Mental Frameworks | Mind
Seeing the glass as a half-full opportunity for effortless growth that I’m grateful for
Why it matters
The world is a complex mess. So to make sense of it, you learnt over time to filter reality through different lenses to make it easier to navigate. Those lenses, or mental frameworks, can be a huge boost to your life, boosting your agency, resilience or flourishing. However, if maladaptive, for example, because something you learnt in the past isn’t serving you anymore, they can hold you back and cause chronic stress, emotional dysregulation, and a sense of helplessness.
Top three things to do
You can shape which thoughts you’ll think. Your thoughts are associations to the input you get, and associations are built over time and strengthened by how useful or emotional they are. You can retrain those associations and apply lenses that serve you without any effort, just as associations that come up.
A note of caution: What follows works in average-ish situations. Don’t blame yourself when you can’t find positive aspects of an abusive relationship, or can’t create slack while you’re working two jobs as a single mom, or don’t become the president by applying a growth mindset.
Agency
One of the largest returns on investment in terms of mindset is probably agency. Once you start realising that you can do things and change things, everything else will become easier.
Practice agency: The best way to get out of a victim mindset where you feel things are just happening to you and you are helpless, is to do things and see the outcome. Every day, do a task that is in the zone of difficult-but-not-impossible. Consistently achieving those will build a mindset of agency. This is called “building mastery” or “active coping”.
Growth mindset: When applying agency to yourself, you get the growth mindset: A sense that you can change, you can grow. Building this follows exactly the same path: Build a consistent practice of doing small things that change you, grow you. For example, studying a skill, working on overcoming a fear, or helping others grow. Check out our guide on change to get ideas.
Effortless action: High-agency can lead to a toxic SF-like view that if you just apply enough grit and control, you can achieve anything. Taoist culture has the view that action should be effortless and in harmony with your environment. This heuristic works because if you have to consistently apply too much effor,t that’s probably a sign that it’s not a match to your skills, an unrealistic goal, unnecessary, etc. To practice this, make a habit of asking yourself: “What might this look like if it were easy?”
One of the beautiful things about agency is that it creates runaway effects on your life. Once you realise you can take action and do so on a particular problem, suddenly all of your other problems become easier to deal with and move forward on. You can also stack this by solving your highest leverage problems first, e.g., sleep, diet and exercise and consequently have more energy and willpower to solve everything else. Here is one of my favourite posts by Cate Hall on agency”
Cameron
Outlook
Now that you have belief that you can change, apply it to your thoughts. It is possible to change how you see the world:
Gratitude: Probably the easiest hack for happiness: Build a habit to look for things to be grateful for, for example, every night before going to sleep. This will train your brain to look for things to be grateful for during the day, improving your outlook on life. FYI: Gratitude mostly works for individualist cultures; in more collectivist cultures, it can create a feeling of indebtedness.
Positivity: If you’re like us, you probably learnt that outlook on life is somehow genetically determined. Not so! Genetic factors only account for about 30%. So, how to train it? Similar to gratitude, just practice imagining your “best positive self” and focusing on things that went well today or positive aspects of difficult situations.
Abundance: We often focus on everything that isn’t enough, especially money and time, thereby arriving in a state of scarcity. This has been shown to impact your IQ as much as skipping a night of sleep, because you can’t stop thinking about it. The best way to move to an abundance mindset is to create abundance: Deliberately create slack by cutting time or money spending. You can also practice focusing on how these constraints enable creativity and solutions you otherwise wouldn’t have considered.
I had an on-off relationship with gratitude journaling. Did it when I first heard about it for a while, dropped it, tried to weave it into my weekly reviews, but it never quite felt right. Then I learnt from a friend that he always does gratitude sharing with his partner before bed. I thought that was so wholesome and am now doing the same. Feels great!
Christoph
Epistemics
What is real? What thoughts are real? What do they mean?
Scout mindset: A drive to see things as they are, not like we want them to be. This is, of course, helpful because things are as they are, and the more we see them like this, the better we can act on that information. Practice it by making predictions and learning from results, thinking in confidence probabilities, not in black-and-white beliefs, seek out people with opposite beliefs and try to see what evidence would change yours or theirs.
Restructuring: When you apply a scout mindset to your thoughts, you quickly see that a lot of thoughts have very little evidence for them. To practice challenging your thoughts, learn about cognitive distortions or cognitive biases and use CBT-style journaling from our article on awareness.
Reframing: Even if something objectively bad happened, there is always the question of what subjective meaning we give it, the story that we tell ourselves. Try the following three: 1. Reframing something in a neutral story, not emotionally charged (e.g., I am failing > I am learning). 2. Try to see the positive aspects 3. Look at it from an older you’s perspective.
Your story here. Our next topic will be about “Broaden the Mind”. Have a hack or story you’d like to share? Reply to this email or email us at christoph@euzoia.org.
Do something now
Pick your favorite framework: How could you apply it even more?
Pick your least favorite: Why don’t you like it? What’s there?
Start an evening reflection habit and weave in some of these prompts.
Want some accountability from us? Reply to this post, and we will check in next week.
Reply to this email with your thoughts on “Broaden your mind” our next topic
Share this post with a friend