5 ways your brain can deceive you and what to do about it

While your brain has evolved in magnificent ways to help you learn, grow and thrive, you must still be cautious about believing everything it tells you.

The brain deploys hacks and shortcuts to make sense of all the information it receives and pays attention to, conserving energy to focus on what it needs to in order to keep you safe.

This includes keeping you safe from physical hazards such as oncoming traffic, slippery floors and falling objects, as well as psychological hazards such as interpersonal conflicts, harassment, embarrassment or even environmental hazards such as poor lighting, loud noises and extreme temperatures. The world can be a dangerous place!

Understanding how your brain functions, particularly in stressful or overwhelming situations, is crucial for maximising your productivity. You can strive to maintain a balanced mindset and approach by recognising both beneficial and detrimental cognitive patterns.

This recognition and insight will help you to make rational and thoughtful decisions, and enable you to act calmly rather than impulsively or reactively.

Your brain can deceive you of the truth in these five common ways:

1. ‘All or nothing’ thinking

This is where you see things as extremes or binary — as either ‘everything is great’, or ‘it’s a total disaster’. So you either aced that presentation, for example, or you made a total mess of it.

Instead of acknowledging the nuances, such as the areas where you did well and where you could improve, you’re stuck in this extreme thinking. We know life is far too complex for situations or events to be broken into these two extremes and that, instead, so many shades of grey exist in between.

Unpacking and discovering what lies within the shades of grey is important, because this is where more accurate meaning and interpretation can be realised.

2. Mental filter

Due to the negative bias already mentioned earlier, you can have a mental filter that means you only recall negative outcomes, events or interactions that happened to you during your day and dismiss anything positive.

For example, you had a productive day at work, but one minor criticism from your boss sticks with you, overshadowing all your other accomplishments that day. You filter out the positives and dwell solely on the one piece of negative feedback.

It can be easy to fall prey to this trap when you feel downtrodden and things feel challenging. Your brain will likely forget all the great things you have achieved so far, and particularly how you felt when you achieved or did something different, because it does not assess these as being an immediate threat to you.

Therefore, your brain is not motivated to remember or recall them readily.

3. ‘Should’ statements

‘Should’ statements occur when you attempt to motivate yourself by dwelling on what you think you ‘should’ be able to achieve — and then you judge yourself critically and often unfairly when you don’t.

For example, ‘I should have reached a certain level in my career by now’, ‘I should be exercising seven days a week’ or ‘I should have completed my assignment by now’. Or you think, ‘I should be cooking gourmet meals every night’, even though you have a busy schedule and often resort to quick 15-minute dinners.

This self-imposed pressure to meet unrealistic standards leads to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. By allowing this ‘should’ language of thought to happen repeatedly, you can severely limit, disempower and judge yourself harshly.

Be mindful of when ‘should’ thinking comes into your mind, because it is often derived from beliefs you’ve held about yourself for a long time or the ideals and views of others, which may not be relevant or essential to you in your life right now.

4. Mind reading

This deception happens when you make quick assumptions and conclude that someone is being negative toward you, without any demonstrable evidence and without taking into account other possible explanations.

For example, say you send a message to a friend and they don’t respond immediately, but you feel confident they have read your message. Instead of considering that your friend might be busy or away from their phone, you assume they’re deliberately ignoring you and feel hurt, disappointed, let down and potentially rejected.

Taking a moment to integrate these assumptions can help you come up with alternative and reasonably plausible ways of making sense of a situation.

5. Over-generalisation

Over-generalisation happens when you face one challenge or negative outcome, and then become convinced this will be repeated in all future similar situations.

For example, ‘I had a super unproductive day; the rest of the week or month will be like this’. Or you have a disagreement with a co-worker and now believe all future interactions with them will be unpleasant.

You generalise one negative experience to all similar situations, assuming they will all turn out the same way. Of course, this over-generalised way of thinking is unhelpful, because every day presents unique opportunities and challenges and does not need to be like the day before.

Similarly, every interaction is unique and does not need to define a relationship. Focusing on each day and each interaction in its wholeness and uniqueness allows specificity and relevance to occur, which is far more meaningful and helpful to you than over-generalising.

Recognise the mind traps

Being mindful of how your brain can deceive you in these five typical ways is extremely powerful.

Having insight into these deceptions can prevent you from falling into these mind traps, which will influence how you think, feel and act. Learning to recognise these mind traps in your own thinking can help you move forward quickly to get the best out of yourself each day.

When you fall prey to one of the five deceptions, reframing and changing how you look at things will help. Psychologists call this ‘cognitive reframing’, and it involves actively altering your perspective or interpretation of a situation, event, interaction or thought to see it in a more positive and balanced light.

Here are three quick steps to move out of unhelpful ways of thinking:

1. Ask yourself regularly, ‘Could I be letting any of the five deceptions cloud my thinking about a particular situation, interaction, event or circumstance?’

2. If you notice you are, ask yourself, ‘What alternative ways of looking at this situation, interaction, event or circumstance are possible?’ or ‘What are the facts of the situation I am aware of?’ and ‘What assumptions am I making?’

3. Finally, ask yourself, ‘What is the most helpful way I can think about the situation to help me reach a more balanced view and understanding of it?’

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This is an edited extract from Productivity Joy by psychologist Simi Rayat. Purchase a copy here. Learn more at simirayat.com