our brain over-updates on a few events, and forms beliefs that become so strongly reinforced we forget there was ever an alternative.

Okay, so beliefs are important. But theories like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have focused on beliefs for decades. Why haven’t we solved all our problems already?

Beliefs are extremely sticky. They develop for a reason, and become so familiar that we can’t imagine a different reality. To knock them down, we need to both hit them hard, and expand our sense of agency dramatically. When changing beliefs, you can operate on a local level or a global level. The local level says things like: “You don’t need to believe that people will abandon you”, and people gradually infer that they have agency over other beliefs too. This is what therapy often does. You dismantle beliefs with the help of the therapist, but you still need the therapist to help you through it. You learn agency on the specific issues you’re working on, but it takes years to build up to feeling agency about your entire life.

The global level says: “You can change literally any belief. Here’s a tool for you to do this yourself”. Your sense of agency radically increases, since you realize you can change *literally any belief-based behavior*, on your own, with practice. Therapy chips away at beliefs for years. By targeting beliefs globally, this course bulldozes them in a few days. Improving my mental health became like HIIT: gritty, intense, and quick.

The key idea was to talk to myself to re-route my negative thought patterns every single time I had them. For weeks, I muttered to myself in my bedroom every day, every 10 minutes. At first, my inner voice was petulant. “But why should I believe this will work?” she pouted at me. I cajoled with soothing affirmations (“You’re already feeling better, aren’t you? Doesn’t that tell you it works at least a little bit?”) and undeniable evidence (“This works for 80% of people who go on this course”). I coached, listened to the voice inside, reoriented and coached again. Sometimes I had to reframe: “You don’t have to be scared of this not working. If you start to be anxious again, just do this process again!”, or “Unwinding your anxiety is just about not giving up, and you *know* you’re capable of that”. Always it was with kindness – the way a wise and loving friend would talk to you. And always with persistence, continuing to coach until my inner voice settled back comfortably and my whole body relaxed with the belief change.

Sometimes I had to go further back. My inner voice was speaking under the weight of years of reinforced patterns. I spoke to my 3-year-old self about her fear of my mum leaving for work and never coming back. “She’ll come back in the evening,” I promised, and “People come and go all the time, you don’t need to worry”. Children are remarkably easy to persuade. After a few back and forths and a suggestion to play with her toys while she waited, 3-year old me laughed happily and let go of the belief. My entire body unwound, 20 years of fear of abandonment dissipating within me.

A few days after my conversation with 3-year-old me, I was sitting on a quiet balcony looking up at the stars, musing on our insignificant and fleeting existence. For years, I had felt sadness when I looked at the night sky because of all of the possibilities and worlds I wasn’t going to get to experience. I waited for the sadness and fear of death to well up.

It wasn’t there. I dug around in surprise, looking for it. Instead, all I found was a quiet, sparkling enthrallment at the lives my kids would live. In a rush, I could hear my children laughing as they traversed worlds and expanded consciousness. I could feel their small sparks of energy amongst the stretching, spinning, ever-shifting web of human existence. It was like opening eyes that had been clenched shut for 23 years, and discovering *light*, *color*, perception beyond what I had imagined.

The next day I was driving down an empty road as the sky became pink from the sunrise. Looking out at the dawn blush, I realized how long life was. I could wander into the woods and mark art, or spend years doing a PhD just for fun.

All of these beliefs (fear of abandonment, of not being good enough) were intricately woven together, reinforced by years of prediction and confirmation. Dissipating one belief rippled through my entire network, in a moment unwinding old beliefs and rethreading new ones.

Since then, I’ve sent many an email without fear, called my friends a lot, and hosted big events; I’ve gone on long, carefree walks and found myself genuinely telling people: “I don’t actually have deep fears anymore”. I’ve knocked down walls, rebuilt windows, and created warm, open rooms with beanbags and flowers. And, the light has been streaming into my house.