Why We Like to Mindread

You are walking down the hall at your place of work and a colleague passes by. You say, "Hey! How are you?" And they just keep walking past you. What are your immediate thoughts?

I've heard lots of answers to this thought exercise:

• I'd think, "What a jerk. I didn't want to talk with them anyway!"

• I'd be concerned, "They must have a lot of their mind to have not heard me."

• "Oh no, did they forget their hearing aides today?" would be my first thought.

• I'd smile and say, "Oh man. Poor thing. They must have such a crush on me they can't even get the words out when I'm near them." (That one is a personal favorite.)

But the most common answer I hear is something along the lines of, "This is about me." Sometimes with a more elaborate backstory, like "They hate me. It's that thing I said a month ago that they are still upset about. I don't think they will ever forgive me. Ya know what, maybe I better just quit and find a new job. I'm not wanted here." Why do we have a tendency to personalize others' behaviors? And when it comes to interpersonal interactions, why do we assume we know what others are thinking?

The term cognitive distortions was first coined by Aaron Beck in his work on depression treatment (Beck, 1963) which formed the underpinnings of what is now called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Cognitive distortions are automatic thoughts that are either not true, excessively negative or just not useful. They usually come when we are in a stressful or ambiguous situation, or one that reminds us of difficult situations we have been in before. And in the very same situation, depending on your automatic thought, you may feel angry, concerned, flattered, sad or disappointed. CBT is just one of several prominent forms of therapy, but at the time of Beck's first paper on this subject, it was revolutionary. If we learn to notice, work with, reframe and soften our thoughts, he proposed, then we can feel better emotionally.

Noticing ourselves as thinking and feeling creatures is a kind of act of mindfulness. When you notice yourself having a thoughts or a feeling, have you ever stopped to ask yourself who is doing the noticing? There is a "you" that is not your thoughts, feelings, behaviors or physical sensations. This part of you is sometimes called the "observer self". It's the part that is just noticing. When we access the observer self, we can "defuse" from our thoughts so that we don't assume that just because they are in our head they are a reflection of truth. Once we have noticed our thoughts, we can decide what to do with them.

But what are thoughts anyway? As humans we take in billions of pieces of data via our senses all day long. Thoughts are a way of organizing, simplifying and representing our experiences. They are a side effect of our brain's language system. They are the basis of neurocognitive heuristics our brain uses to help us to navigate the world efficiently. We are constantly trying to simplify the complexity of our experiences. And so our brain is using short cuts to help it make more sense.

And why do automatic thoughts tend to be so especially compelling in interpersonal settings? Well, for one, we are humans - social beings. To navigate the social world, we benefit from making guesses about each other's inner lives based on body language, tone of voice, and other context clues. Perhaps we have learned in evolutionary ways that this could be the difference between being "in" or "out" of the tribe. And of course our own personal experiences inform our automatic thought patterns, as well. During the critical learning period of our early life, our interactions with primary attachment figures formed basic neurocognitive frameworks for understanding interpersonal phenomena. For example, let's say you had someone close to you, such as a parent on whom you depended for your basic needs, who did not self-regulate well. You may have learned the importance of recognizing subtle cues to help you make an educated guess about how their internal state was on a given day. You learned that it was best, when in doubt, to assume the worst. To your young brain, you understood this to be a requirement for your survival.

As kids, we didn't know our parents were just humans with their own hang ups, fears, weaknesses. We just knew at an innate level that we needed things - shelter, food. And so our brains found shortcuts for how to make sense of the world in a way that allowed us to be most likely to get those needs met. And overtime, these automatic thoughts about people formed some of the basic tenets of our world views - our interpersonal schemas.

Well that's a bit sad, you might say. Here we are as adults walking around interacting with each other with overly simplistic ideas formed long ago when we were young and didn't know any better. And these simplistic ideas lead us to be defensive, scared, angry. At their worst, they lead us in big and small ways to hurt each other and ourselves. Sad, yes. Definitely. More than sad. Tragic. Bonkers. But also kind of beautiful. Look at it this way. Human, from our beginnings, are survivors. Innovative. We find a way to make things work with limited resources. We are resilient.

In CBT, there are lots of tools available to work with our thoughts in a way that allows us to navigate the social world more effectively. Other therapy modalities add to, and deepen this work. So there is hope. There is hope for those of us who find ourselves spiraling after an ambiguous interaction with a colleague in the hallway... or a partner, or friend, or stranger in the grocery store. I could flesh out all the therapeutic strategies I'm alluding to. But that isn't where I want to focus just now. I want to invite us to simply take a moment to acknowledge what remarkable creatures humans are. We are survivors. In the words of Dr. Who: "Homo Sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species... They're indomitable... indomitable."