Mental Constructs: the cornerstone of self-improvement

Think about what moved you to self-improvement in the first place.

I guess that it probably was some frustration or some obstacle on the pursuit of an objective, which made you stop, step back, and think that maybe it was your own behavior or attitude which needed to change, rather than external circumstances.

Hopefully you solved your problem.

Nonetheless, the assumption you made — that you could change your own point of view and beliefs — would have not been possible for normal people before some centuries ago.

Before the birth of Kantian philosophy and then psychology, people could not even imagine that they had an inner life, that their psychology was separate from external reality, and that the former was viable to errors, and to be even doubted and changed. Your banal assumption is then the product of centuries of philosophical speculation by the finest minds humans have ever known.

What’s truly interesting about that idea though, is that its explicit content — that we can change our way of seeing things — is at once the application of such content to yourself. By thinking that maybe your way of seeing things can be modified, you are indeed already influencing your though patterns. You are moving your focus on different elements, from external elements, to your own thought process.

The consequences are real: your actions might change, your empathy towards others might too — maybe you’ll stop thinking you are right, and you might start thinking that your opinion is one among many. You might experiment with new ways to deal with people, or do things.

There nowadays exist entire professions devoted to studying and influencing our perceptions of things: psychologists, psychiatrists, marketers, politicians, philosophers, journalists. The common thread is the basic, uninteresting idea that our ideas, feelings and reality might not coincide. That we might be wrong.

Welcome to mental constructs.

The anatomy of Mental constructs

The example above is the father of mental constructs, while being a mental construct itself.

Mental constructs are simply the set of ideas and beliefs that we hold. While this seems easy on the surface, truth is that most mental constructs are so deeply ingrained in us, and backed up by so many experiences and emotional baggage, that we fail to see them as opinion, not facts.

Furthermore, I like referencing to them as constructs, rather than only beliefs, because they they indeed possess entire scaffolds to back them up, and we mostly experience them as entire world views, rather than individual ideas. This makes it even harder to separate them from facts.

Mental constructs literally form the structure of our world. This is because they orient our attention, and therefore actions in the World. They give meaning to our experiences. They are meaning itself. Experience without it would be raw data, as much as a foreign language is just mere sound before you know not only its words, but its rules as well.

The very idea of “World” is a mental construct.

We can’t ever really escape mental constructs, nor should we. The very beliefs which might not be fully accurate are the same ones that allow us to feel emotions and give richness to experiences.

The power of Mental Constructs

Mental constructs are power itself, as philosopher Michel Foucault held. They are since power itself is the desire to influence the world, and we define what is the world, and how to influence it, by mental constructs.

Mental constructs form the invisible net through which you live your life, the maze which you try to navigate and which determines which choices you’re allowed to take, and which ones seem inaccessible to you.

Your emotions are products of them, since emotions are our reaction to our perception of events. Between events and feeling stand the transparent world of ideas and beliefs, which determine if we feel sadness or joy, anger or calm.

We like to think that events are reality: we do since events are tangible, and therefore more readily available. Thoughts are not. We also do since most of our mental constructs are strongly backed up by hard emotions, since they constitute our most fundamental mean of power and security in life.

Mental constructs are the fabric of our worlds, and this is not going to change.

What can we do about it?

Some practical tips to use mental models

1)Discerning emotions, thoughts and facts

The basic tip is one from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

When living an experience, learn to discern between emotions and thought, and thought and facts.

You do this by questioning “is this an emotion, a thought, or a fact?”. Everyone gets this wrong from time to time. “I feel you are right” is actually an opinion, and should say “I think you are right, therefore I feel secure”.

The above tool is useful, and is taught in CBT sessions to patients, because emotions, thoughts and facts need to be dealt with differently.

Emotions need to be accepted as they are and experienced. They cannot be directly changed.

Facts must be accepted, but can be influenced with action.

Opinions can be seen, accepted but also questioned. “How much is this opinion realistic, and useful?”. This is the question to apply to opinions, after you’ve spotted it out.

Problems start when:

• you treat emotions as facts, so you try to force them to change, you deny them, or you apply judgement (so called secondary beliefs) to them, thus making the feeling usually worse
• you treat thoughts as facts or emotions, therefore forgetting that they can be questioned in their usefulness

It’s usually hard to treat emotions as thoughts since emotions are more direct and hardly get mistaken for something colder like a thought.

It is usually helpful to start from emotions, as they are directly noticeable due to their physical quality, then discern the event or fact associated to it, and last individuate the thought which stands in the middle. Thoughts are more elusive and usually taken for granted, so they are harder to pinpoint at first.

2)Finding alternatives to thoughts

Try it now. Pick a thought you had recently, maybe about an argument you had. Try for a moment to imagine an alternative explanation to it. Maybe you thought “they’ve been really rude to me”. Try to think “they behaved rudely, but maybe I need to understand their reasons”. Now check your emotions. Do you feel a difference? At first you felt resentful, annoyed. Now you feel calmer.

This brief experiment is simply to show you how experimenting with different perspectives can truly shift our feelings about a situation, and it also show how two different opinions are not more or less real, as they both feel true when you hold them.

It is not “lying to ourselves” as we do this all the times, albeit unknowingly.

The knowledge of mental models hopefully give you the tool to be more in control of your inner state in a conscious way.

A core idea is that of experimenting with new perspective after you’ve spotted an opinion. This is since we all hold our opinions very dearly and trying to force them to change can actually work against us, causing negative emotions and self-judgement to take place.

3)Accept your emotions, be compassionate of your mental constructs

Emotions are experientially closer to facts than opinions, because they are experienced in the body. Emotions cannot really be influenced directly (without the use of substances) but can be influenced modifying opinions and facts (although the latter are always filtered by mental constructs).

We often feel bad for some emotions we experience, or some thoughts we entertain. You might feel shame, or guilt. These are usually the consequence of secondary thoughts which we formulate about our own emotions.

Fact is, our mental construct were mostly there before we even noticed them. We are not to be held responsible for their creation (nor are our parents). Most importantly, we can put them in perspective and even experiment with alternative ones.

We can react to our own mental constructs, and work on building more useful ones.

An useful mental construct is to see them as something we were endowed with during our growth, but which are passible of change, and improvement.

4)In every situation, know a mental construct is in action

We often get stuck in life and feel there is no way out of situation when we forget that we are employing a mental construct to interpret it.

We see reality and our emotions so tied that we deduce they must be one.

The knowledge of mental constructs lets you now that the key to your wellbeing is really inside of you, not in some deep way but simply in your possibility to choose the mental construct which you live by.

Often facts need to change to make us finally well-off, but cannot influence facts until we come to see them as passible of being acted upon, and that comes through a change of mental construct.

Change comes after we decide we can change, or something makes us realize that we can do it.

The way you see and approach a situation determines the elements you’ll pay attention to, and the action you will take.

By knowing this and reminding yourself of it, you will hopefully feel more empowered and less victim to circumstances.

To conclude

Mental constructs are at work continuously in our lived. There is no escape from them.

While this might seem a prison, and we might never come to see reality as it is, it actually is the source of great power. The power to, literally, choose the form of the world we live in.