Debugging Your Brain

Casey S. Watts

• Publisher: Casey Watts
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780578755045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology

The human brain is buggy. Sometimes your mind distorts reality, gets frustrated with shortcomings, and spirals out of control. With practice, you can debug your brain. Catch those distortions of reality, transform those frustrations into insight, and short-circuit those downward spirals.

Debugging Your Brain (DYB) is a clear applied psychology book and a concise self-help book. Whether or not you have a technical background, you will find the software development analogies approachable and insightful. You will likely reference and re-read DYB many times, each time discovering new insights.

DYB is full of practical techniques. Each technique is condensed to its core idea, accompanied by just enough story to make it memorable. Each chapter has activities to help you put its techniques into practice. The chapters include: Modeling The Brain, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Introspection, Identifying Inputs, Experience Processing, Experience Validation, and Cognitive Restructuring.

Your brain is a complex system. Patch the software that runs in your mind.

Experience Processing

In this chapter, “Experience Processing,” you will learn techniques to help you process experiences by putting them into words. Verbalizing can help you better understand your experiences, and express them to others. Verbalizing experiences can help reduce the stress you feel about a given situation, making you feel more in control and at ease. It can help you choose the best response for the current situation or a future one.

First we will cover three principles, and then we will dig into six techniques that leverage those principles. We will start with these three principles: 1. verbalizing your experiences 2. avoiding rumination 3. accepting automatic inputs as data

The Three Principles

Verbalizing Your Experiences

Putting an experience into words can be a huge relief, especially when the experience is complex or troublesome.

Words give us handles we can use to hold onto aspects of the experience. We can use these to investigate and figure out what is really going on. By using accurate language, we can process experiences a lot more deeply and effectively than we can by using abstract, wordless thoughts alone. You might verbalize an experience by thinking to yourself, by talking to a friend, or by writing.

Avoiding Rumination

When processing thoughts and feelings, there is a risk of accidentally ruminating on them instead of effectively processing them.

Rumination is focusing on the causes and consequences of a problem, instead of on its potential solutions.

Rumination is focusing on the causes and consequences of a problem, instead of on its potential solutions. When you are too focused on the negative, it may cause a downward spiral and make you feel even worse. If you notice yourself ruminating, you may want to take a break and try again later. If you are not careful, you could accidentally reinforce maladaptive thought patterns.

Earlier we covered an example of rumination without calling it rumination - focusing on an interview where you are not sure how it went. It can be easy to accidentally focus too much on what things may have gone wrong during the interview, and imagining all the potential negative consequences. It can be challenging to think of constructive things that would help your situation, like sending a thank you note. With practice, you can learn to notice when you are accidentally ruminating, and instead focus on being constructive.

Accepting Automatic Inputs as Data

In our input-process-output model of the mind, automatic thoughts and automatic feelings are inputs to your system. To avoid rumination, strive to accept your automatic thoughts and automatic feelings as inputs. Accept these inputs as data, without judgment.

When you accept automatic inputs as data, you can process them more fully. When you instead fixate on them and judge them, that can be very counterproductive. Ruminating on and judging inputs may even cause a downward spiral.

This skill of non-judgmentally accepting inputs as data gets easier with practice. To actively work on this, try meditation. Meditation practice is, at the core, training your brain so it focuses on observing thoughts and emotions instead of judging them.

Six Techniques

Those three principles were verbalizing, avoiding rumination, and accepting inputs as data. Next we will cover six concrete techniques that leverage those principles:

1. talk with a friend
2. talk with a rubber duck
3. write
4. meditate
5. read fiction
6. expand your emotional vocabulary

Talk with a Friend

Talking through an experience with a close friend is one of the most powerful processing techniques. This is also my personal favorite. Not only is it helpful for processing the experience, but this is also a bonding opportunity for your relationship.

In order to communicate your thoughts and feelings to another person, you have to put them into concrete words. If your friend can accurately reflect back to you what you are saying, that helps you be more confident you are understandable. This confidence can help you feel more settled about that part of the experience. This can help you move on to processing other details.

Sometimes a friend will describe something in a different way than you would. If you like their phrasing, you might adopt it yourself. When you sometimes have trouble putting an idea into words, a friend can help you explore those. They might brainstorm different ways of describing it until something feels accurate and correct. If you especially like a particular phrasing you might even write it down to reference later.

Here is an example of how I process experiences with a friend.

1. First, I check for availability. I ask the friend if they can help me talk through something. This makes sure they are available to help me process my unprocessed thoughts before diving in. I want to make sure they have time and are also willing to do the emotional labor involved.
2. Then, I share my experience with them. When sharing unprocessed thoughts, sometimes I end up rambling a bit. It can take a few tries to figure out the right word. For example, I might try: “I feel good about it. Excited maybe? Not quite excited. I do think it’ll go my way, and that’s a comforting feeling.”
3. As we go through the experience, sometimes we brainstorm together. When I am having trouble describing something, my actively-listening friend might suggest some phrasing for me, like “are you feeling confident?” If they are right, we have named this feeling! If not, we can continue on until some description feels right. Often you can find a single word for something. If not, you can at least find a phrase or sentence-long explanation of the feeling.

If your friend can reflect back to you accurately how you are feeling, that can make you feel understood. It can be very comforting and validating. This can help you move on, now that the experience has been processed.

Talking with a friend is often the most powerful method of processing an experience, but talking with an unsupportive friend could make you feel worse. A friend might inadvertently invalidate your experiences, making you feel more uncertain about them.

You cannot control how effectively your friend supports you, but you can influence it some. Even if you talk about how you want to be supported explicitly, it can be hard for them. Supporting other people is a skill.

If you can be a good model of active listening and effective validation, it may help your friends learn how to support you in a helpful way. When you are listening to friends, there are many tactics you can use yourself to make them feel validated, which we cover later in this book.

Talk With a Rubber Duck

Not ready to talk to a friend? Try a rubber duck!

Our second technique is a common software development trick: “rubber duck debugging”. This is often taught in introduction to programming courses. They suggest: put a rubber duck on your desk, or imagine one. Pretend the duck is sentient and explain the situation to it. Imagine what questions it would ask, and what information it would need to know to be able to help. You can have a full-on conversation with this duck whether it is out loud, in your head, or in writing.

Often by talking to a rubber duck I end up not needing to ask for help from anyone else at all! The process of verbalizing how to describe my issue helps reveal what assumptions I am making. The root of my problem often lies somewhere in those assumptions. Enunciating those assumptions really helps make the situation clearer.

You could imagine the duck has similar context to a coworker, or someone else like your manager, your best friend, a family member, etc. And if you cannot think of an existing person who would be particularly appropriate, you can even imagine up someone new. What context would this imagined person need to be able to help you work through this?

This rubber duck technique may not seem effective at first glance. I am still surprised myself at how often it works. It really does.

Duck or Friend

Sometimes you may talk through a situation with your rubber duck and still want to talk to a friend afterwards. Talking to the rubber duck helps you do a certain level of processing, putting your experience into words as much as you can on your own. Later when you are with your friend, you can express yourself much more clearly. Together with your friend, you can dig in even deeper than you could have been able to otherwise.

Before meeting with your friend, think of what questions that friend would need to ask to get context. Think about what assumptions you are making that would be helpful to make explicit. The more you can enunciate on your own, the smoother and deeper a discussion with a friend will go.

Write

Writing is the third technique. Writing can help you go even deeper on an issue than just talking or thinking. Writing activates a different part of the brain, and makes you really nail down thoughts and feelings. When you take time to write, you can also focus more on the words you are using.

To start, you might “brainstorm,” writing down everything in a stream-of-consciousness way. Just putting your thoughts and feelings into words, even if they are not very accurate to start. After brainstorming, you can then re-read and edit it until it feels accurate. Some parts will likely feel “off” on your first try, and you can iterate on them. Try to use the most specific words you can, especially for emotions.

I use the term journaling to mean “writing out thoughts and feeling...

Table of contents

• Debugging Your Brain
• Book Overview
• Introduction
• Modeling The Brain
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• Introspection
• Identifying Inputs
• Experience Processing
• Experience Validation
• Cognitive Restructuring
• Key Takeaways
• More Resources
• References