PDF Summary:Designing the Mind, by Designing the Mind and Ryan A Bush

Do you want to become the master of your own mind? Do you struggle with thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that don’t align with your goals and aspirations? If so, Ryan A. Bush’s book Designing the Mind can help. Bush argues that the mind is like a computer that can be reprogrammed, and he provides a collection of strategies that will help you change the thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors that are holding you back into ones that help you become your best self.

In our guide, we’ll explore Bush’s assertion that you can treat your mind like a computer with software that can be adjusted to better suit your needs. We’ll also explore his strategies for rewriting unhelpful thought patterns, redirecting undesirable emotions, and optimizing your behavior to suit your goals and values. Our commentary will explore alternative methods for changing unwanted thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors. It’ll also provide a deeper look into some of the neurological and psychological phenomena behind Bush’s arguments.

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How to Overcome Your Biases

According to Bush, to more accurately perceive reality, you need to actively work to eliminate your biases. This can be a difficult process because we typically struggle to see our own biases, even when we can recognize them in other people. Despite this, it’s possible with study and practice.

(Shortform note: The inability to recognize our own biases comes from a psychological phenomenon called naive realism: an egocentric bias in which we believe that our perception of reality represents objective truth. Thus, we assume that any perspective that contradicts our own is biased. Theoretically, as children develop and learn logical reasoning skills, their naive realism diminishes. In practice, however, many people are still limited by this bias into adulthood. This can lead to strong divisions over anything from debates among friends about the merits of a TV show to widespread conflicts over differing political views.)

Let’s explore three ways to overcome biases: through mindfulness, self-study, and reflection.

Practice #1: Use Mindfulness to Overcome Biases

As we mentioned earlier, mindfulness practice can be a good way to start building awareness of your cognitive processes, including your biases. According to Bush, it allows you to focus your attention on patterns of thinking that would otherwise be automatic.

Specific Practices for Using Mindfulness to Reduce Bias

Mindfulness helps you cultivate conscious awareness of yourself and the world around you, encouraging nonjudgmental observation and a commitment to regular introspection. As Bush suggests, this introspection may make identifying your personal biases and behavioral patterns easier as you get to know yourself better. Here are three mindfulness practices you can use to recognize your biases and change your biased behavior:

1) Practice being aware of your emotions. Negative emotions that we often shy away from—like judgment, apathy, and fear—can be important indicators of biased thoughts and impulses.

2) Separate your sense of self from negative thought patterns. Mindfulness involves decentering your thoughts and emotions and recognizing that they don’t always represent the truth. When you recognize that your biased thoughts are temporary and not necessarily a reflection of who you are, you can more objectively examine them.

3) Use a loving-kindness meditation. The Buddhist practice of loving-kindness involves wishing yourself, your loved ones, your enemies, and finally the whole world well. This meditation increases feelings of connectedness, and research shows that it substantially decreases unconscious bias toward marginalized groups.

Practice #2: Use Self-Study to Overcome Biases

Bush also advises learning about the most common biases so you can begin recognizing them in yourself. Study them using multiple sources, and familiarize yourself with the situations that normally trigger them.

(Shortform note: Bush suggests self-studying cognitive biases as a way to begin overcoming them, but if you want a little more structure in your learning, consider taking a course on the topic. There are many online options on platforms like Udemy, and some universities also offer cognitive bias courses.)

Practice #3: Use Reflection to Overcome Biases

Once you identify a bias you have, Bush advises trying to notice every situation that triggers it. Instead of acting based on your biased thinking, pause to reflect. Consciously create an alternative, unbiased thought pattern and act based on this new pattern. The more often you do this for the same type of situation, the more intuitive your new thought pattern will become. Eventually, it’ll replace the biased thought pattern entirely.

Strategies for Recognizing and Overcoming Unhelpful Thought Patterns

How can you recognize your biases and identify new thought patterns to take their place? One way to identify problematic thought patterns is by cultivating curiosity in everything you do—examine your thoughts about different situations, and ask yourself why you’re responding in a certain way.

Using curiosity, you can observe your thoughts nonjudgmentally. The curious mindset also helps you to accept that there are multiple ways of thinking about a situation—instead of staying stuck in one thought pattern, ask yourself, “What’s another way to interpret what’s just happened?”

If you’ve identified an unhelpful thought pattern but you’re having trouble thinking of a healthier alternative, consider asking someone else for their input, such as a therapist or a trusted friend. When you’re stuck, hearing someone else’s perspective can help you see the situation in a new light.

Bias Example: Rewriting Confirmation Bias

As Bush mentions, one well-known and universal cognitive bias is confirmation bias. When under its influence, we place a disproportionately high value and strong focus on information that confirms our existing beliefs while ignoring or denying information that contradicts those beliefs. An example of a triggering situation for confirmation bias might be reading an article that represents an opposing opinion on a political issue that’s important to you: You might immediately dismiss it as illogical, irrelevant, or further confirmation that the other side doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Confirmation bias can limit your exposure to new information and ideas, preventing important growth and change. Therefore, it’s useful to identify and reduce this bias in yourself.

Strategies for Overcoming Confirmation Bias

To reduce the influence of confirmation bias on your beliefs, always consider the credibility of the source you’re reading—what might their agenda be? Where do they get their information, and is the evidence they’re using to support their points legitimate? What is the article actually trying to say? If you can answer these questions for every article you read (including those that support your current beliefs), you’ll be able to better determine the quality of the information.

In the future, before settling on a final opinion about an issue, read articles from different sources and different perspectives and keep an open mind to ideas you don’t immediately agree with. This will help you move past the limitations of confirmation bias, and it’ll give you a more objective framework for evaluating arguments on any issue.

Level 2: Conquering Your Emotions

The next level of mental programming Bush suggests you work on is conquering your emotions. He argues that understanding and altering your emotional responses must come next because emotions, more than anything else, drive us to act. If you have a poor emotional reaction to a situation, then your behavioral response will likely do more harm than good. (For example, most of us have said or done something in anger that we regretted once we calmed down.) If you learn to modulate your emotional responses, you can more easily change your behavior for the better.

(Shortform note: Emotions are great motivators toward action because of how we evolved to survive—many emotions come from the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fearful or threatening stimuli. When we see something that appears dangerous—like an aggressive animal, for example—emotions like fear prompt the fight-or-flight response, which physiologically prepares our bodies to deal with the danger by facing or fleeing it. This isn’t always useful in today’s world when we have strong emotional responses to things that aren’t truly a threat to us, like public speaking or job interviews. Bush’s strategies for redirecting unhelpful emotions could be especially useful in those cases.)

In this section, we’ll discuss where our emotions come from. We’ll also explore Bush’s method of using rational thinking to get rid of undesirable emotions.

Where Our Emotional Responses Come From

To begin controlling your emotions, Bush notes, you have to first understand how they form. Your rational thought processes mediate your emotional responses: Instead of responding with an emotion directly after you experience a stimulus (like an interaction with another person or a piece of news you receive), there’s a thought pattern in between the two that determines how you feel about the stimulus. Usually, if you judge that the outcome of the stimulus is desirable, you’ll experience positive emotions. If you judge that the outcome isn’t what you wanted, you’ll experience negative emotions.

How to Identify the Source of Unexpected Emotions

Bush argues that emotions always stem from our thoughts, but what about situations when we feel an emotion and can’t pinpoint any thoughts or triggers that could’ve caused it? Sometimes, our brains trigger emotions unconsciously. Neurological studies show that the human brain picks up on a lot of information in our environment without our conscious awareness, meaning that we may unconsciously notice things that then inspire confusing emotional responses.

If you experience an emotion and can’t figure out where it came from, ask yourself the following questions:

• Were the preceding events surprising or gratifying?

• Will what happened stand in the way of what I want, or will it help me achieve it?

• How much control do I have over what happens next?

• Do the events align with my belief in what’s right and what’s wrong?

• Were the preceding events my fault or someone else’s?

Studies show that thought patterns that prompt strong emotions typically answer these types of questions. As Bush asserts, if your answers to these questions work in your favor, you’ll probably experience positive emotions. If not, you’ll experience negative feelings.

How to Change Your Emotional Responses

Bush states that you can change your emotional responses by reevaluating how you think about situations that cause undesirable emotions. Start by keeping a log of every undesirable emotion you experience. As you name each emotion, also write down the situation that triggered it and any thoughts you had before you felt it.

(Shortform note: In addition to logging your emotions and their triggers, consider writing down your physical experiences of different feelings. Emotions don’t just happen in your mind—they prompt physiological responses in your cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, skeletomuscular, and autonomic nervous systems. For example, you might feel hot and flushed when you’re angry, or you might feel nauseated and weak when you’re anxious. Logging when these physical sensations occur can help you pinpoint connections between feelings and events, and they can indicate how strong a feeling is.)

Over time, Bush notes, you’ll start to see patterns in the kinds of situations and lines of reasoning that lead to negative emotions: For instance, maybe almost every time you feel sadness, the emotion is preceded by self-deprecating thoughts. Once you’ve identified some of your patterns, you can start to rewrite them. Analyze the faulty thoughts and beliefs that lead to each undesirable emotion and come up with rebuttals for them. This will prevent the undesirable emotion from triggering. As you practice identifying and challenging the reasoning behind undesirable emotions, you’ll get better at moving past them.

Replacing Negative Thought Patterns vs. Ignoring Negative Thought Patterns

As Bush argues, redirecting negative thought patterns and replacing them with positive ones can help you overcome emotions that don’t serve you. Some people might confuse this with thought stopping—actively watching for and banishing negative thoughts—but there’s an important distinction between these two practices.

While challenging and redirecting negative thoughts acknowledges the negative thoughts and helps you identify alternative perspectives, thought stopping is when you attempt to ignore negative thought patterns entirely. This doesn’t work—when you suppress a thought instead of addressing it, it’ll most likely resurface even stronger, along with all of its accompanying emotions. Instead of ignoring your negative thought patterns, approach them mindfully by recognizing them without judging them.

Faulty Reasoning Example: Your Friend Cancels on You

Let’s examine an example of how to deal with destructive emotions that are based on faulty reasoning. Say you have plans to go out with your friend, but they cancel at the last minute. They apologize and say that they’re just too busy at work, and you say it’s not a problem. Still, you’re left feeling frustrated and a little anxious. Instead of letting these unpleasant emotions inform your next interaction with your friend, you take a moment to understand where the feelings are coming from.

Right when you got your friend’s text, you had the thought, “If they’re canceling this late, they must be avoiding me because they’re upset with me.” You tried to think of anything you could have done to offend them, and when you couldn’t come up with anything, you felt frustrated with them and defensive. You also felt anxious because you don’t want to be in conflict with them.

To get rid of these unproductive emotions, you find a rebuttal for your faulty thought patterns: Your friend has shown no other signs of being upset with you, and they previously told you how busy they’ve been at work long before they canceled. They were also adamant about rescheduling your get-together. This rebuttal soothes your anxiety and frustration—you realize that you don’t have to feel defensive or insecure because your friend’s choice is unrelated to your relationship with them.

Level 3: Mastering Your Behavior

In the previous two sections, you learned how to change faulty, bias-driven thought patterns and get rid of unhelpful emotions. In this section, you’ll learn how to implement Bush’s final level of self-mastery: control over your behavior and actions. We’ll examine his assertion that you should direct your behavior toward values-based goals, along with his strategies for changing your behavioral habits.

Self-Control and Following Your Goals

According to Bush, you should strive to gain as much control over your behavior and actions as possible. People who have a high level of self-control experience a collection of benefits, including a healthier lifestyle, more stable finances, more successful relationships, and a generally better state of mental and physical health.

The Virtuous Cycle of Self-Control and Healthy Living

While having a high level of self-control can contribute to a healthier life and create the benefits Bush lists, having a healthier lifestyle can also increase self-control, creating a virtuous cycle. For example, getting good-quality sleep is important for brain health, and brain health highly affects our behavior—when we’re feeling tired and stressed, we tend to make poor decisions rather than maintaining strict self-control.

Further, studies show that sleep deprivation specifically affects the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. These parts of the brain regulate emotions and logical reasoning respectively, so poor sleep leaves you less able to control your thoughts or emotions. Since Bush argues that you have to master mental and emotional control before developing behavioral self-control, to make it to Level 3 of his framework, it’s important to get good sleep.

Base Goals On Your Values

To reach a successful state, you have to specifically direct your behavior toward achieving your goals. Bush argues you should base your goals on your values.

(Shortform note: In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield expands on the idea of using goals to shape your behavior, arguing that you should act as if you’ve already achieved your goals. This will help you attract and recognize opportunities and people that will bring you closer to completing them. To determine how specifically you should act, ask yourself the following questions: How would you feel when you achieve your goals? How would you think? How would you talk? What would you wear? Additionally, try modeling the behaviors of successful people, like self-confidence and comfort with taking risks.)

Before we explain how to set values-based goals, let’s explore what values actually are. Values start as your intuitions about the perceived “goodness” and “badness” of different actions and consequences. When you have the same intuitions about what’s good and bad over and over, you get a sense of your ideal traits, such as kindness, courage, or honesty. The collection of these ideals becomes your value system, which represents your ideal self and the traits you want to embody. Embodying your values will bring you fulfillment and success.

How to Define Your Values When You Struggle to Intuit Them

Discovering your values might be hard if you're not in touch with your intuition. If you’re in this situation but you still want to gain the benefits of clarifying your values (increased success and fulfillment), you'll first need to take extra action to identify your values consciously.

Start by reviewing a list of core values—like wisdom, loyalty, and kindness—and write down the ones that resonate with you. Additionally, think about the people you admire most and the qualities they represent, and write down these qualities too. For example, you might admire a family member for their generosity.

Once you have a list of values you feel represent you, group them into categories. For instance, if you wrote down kindness, generosity, and empathy, you might make a group of values centered around helping others. These groups can help you identify major themes in your value system and figure out what matters most to you.

Values vs. Desires

Bush warns that values shouldn’t be confused with desires. Desires represent the things we want and crave—like a fancy new phone or expensive concert tickets—but they aren’t necessarily the things that will make us happy. Often, when we acquire the object of our desire, it doesn’t make us feel as good as we thought it would, leaving us unsatisfied. Desires also invite loss into our lives—we feel good when we obtain something we want, but we suffer when we inevitably lose it since everything’s impermanent.

(Shortform note: As Bush states, greater desire often invites greater dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, our modern consumer culture depends on us desiring things. Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on advertising that entices us to spend more on items we desire. Then, we desire more money to keep spending, and our dissatisfaction increases. Research shows that people in countries with greater wealth—and thus a more robust consumer culture—are often unhappier than people in poorer countries. To break the cycle of consumerism and desire, focus on appreciating and taking care of what you already have. Additionally, look to the truly important things for fulfillment, like the people you love or activities you enjoy.)

Even though they rarely contribute to our long-term happiness, Bush notes, desires are often more powerful than values. Our brains are designed to follow desires without question—the feel-good chemical dopamine (which is tied to desire) pushes us toward action with the promise that we’ll receive a reward once we get what we want. In contrast, values are steady and ever-present, but they’re also easier to ignore.

How to Reduce Your Dependence on Instant Gratification

Desires are more powerful than values because fulfilling them brings an immediate reward—dopamine—and we’re hardwired to seek instant gratification. It’s much harder for us to conceptualize and make decisions based on an intangible future reward, which is what following our values brings.

That being said, delaying gratification is a skill we can practice and learn. One strategy for doing so is using commitment devices, or circumstances that you set up to remove temptation. For example, say you want to spend more time reading because you value having a wide breadth of knowledge. Still, you’re struggling to achieve your goal because you often pick up your phone and spend hours scrolling through social media instead of reading, since it gives you an instant hit of dopamine. To help you commit to your values-based reading goal, consider putting your phone in another room while you read or deleting the social media app from your phone.

How to Set Values-Based Goals

Bush describes a values-oriented framework you can use to design your goals. As representatives of your ideal self, your values should be at the top of your goal framework, meaning that your goals should always bring you closer to them in some way. Then, use reason and logic to determine the best methods for achieving those goals. Finally, let your desires drive you to take action toward your goals.

For example, say you strongly value independence. To become closer to your ideal self as an independent person, you make a lofty, value-driven goal to be your own boss someday. Instead of quitting your job right away, though, you use logic to make a plan that will allow you to save enough money to open a business of your own. Finally, you allow your desires—like wanting comfort and security, wanting a flexible schedule, and so on—to push you to take the steps necessary to make the plan a success.

(Shortform note: Keeping your goals centered on your values first before logic and desires works well because it helps you focus not only on what you want but why you want it. In other words, values-based goals give you purpose, direction, and motivation since they align so closely with what you truly want and who you truly are. This means that, in addition to helping you achieve self-mastery, values-based goals might actually make you healthier—recent studies show that a sense of purpose can have important health benefits. Having a strong sense of purpose can counteract the effects of chronic stress and protect the body against inflammation. Additionally, high levels of purpose reduce activity in the amygdala, making you less emotionally reactive.)

How to Change Your Habits

Along with aligning your behavior toward values-based goals, Bush asserts that eliminating and replacing bad habits is another way to take control of your behavior. Good habits are behavioral patterns that push you toward your goals, while bad ones take you away from your goals.

(Shortform note: Although bad habits push us farther from our goals, they’re often behaviors that make us feel good in the short term. Because, as previously noted, we seek instant gratification over long-term results, bad habits often seem more appealing than many good habits that require us to put in more work. Generally, habits are so hard to break because they’re formed in a part of our brain that’s out of our conscious control, leaving us mostly unaware that we’re engaging in them.)

Bush describes two strategies you can use to redirect your behavior and form more beneficial habits:

Strategy #1: Keep Track of Your Habits

According to Bush, just keeping track of your habits can sometimes be enough to break bad ones. To change your behavior, you have to first understand and analyze your current patterns, which this strategy promotes.

Start by writing a list of habits you want to have and habits you don’t want. For example, maybe you want to cook five nights a week and take your dog for a walk every morning, but you also want to stop biting your nails and procrastinating on your email responses. Once you have your list, keep a record of how many times you do each habitual behavior per week. You’ll see how much of a hold bad habits have on your time, and you can then take the steps necessary to break them.

(Shortform note: When trying to change your habits, Jack Canfield also argues that you should start by identifying old habits you want to change and new habits you want to implement. In The Success Principles, he expands on this strategy: He suggests narrowing things down and focusing on changing just four habits every year. Studies show that it takes about 13 weeks to establish a new habit, so you can learn a new one every quarter. Start by listing your four bad habits and explaining why they’re potentially harmful. Then, identify a new behavior to replace the old one. Finally, create a plan with specific steps that will help you implement the new habits, and focus on one plan per quarter.)

Strategy #2: State How You Plan to Spend Your Time in Advance

According to Bush, you can create a new, positive habit by setting clear intentions and goals for enacting it. We’re often too vague when trying to implement a new behavior—without a specific plan, we’re much less likely to follow through. This is because we have to use more willpower and make more decisions when the time comes for us to actually engage in the new behavior. If you have a plan beforehand, that mental work is already done for you.

When planning a new habit, express the following in specific terms:

• The behavior you want to implement
• The exact time and day you’ll implement it
• The location where you’ll implement it

For example, instead of saying to yourself, “I want to walk my dog more,” say “I want to take my dog for a half-hour-long walk every morning at 7:00 am in the park.”

(Shortform note: After planning out the details of your habit (and thus eliminating the risk that you’ll succumb to decision fatigue), you can further increase your likelihood of success by visualizing yourself enacting the plan. In Organize Tomorrow Today, Jason Selk, Tom Bartow, and Matthew Rudy describe how visualization prepares your mind and body for an action before you really take it. It allows you to rehearse what you want to happen, meaning that by the time you have to do the action you visualized, you’ll feel more prepared for potential challenges and surprises. Therefore, if you picture yourself doing the behavior at the time and in the place you planned, you’ll be more likely to succeed when you actually implement it.)