Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

What you may not realize is just how much power you have to choose the interpretation of these events. Cognitive therapy says that the cognitive catalysts for our emotional reactions are called negative automatic thoughts.20

Beck observed that each person in his studies with depression and anxiety experienced predictable cognitive distortions. Mildly neurotic people had subtle misperceptions; severely neurotic people had massively warped worldviews. All of these errors can be corrected, regardless of severity.

Today, CBT is used to treat depression, several forms of anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and just about every other emotional disorder. Furthermore, CBT is the most empirically effective therapeutic method ever devised, beating out even the best antidepressant medications for some disorders.

Our research reveals the unexpected: Depression is not an emotional disorder at all! The sudden change in the way you feel is of no more causal relevance than a runny nose is when you have a cold. Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms. Intense negative thinking always accompanies a depressive episode, or any painful emotion for that matter. - David Burns, Feeling Good

No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm. - Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

Emotional Alchemy Indeed, in humans the cognitive apparatus can greatly shorten, prolong, or otherwise modify the more ‘hardwired’ emotional tendencies we share with the other animals. - Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience

Immediately after an emotional response, our rational mind has the opportunity to reflect and reinterpret the information before it feeds back into our emotions. Reappraisal, also called reframing, is the act of reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional stimulus, altering the resulting emotional trajectory. In other words, every time we experience a negative emotion, we are given the gift of reinterpretation, and this reinterpretation is a key leverage point to controlling our emotions.

See Alain De Botton Article on generous interpretation

Reappraisal has been found by both self reports and functional imaging studies to reliably increase positive emotion and decrease negative emotion, though it can also be used to do the opposite if desired.24 Its use is also correlated with enhanced memory, closer interpersonal relationships, and overall mental health. It must be stressed that reappraisal is not the same thing as the positive thinking which is so popular in today’s self-help section.

Reappraisal is an in-the-moment strategy we can use any time we are dealing with an undesired emotion. But in order to build a truly better mind, we are going to have to go a bit deeper to the core of emotional psychitecture.

See Eunoia Facebook Quote

We don’t simply want to become aware of our harmful emotional reactions or change them as we are dealing with them. We want to remove them on a systematic level. We want to reprogram the cognitive algorithms which gave rise to them.

Restructuring Your Emotions My students and I have found that truly happy individuals construe life events and daily situations in ways that seem to maintain their happiness, while unhappy individuals construe experiences in ways that seem to reinforce unhappiness. - Sonja Lyubomirsky

Wouldn’t it be nice if we automatically chose the adaptive interpretation of events as soon as they happened? In order to reprogram bad emotional algorithms, we have to examine the beliefs at their root, identify the distortions, and practice their rational rebuttal until it has been internalized. This method for obliterating bad emotional algorithms and replacing them with adaptive ones is known as cognitive restructuring.

Cognitive restructuring is the fundamental tool of emotional psychitecture, and psychological research has found it to be highly effective for eliminating negative emotional responses.30 The first step is to keep a log in the form of a notepad or a smartphone app.31 Try to take a note of every undesirable emotion you notice - anything from minor annoyance to severe anxiety. The simple act of keeping a log should cause you to notice many more of these emotions than you normally would. Every time you log an emotion, take a note of the situation which triggered it, and if possible, the chain of thoughts which immediately preceded it.

See Thought Record Exercise in CBT book

Over time, you will begin to notice patterns and trends. You will find that certain lines of reasoning dominate your emotional experience. You may find that a certain kind of mistaken reasoning is responsible for a huge percentage of your daily struggles. By correcting the mistaken reasoning, you can permanently reprogram the algorithm and eliminate the undesired emotion.

As you practice the art of restructuring, you begin to call your brain out on the nonsense it throws at you. Discipline with this practice will gradually train your brain not to think these thoughts in the first place. I want to assure you that the art of cognitive restructuring can be mastered. Whether you have a relentless inner monologue or merely an occasionally annoying one, you can develop a firm grip on the ongoing narrative of your life, proactively designing your own experience rather than simply being along for the ride.

Whether or not we are fully conscious of it, we choose irrational interpretations. And counterintuitively, we do it because it feels good.35 We are not just victim to our painful emotions. We indulge them. We choose to catastrophize because, perverse as it may seem, self-pity gives us a kind of short-term high, even if it habitually locks us into deeper lows. When we allow the mind to get away with thinking distorted and self-critical thoughts, our reward system trains it to do it more.36 In order to choose long-term well-being, we have to resist the urge to indulge in our own pain.

We can design our emotions through at least five methods, known as situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation.

Cognitive restructuring takes reappraisal to a deeper level by permanently altering beliefs that repeatedly cause us to suffer. To practice it, keep a log in the form of a notepad or a smartphone app, and try to take a note of every undesirable emotion you notice, the situation which triggered it, and the chain of thoughts which immediately preceded it. Much like the cognitive biases of chapter 2, you can memorize the most common distortions that affect our emotions.

As we have seen, living to serve and gratify our desires is far from the key to enduring well-being. But our desires do more than serve as the red herrings of happiness: they actively cause us to suffer. Because desires cause us pain and frustration when they are not satisfied, every desire we harbor is a potential threat to our contentment and stability.

Forming defined goals does not get rid of our desires. Even after we refuse the seductive offer of our desires to set our goals for us, they are still present, either serving to pull us toward our goals or away from them. The desires that pull us away from our goals are called temptations.

Another wise thinker who weighed in on desire was Epicurus, who argued that we need very little to be happy and should strive to reduce our desires as much as possible. He thought we should satisfy our natural and necessary desires like food and water. But we should not strive to satisfy those which are unnatural or unnecessary, like extravagant foods, sex, power, or Instagram followers (his words, not mine).

It is possible for us to regulate our desires such that we cut off our suffering when the situation calls for it. But furthermore, it is entirely possible to do this and still use them to powerfully motivate us toward rational goals. We don’t need to renounce desire altogether; we just need to become proficient desire manipulators.

The first and most basic skill we must practice is the ability to up-regulate, or increase, and down-regulate, or decrease the strength of a particular desire.

When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: ‘This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish’…This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13

Gratitude can be used as a method for up-regulating all desires for what you already have while down-regulating desires for what you lack. It is an excellent strategy for countering the disappointment of failure by shifting emotional investment away from new gains and toward things that you already have, such as loved ones, achievements, or fortunate living conditions. Often the greatest barrier to serenity is too many desires for what we don’t possess and too few for what we do.

The Stoics had a related practice which has been called negative visualization, or premortem. It is closely related to the Buddhist reflection on impermanence, and the Dalai Lama has termed it “pain insurance.” When you initiate this practice, you reflect on the possibility of losing the things you have. You consider the possibility that all of your plans may fail, all of your possessions may be lost, and all those you care about, including yourself, can, and eventually will die.

In his book, The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Donald Robertson points out that this thought experiment has its place in modern therapy as well.19 Aaron Beck refers to the tendency of depressed patients to magnify their issues and take the “worm’s eye view” of their situations. To counter this, patients are encouraged to take an “enlarged perspective,” in which they distance themselves from their current circumstances, view them with greater objectivity, and contemplate them from a greater scale and timespan.

powerful tactic which uses and builds upon the basic skills of up and down-regulation is a method I call counteraction. Counteraction, which was briefly touched on in chapter 2, entails balancing out a desire by up or down-regulating an equal and opposing desire so they “cancel” one another out.

By generating conflicting desires, you hedge your bets against unwanted outcomes and turn every outcome into a wanted one. The moment one outcome actualizes, you can drop the counteracting desire.

See Andres Lo

You can carefully increase a desire and decrease the conflicting desire like increasing the gas in a car. Eventually, you will start to enact counteraction techniques automatically and internally. You start to immediately notice friction in your mind and generate the counteracting desire automatically.

He was a precursor to the modern-day minimalist, rejecting anything unnecessary. His shamelessness was meant to serve as a demonstration that nature and reason were superior to convention, and that in many ways, the simple lives of animals were better than the overcomplicated lives civilized society demands. He preached the virtues of self-control and self-sufficiency and claimed that virtue of character was all anyone needed to live a good life. He once threw away his only possession, a wooden bowl, after seeing a boy cupping his hands to drink from the river, announcing, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.”

By banishing all unnecessary forms of gratification from his life, he reduced the number of things he needed to have in order to be content, and the number of things he could lose that would ruin his day. If we find that certain desire-based dependencies are maladaptive or cause us to act against our values, we can use the practice of asceticism, or voluntary discomfort, to intentionally deprive ourselves of some desired and attainable object. The practice has been used by some to serve as self-punishment, which has led some to quickly write it off.

But the useful purpose of asceticism is to down-regulate a perpetual desire for anything extrinsic. By utilizing this practice, you can break dependencies and make yourself more emotionally robust. Simply choose something on which you feel you are overly reliant, and intentionally limit or sacrifice the gratification of the associated desire. Though it may feel like self-punishment, minor and temporary acts of self-denial can be fully grounded in self-compassion.

If you find yourself unable to endure basic economy flights, enjoy camping trips, or are unhappy whenever the thermostat is not set to the perfect temperature, you have become overly-reliant on comfort. This dependency will limit your ability to be content in all but the rare perfect scenario.

Frequent practice of moderate asceticism is a way of embedding into your mind the fact that your desires are not good indicators of worthwhile choices. When you act against those desires, your mind will learn from your behaviors and conclude that these things are not so desirable after all.

Intrinsic goals do not result in negative emotion because it is impossible to fail at them, and building a life full of intrinsic goals is a great way to prevent constant emotional pain. But even when our highest goals and ultimate aims are intrinsic, we will inevitably have certain extrinsic sub-goals that will result in pain when they are unmet. And in order to prevent this pain, we need to structure these goals properly. Which of these structures would you rather be inside of in a tornado?

The structure on the right, however, is highly robust, and a person with a goal structure like this will be far more emotionally robust. As soon as one goal fails, he can pivot over to another, and the more quickly this can be done, the less time has to be spent suffering, and the sooner he can get back to pursuing his ends. This is why you need to develop alternates for your goals. Carve out as many alternate paths to your higher goals as you can.

Forking Paths

Our desires are essentially emotional investments, and many of the principles of good financial investing apply to good desire allocation. Diversification is the act of increasing the variety of investments to avoid being overly reliant on any particular one.31 Just as being fully invested in one stock makes you incredibly vulnerable to its fluctuations, being fully invested in any specific goal or outcome makes you emotionally vulnerable.

Single stock risk see Andrew Lo

Design a dense minefield of success for yourself such that it is impossible to take a step without winning.

Use the tactics discussed earlier to up-regulate or down-regulate desires until all outcomes are appropriately balanced. “Invest” desire toward the goals with the highest and most probable emotional return. When it seems likely that a certain goal will not pan out and its outcome is out of your control, down-regulate your desire for that outcome or counteract it with an opposing desire.

When you suspect that a person in your life has an overall negative effect on you, decrease your investment and increase it in other, more constructive relationships. Furthermore, if you feel you are overly invested in relationships altogether, or have a condition like autism that makes relationships more difficult, it may be a good idea ...

The investment principle of liquidity is also highly relevant to desire design. You need to be able to quickly move funds from one form of investment to another so you can respond to new circumstances with agility.33 And you need to be able to modulate your desires quickly so you aren’t stuck wanting something which has already left the realm of possibility. By exercising the muscle of desire regulation, even when it seems unnecessary, you increase your emotional agility. Try to ta...

Lastly, extinguish desire for anything out of the realm of possibility as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t make sense to invest in the stock of a company we knew was going out of business, and it d...

As you get quicker and quicker at desire regulation, you increase what we might call your refresh rate, or the speed at which you can accept and adapt to circumstances. You gain the ability to adjust the dials of desire as it aids you in your goals, whether those goals are behavioral or emotional. Much like the reappraisal methods of the last chapter, this can become an instantaneous process. You can adapt to new circumstances as soon as they arise and skip the negative emotions altogether.

Though we only have one word for them, there are two very different meanings of “optimism.” Cognitive optimism is a distortion of the truth. The willingness to believe a desired outcome or belief is more likely than the evidence suggests. But emotional optimism has nothing to do with specific truths or outcomes in our lives. It is the highly adaptive attitude that all will be well regardless of the outcome. We must all aim to be cognitive realists and emotional optimists.

Aristotle proposed the notion that we should strive not to extirpate all negative emotion, but to experience appropriate emotions in appropriate proportions. The virtuous had to learn to master their emotions and experience them appropriately in the right balance. This balance was defined as a mean between two extremes, and this mean varied by circumstance. Courage was the ideal mean between cowardice and rashness, and pride between humility and vanity. In this sense, ethics could be compared to aesthetics, striving toward beauty, proportion, and harmony.11

Emotional Algorithms Man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects I call bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worst. - Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

Human emotions exist to guide people toward gene propagation in a bygone world. They may overlap with modern, personal ends, but this is in no way guaranteed. Our emotions should only be considered useful to us insofar as they serve our personal goals. They are not inherently useful to us or even necessarily informative. They can guide us in positive directions and teach us valuable things, but to suggest that they always will is to misunderstand the reasons they exist.

Several philosophies have urged followers to numb or relinquish their passions wholesale. But the psychitectural perspective looks at individual emotional responses à la carte. We must decide on a case-by-case basis which emotions serve us in which situations.

For every negative emotional algorithm, there are strategies to be uncovered for deprogramming it. Certain cognitions can serve as counter algorithms for anxiety, jealousy, and anger, and the best of these have been preserved. We can codify the wise, therapeutic words of the great psychitectural thinkers. If you can embed these precepts into your software, they will be triggered automatically by the thoughts which cause anger, envy, and sorrow, neutralizing the painful reactions on contact.