How Our Minds Connect Dots that Don’t Connect

In your mind, there is a little voice that tells you a story about the events happening in your life.

This story becomes the narrative through which you view yourself and the world around you.

The mind is adept at assigning meaning to events that occur in the course of one’s life.

The meaning assigned by your mind may be true or untrue.

However, most people are rigid to see beyond the meaning that their mind has assigned to events in their life.

For example,

Brian applies for a job and is called for an interview.

Brian experiences intense stress and anxiety because he fears what will happen if he fails the interview.

However, the root cause of Brian’s anxiety is not the interview, it is the story he has told himself regarding the interview.

Let’s review the story which Brian is telling himself in relation to the interview.

Brian believes that passing the interview will help him get a well-paying job.

He tells himself that if he has a well-paying job, he can afford to take his girlfriend out and buy her gifts, but if he fails the interview, he might lose his girlfriend because he may not be able to take her out and buy her gifts anymore.

So Brian’s mind has connected passing the interview with keeping his girlfriend when in actual sense, these two are unrelated.

I am not so different from Brian. On several occasions, I have deceived my mind into thinking what I want it to think because it is more comfortable for the mind to have certainty, even if its a false certainty, than to accept life’s inevitable uncertainty.

This shortcoming prevents us from seeing reality as it is. As result, we begin to see the world not as it is but how our mind is used to see it.

As humans with the ability of imagination and thought, we have a tendency of cleaning up the truth in our mind, to make it better, to shine it up a little bit so it doesn’t hurt as much. We redesign the truth and replace it with whatever suits the story our minds tell us, inadvertently causing us to live in an ongoing war with reality.

There is a story that you keep telling yourself, but have you ever questioned the validity of that story?

Unfortunately, most people live in the prison of their own minds because of their unwillingness to question the narrative that they tell themselves.

I have ever found myself in this trap and this is how to break free so that you don’t become biased to reality due to your own mind:

-Engage with complex ideas that fascinate you. Invest time and energy to engage with complex ideas and problems in an effort to deeply understand and question the world around you.

-Confront your beliefs. Actively question and analyze your own beliefs and the ideologies you subscribe to, and always look for disconfirming evidence. Consider whether your beliefs are truly your own or adopted from external influences (like society, social media, etc.)

-Understand the likelihood of you being wrong. Most people assume that they have no tendency to be wrong but this is not true. Our minds are biased which makes it easy for us to overlook things and be on the wrong.