I have written before about how your brain constantly lies to you. It is still a theme that keeps coming up, one I see in a great many people, and in myself too. Except that, once I understood the mechanism, I stopped believing its lies. 😊
Starting from there, here is another kind of lie, a subtler one:
Your brain is not built to show you reality exactly as it is. It is built to make predictions. To anticipate. To fill in the gaps. To guess what comes next. Because that uses less energy than analyzing every situation from scratch.
That is why, very often, you don’t see the world as it is, but as you expect it to be.
If you go into a situation convinced you will fail, your brain starts looking for evidence of it. It will notice the mistakes, magnify the risks, hold on to the criticism, and ignore the progress and the things that work.
And not because it wants to hurt you, but because it is trying to confirm the prediction it has already made.
This is where the paradox appears.
You think you are reacting to reality, when in fact you are reacting to your interpretation of it.
!!! So you no longer see all the information available. You mainly see the pieces that fit the story your mind has already written.
If you think of yourself as unlucky, you will notice every moment when things didn’t work out.
If you think of yourself as unwanted, you will see signs of rejection everywhere.
Over time, this evidence piles up and you end up saying:
“See? I was right.”
!!! But all you had was a mind extremely good at finding confirmation for what it already believed. 😄
Most of the time, it is not reality that limits us, but the story our brain tells about it. And the moment you see the mechanism, you stop automatically believing all its stories.
The brain can “work” for us or against us. And in both cases, it is equally good at it! 😊
