How to Change Your Own Mind
“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“...the brain is a ‘prediction machine’, and … what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of its sensory inputs.” Anil Seth, Being You
Starting small
When I’ve said to people that I’ve started a Substack about unravelling and reimagining society, I’ve had a lot of the reactions that you’d probably expect. Eyebrows raised, “oh right…”s and “good for you…”s. Which is probably fair enough.
So I thought, let’s start smaller with this post. It’s quite difficult to imagine getting 7.8 billion people to think and act differently, so how about starting with yourself?
I’m going write about the various pieces of the puzzle that have led me to where I am today in terms of my belief that we all have the power to change how we think and act in the world, and that starting with ourselves is the best place to begin.
Manifesting (bear with me)
I’m lucky enough (despite being regularly told how unlucky I am) to have a birthday that pretty much coincides with New Year’s Eve. This makes it a doubly perfect moment to take some time to assess how I think my life is going and to decide what I might want to do differently going into the next year.
Like many others, I spent 2021 and 2022 adjusting to post-pandemic reality and spent far too much of those years feeling angry, frustrated and stuck. Angry and frustrated by the state of the world. Stuck in unhelpful habits that I couldn’t shake and unhelpful thought patterns that I couldn’t shift. Coming into 2023 I knew something had to change. Now, I like to be honest, so I should be upfront that the trigger for this was not some kind of spiritual awakening, but rather being fully sucked in by ‘manifestation TikTok’ over the Christmas holidays.
Manifestation, as I understand it, is the concept of bringing something tangible into your life via your thoughts, actions, beliefs and emotions. After the two hundredth video explaining that manifestation is real and that xyz person had had the best year of their life so far, I thought there was no harm in at least trying it.
Disclaimer: I’ll do another piece at some point about social media and the deeply worrying implications of being sucked into any kind of scrolling hole (don’t get me started on the evening I spent watching Tarot Card TikTok).
So, on January 2nd (January 1st was a bit of a write-off after a particularly jubilant New Year’s Eve Party), I sat down and wrote what I would like to be true by the end of the year. I won’t go into detail but it covered all areas of my life and was mostly an exercise in working out what I wanted to be doing more of, what I wanted to be doing less of and what I wanted to be doing differently.
And, reader? It bloody works. I’ve built positive habits, felt better in myself and opened up new paths in my life that I would never have expected (like starting this Substack). I absolutely can’t give all the credit to the concept of manifesting though, so I’d like to explore some other elements that have formed my belief in our ability to change our own minds.
Books on the brain: from Stoicism to neuroscience.
These ‘other elements’ have mostly come in the form of books that have had an impact on me at various stages of my life. I’m going to walk through a few of them here.
Response
The first of these was my introduction to Stoicism when my brother bought me a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a book that has lived on my nightstand ever since. What I took from it was that Stoic philosophy is so much more than what I had understood the term ‘stoic’ to mean from common parlance. I had thought Stoicism was about self-discipline and an ability to endure hardship without expressing emotion. Those things are true but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about living a good life, striving for virtue and understanding that those pursuits are what connects us all together as humans.
However, the one that is most pertinent to our purposes here, and the one that made such an impression on me in my early twenties, is the realisation that the only thing in life we can control is how we respond to things.
I have referenced Marcus Aurelius, who is one of the most famous Stoics, and was Roman Emperor in the late 2nd Century AD - often held up as an exemplary wise ruler. But the Stoic who actually spoke most extensively about the idea of ‘controlling what you can control’ was a man called Epictetus, who was born into slavery and then became a freedman and philosophy teacher.
Epictetus taught that contentment lies in understanding that there are some things that we can control and that there are others that we cannot. Of the things that we cannot control, it is our perception of them that causes us unhappiness, rather than the events themselves. He believed that the ability to challenge our perception is uniquely human and what sets us apart from animals: all animals use their perception to make sense of the world around them but only humans have the capacity to question those perceptions. Indeed, it is our duty to question them and to proactively choose how we will act in response.
So: we have the idea that the one thing we can control is how we choose to react to the things that happen to us.
Though as we all know, that’s easier said than done.
Habits
It has always made me laugh that the publication of ‘Atomic Habits’ was rapidly followed by the publication of ‘Tiny Habits’. A disagreement, perhaps, over how small to go, but the essential idea is the same: everything we do is made up of the micro decisions we make (consciously or not) and it is within our power to change those decisions and therefore change what we do on a daily basis. So far, so Stoic. The reason this piece of the puzzle is important is that it gives you an actual method for how to make those changes. The idea is to rewire your brain into new, hopefully more helpful, pathways that take you closer to the person you’d like to be.
In early 2020, I went to a lecture by BJ Fogg, author of Tiny Habits and learned about how a great deal of what our brains do is build habits, which then become incredibly difficult to break. It suits the brain to build habits as it can then go into more of an autopilot mode and use energy on other things. However, changing those habits and patterns is possible.
My key takeaways on how to actually do this are threefold:
If you want to change your behaviour: make the changes very small and they’ll be easier to adopt and then turn into habits. So much of what we do is habitual and based on what our brain expects us to do at that moment.
Tack the habit change onto something you already do as part of your daily routine: waking up, brushing your teeth or going up the stairs for example.
Give yourself a celebration ritual when you do the very small change. The example Fogg gives is recreating the feeling of throwing a scrunched up piece of paper into a bin on the first try. Punch the air, do a dance, smile: anything to recreate that positive feeling.
Let’s take the example of cold water immersion.
We’ve all heard of the massive health benefits (both physical and mental) of doing this on a regular basis, but it’s quite a leap to go from being someone who believes that they hate cold water and can only cope with a lovely hot shower to start their day to believing you are someone who could regularly go swimming in a lake in November.
The tiny habits theory says: why not try just turning your shower cold for five seconds at the end (or the beginning, the choice is yours). Once you’ve done that a few times, you’ll realise it isn’t so hard and you’ll start the positive reinforcement cycle and your cold showers will start getting longer. And then who knows, maybe in a year’s time you’ll be diving head first into that lake.
It all makes sense to me and I’d told a lot of people about the theory and thought about it often, even if I’d never actually had much success in adopting it in practice. Especially when the pandemic hit and I spent most of my brain’s energy on just trying to stay sane.
So: we have the idea that every day is made up of thousands (millions?) of tiny decision points. Our brain chooses the path of least resistance but we can retrain those neural pathways and make different choices to take us closer to being the kind of person we want to be.
A new theory of consciousness
Then, for Christmas last year, my dad bought me a copy of ‘Being You’ by Anil Seth. In what felt like fortuitous timing, it was the first book I picked up after I’d decided that I’d got what I needed from manifestation TikTok and that reading might be a better pastime (spoiler alert: it definitely is).
Seth’s book is rich and covers a lot of ground that I’m not going to go into here, so I’d recommend reading the full thing as it’s full of fascinating insights about what it actually means to be conscious and that consciousness is not as simple as ‘you are conscious or you’re not’.
For my purposes I want to focus on one thought that really struck me. This is that the entire human experience is perception that comes from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I’m going to attempt to condense an entire academic career’s worth of thinking about neuroscience into a couple of paragraphs here so bear with me.
Part Two of Seth’s book focuses on the idea that the brain is a “‘prediction machine’, and that what we see, hear and feel is nothing more than the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of its sensory inputs’.”
He challenges the generally accepted idea that there is an objective external reality that we perceive and make sense of, a ‘bottom up’ detection of the world. In this view, our brains are taking all sorts of sensory information to build up an “inner picture of the outside world for the benefit of the self.” There’s a cup of coffee on the table, I see it, I decide I want to drink it, so I pick it up and have some. I have made sense of a set of external stimuli to my own benefit (this is actually Seth’s example, I’m not solely inspired by the coffee cup next to me).
Seth’s view, however, is that perception is not about ‘reading’ and processing sensory data. Rather, everything we experience is about the brain’s best guess as to the cause of that sensory data. Perception is inference: external signals and sensory inputs are combined with our brain’s expectations and beliefs about what is causing those signals and inputs, and that is what generates our human experience.
It’s not a case of the brain looking through the transparent window of our eyes to interpret reality, our reality is formed entirely of our brain’s predictions about what’s going on around us. I.e. “We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them.” The way we think, our habits and actions are therefore based on our brain’s best guess of what’s going on based on prior experience and information. The more regularly the brain predicts that a sensory input will result in a certain outcome, the more entrenched that prediction mechanism becomes: ‘when I wake up, I will pick up my phone and scroll for 30 minutes’ rather than ‘when I wake up, I will get up straight away and make a cup of tea’.
If this is the case, perception is a “generative and creative act” and the contents of our conscious minds are really just made up of our brain’s predictive generations. If this doesn’t quite make sense, I’d encourage you to read the whole book, or ask me about it and I’ll try again with my summary.
So: we have the idea that reality is not objective and that our brains are constantly updating how we perceive the world based on the accuracy of its predictions.
Why does that matter and how is it going to help us at a societal level?
Why does this matter and how does it fit with the other puzzle pieces? It matters because it backs up, with a lot of scientific research, the notion that how we experience the world is a matter of how our brain is used to experiencing the world. It fits with the Habit theory of the brain dictating what we do by constantly making its best guess of how to respond. It fits with the Stoic philosophy that says the only thing that really matters is what goes on inside our own heads.
And if that’s the case, we have a lot more power than we think.
Ultimately, unravelling our assumptions about how society is structured will require an awful lot of people to do an awful lot of reevaluating of things that they have held true. It will be a collective brain rewiring.
I would like to caveat that I know that for some people this isn’t an option and that being able to do this is definitely a product of privileged circumstances. Whether it’s because of mental health, grief or genuinely difficult situations, there will be a number of people for whom it’s not possible to just ‘change your mindset’.
However, for many of us, it’s so much more possible than you think. And if more and more of us start to believe that our current perceptions and experiences of the world are not a response to an objective reality, then we can start to proactively question our existing assumptions of how the world must be and how we must be in it. And then the unravelling of our individual and collective perceptions can begin in earnest.
So what’s the one thing you can do next?
At the end of your next shower, turn it cold for five seconds. Yes, I’m serious. This is going to be our first collective step to unravelling our limiting beliefs that we can’t do things differently.
Plus, it’s good practice for the apocalypse when we run out of hot water.
If you enjoyed this piece please subscribe, share and get in touch with me. I’m always keen to meet new people, hear different points of view and learn more about the topics I’m thinking about.
If you want to read any of the books I’ve mentioned here’s a full list
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Atomic Habits, James Clear, 2018
Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, 2019
Being You, Anil Seth, 2021