If this is your first time reading, please check out the overview for Poor Ash’s Almanack, a free, vertically-integrated resource including a latticework of mental models, reviews/notes/analysis on books, guided learning journeys, and more.
Mindfulness / Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) / Positive Psychology Mental Model: Executive Summary
If you only have three minutes, this introductory section will get you up to speed on the mindfulness / cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) / positive psychology mental model.
The concept in one quote:
If you own this story, you get to write the ending. – Brene Brown
(from “ Daring Greatly”)
The concept in one sentence: our automatic thoughts and feelings meaningfully impact our decisions, without our permission and often for the worse – whether we’re fighter pilots, investors, or parents.
Key takeaways/applications: becoming aware of our automatic thoughts and behaviors is important regardless of whether we think we’re very emotional or not. For those who struggle with depression/anxiety, it’s obviously a critical quality-of-life issue. It’s equally dangerous for those who don’t, because you may never recognize the need to manage them until you’re in a critical, maybe even life-or-death situation where it’s too late to figure out how to do so.
Three brief examples of mindfulness / cognitive behavioral therapy / positive psychology:
The cloud isn’t made of water vapor… it’s made of mindfulness.
To what does Marc Benioff, founder of original cloud disruptor Salesforce, attribute his success at Oracle – and beyond?
It’s multicausal, of course, but Benioff is fond of quoting Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” – and in a brief digression early in the his autobiography, “ Behind the Cloud” , he encourages readers to practice some of the core tenets of mindfulness:
Observe your feelings. Do not become your feelings. Be aware of your reactions.
Do I really want a cup of tea, or am I just bored?
Charles Duhigg’s “ The Power of Habit” explores the powerful pull of habits, for both good and bad. We talk about habit in this model. But, as Duhigg mentions, the first step toward replacing a bad habit with a good one is awareness of your own thoughts and behavior – or mindfulness.
The same applies for building approaches like probabilistic thinking or avoiding hyperbolic discounting – half the battle is simply becoming aware of what you’re doing wrong cognitively, and nudging yourself in the right direction.
How do you think you’re thinking?
Many people focus on the endless practice – the “10,000 hours” or whatever – that elite chess players put in. Equally important – and explored by books like Josh Waitzkin’s ‘The Art of Learning” – is their focus on mindfulness. As Nate Silver mentions in “ The Signal and the Noise” :
“Elite chess players tend to be good at metacognition – thinking about the way they think – and correcting themselves if they don’t seem to be striking the right balance.”
Silver notes the same premise applies to other fields of endeavor, like playing poker – he recounts his own time as an online poker player, discussing the dangers of playing “on tilt” (when emotions are screwing with cognition.)
If this sounds interesting/applicable in your life, keep reading for unexpected applications and a deeper understanding of how this interacts with other mental models in the latticework.
However, if this doesn’t sound like something you need to learn right now, no worries! There’s plenty of other content on Poor Ash’s Almanack that might suit your needs. Instead, consider checking out our learning journeys, our discussion of the activation energy, feedback, or sunk costs mental models, or our reviews of great books like “ Deep Work” , “ Polio: An American Story” , or “ The Great A&P” .
Is Happiness Learnable?
It turns out happiness turns out to be a learnable skill. In “The Happiness Advantage,” which reframed my view on many issues, Achor explains a surprising concept”
External circumstances predict only about 10 percent of our total happiness. – Shawn Achor
Shawn’s research explores how even people with incurable health conditions can thus be happier than than healthy, wealthy lawyers, with prestigious jobs and big bank accounts, who, as Achor explores, have an unusually high rate of depression and alcoholism.
Shawn prescribes a number of usable techniques such as gratitude, small acts of kindness, and reframing.
Johann Hari’s Lost Connections is a nice complement; he argues that unhappiness and depression are rarely caused by simple chemical imbalances, but by deep disconnections in modern life. He identifies key forms of disconnection, such as from meaningful work, community, and nature, that collectively leave people feeling isolated. Drawing on studies like the Whitehall civil service research (which Achor also cites) and the work of psychologist Tim Kasser, Hari reframes depression as an evolutionary signal that something in our social or emotional ecosystem is out of alignment, much like physical pain alerts us to bodily harm.
Instead of medicating that signal away, Hari suggests rebuilding the “lost connections” that give life meaning. He argues that fulfillment is found in relationships, shared purpose, and intrinsic goals, not in the extrinsic metrics of wealth or status. His message dovetails with Achor’s: happiness isn’t a static state conferred by circumstance, but something we can cultivate through intentional connection, contribution, and compassion.
Mindfulness, Habit, And Life or Death
Mindfulness is the practice of becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings, and their relation (or lack thereof) to reality.
First, note that mindfulness is a practice – it’s a learnable skill; something we make a habit of doing.
Mindfulness is an active rather than passive approach: we’re not just letting our thoughts and feelings float by like pollen on the wind; rather, we’re actively evaluating them, and deciding whether or not they’re in good shape – or if they need to bust their butt a little bit at the Gym of Good Thoughts.
Perhaps the easiest way to introduce the idea of what we’re talking about here is a quote from Dan Harris’s “ 10% Happier” .
Harris, at one point during his journey, realizes that his thoughts:
“weren’t irrational, but they weren’t necessarily true […]
I was able to see my thoughts for what they were: just thoughts, with no concrete reality.”
Harris found the answer in meditation (sort of – he uses other techniques too.) I don’t meditate myself, but 10% Happier is still a great book on mindfulness. Harris calls mindfulness “the space behind the waterfall” – a place where you can observe your thoughts without getting dragged along for the ride.
When I reference Harris using other techniques, I’m talking about principles from the field of cognitive behavioral therapy – a scientifically validated, utility-focused form of therapy that is often more effective than medication for anxiety and depression, but even a wide range of other conditions like chronic pain and insomnia.
What is CBT? Dr. Judith Beck, practicing therapist and the daughter of the field’s founder Aaron Beck, explains in her book “ Cognitive Behavior Therapy” that CBT is based on the premise that depression and anxiety have at their core a:
“systematic bias in the way the patients interpreted particular experiences.”
Training patients to notice these biased interpretations and replace them with more adaptive ones leads to an:
“almost immediate lessening of the symptoms.”
Beck notes that we all have automatic thoughts that we may be “barely aware” of, and – like Dan Harris before his realization –
“you most likely accept them uncritically […] you don’t even think of questioning them.”
The good news, Beck notes, is that:
“dysfunctional beliefs can be unlearned, and more reality-based and functional new beliefs can be developed”
via CBT techniques. Core beliefs (“I’m an incompetent person”) lead to intermediate beliefs (“this class is too hard for me”) which leads to automatic thoughts (“why bother trying to read the book”).
Beck further notes that:
“the quickest way to help patients feel better and behave more adaptively”
is to help them build more adaptive core beliefs (i.e. modify their schema.) Why? Because:
“once they do so, patients will tend to interpret future situations or problems in a more constructive way.”
As with many things, awareness is half the battle: simply realizing that you have automatic thoughts that drive much of your behavior, that you accept uncritically, will help you start noticing those thoughts and evaluating them critically.
Of course, the techniques for modifying thoughts and beliefs that cause depression and anxiety are not application-specific.
Put another way, CBT techniques can be used to become better at probabilistic thinking, scientific thinking, Bayesian reasoning, inversion, noticing multicausality, or any of the other cognition-enhancing models mentioned on this site.
One technique often recommended – by Beck, as well as by others like the aforementioned Brene Brown, in “Daring Greatly” – is to pretend that the thought is happening to someone you really care about and have empathy for – a close friend, a family member, a child.
If someone else who you cared about was thinking like this, what would you tell them? It’s much easier to recognize and point out mistakes in others – and, sometimes, easier to be kind to others than to ourselves.
Many of us, for example, have seen our friends trapped in unhealthy relationships that they can’t garner the courage to quit… it’s easy to recognize. It can be harder to recognize when it’s our relationship. Stepping outside our own schema can give us a more objective point of view.
Similarly, many of us can see the cognition-distorting effects of strong ideology in our crazy coworker… or Uncle Jim at Thanksgiving. But how often do we think our own ideas are crazy? Nah, man – all MY ideas are TOTALLY, 100% right and you’re cuckoo if you don’t agree. ?
Once you’ve got that process down, you can start using some of the practical techniques for changing those thoughts in the sections below. (I also discuss some of Beck’s techniques in the probabilistic thinking mental model, so please check that out.))
One of the keys, though, is you need to make this a habit. That will allow you to, as Beck puts it,
“spontaneously (i.e. without conscious awareness) respond to the thought in a productive way.”
Why is this important? Let’s take the extreme example: fighter pilots. Laurence Gonzales’s wonderful “Deep Survival” opens with the story of a pilot crashing into the side of an aircraft carrier. How did that happen?
Gonzales notes that much of our behavior is driven by conditioning – which, in turn, is driven by the reinforcing power of emotion. Books like Charles Duhigg’s “ The Power of Habit” provide a salient example – Eugene Pauly, who lost the use of his memory thanks to a rare infection, was still able to learn some surprising things due to emotional rewards.
The way Gonzales puts it, our brains create strong “emotional bookmarks” for both good and bad experiences; that’s why we may always be fond of our grandpa’s house, or feel sick just thinking about that ramen place where we got food poisoning, one time.
For pilots, “down” is a very strong emotional bookmark. Flying a fighter jet, as you imagine, is an exhilarating experience – and trying to land one on an aircraft carrier is a terrifying one.
So, sometimes, in their eagerness to just get down – down is good; they like down – Gonzales explains that their amygdala (the emotional part of their brain) can wrench control – a ‘hijack” – from the frontal cortex, the rational part of our brain. This is mediated by the release of cortisol – the stress hormone – and a number of other powerful biochemical responses.
It turns out this is exactly the same mechanism that often operates in more pedestrian emotional situations. But it’s important to train it – your brain has to be able to do this automatically, to restore this balance via habit – because when we’re making critical decisions in response to external circumstances, Gonzales notes thatcognition and logic:
“simply takes too long, often impossibly long.”
On the other hand – thankfully – mindfulness can become a habit, as Beck explores above. Indeed, as Shawn Achor mentions in “ The Happiness Advantage” :
“in resilient individuals, the prefrontal cortex rapidly won over the limbic system.”
Gonzales explores some adaptive short-term responses to regain cortex control, as does Achor; they include empathy and humor. I discuss these more in the cognition / intuition / habit / stressmental model.
Here, we’ll focus on more deliberate, longer-term practices. This is just a brief overview – for a more complete picture, read Gonzales’s Surviving Survival, (SvSv review + notes) – the best book on resilience I’ve ever read. It explores how people emotionally and practically recover (or don’t) from the sort of life-and-death situations faced in Deep Survival.
“You create the world by your belief in it, so it’s important to believe this: there really is a path. It takes you not back to your old life but onward to the new one.”
Thankfully, most of us don’t have to worry about our wayward thoughts crashing us into an aircraft carrier. How can we replace our maladptive thoughts with more adaptive ones? Let’s explore.
Mindfulness x Hyperbolic Discounting x Contrast Bias: Hedonic Adaptation
“Our sensations being very much fixed to the moment, we are apt to forget that more moments are to follow the first, and consequently that man should arrange his conduct so as to suit the whole of life.
Your attribution appears to have been applied to your life, and the passing moments of it have been enlivened with content and enjoyment, instead of being tormented with foolish impatience or regrets.”
– Benjamin Vaughan (in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, featured in ” The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”)
I feature that quote in the hyperbolic discounting mental model, which explores more deeply our tendency to overweight the present moment. Everyone intuitively understands this – Patton, Ury, and Fisher make the analogy, in “Getting to Yes” of how missing a plane seems hugely important at the time, but trivial later. This is a technique mentioned by Harris and Beck as well – “decatastrophizing” – realizing that what seems like the end of the world now isn’t really the end of the world.
Yet most of us don’t live our lives assuming this will be the case. One of the most surprising, well-replicated, and unintuitive findings in psychology is that future events neither make us as happy nor as sad as we expect.
This is called hedonic adaptation, and it underlies that quote I referenced earlier from Shawn Achor about circumstances predicting only 10% of our happiness.
Megan McArdle, for example, notes in “ The Up Side of Down” – a wonderful book about dealing with failure – that people often cite horrible tragedies, like life-changing car accidents or a divorce, as some of the most profoundly and positively impactful moments in their lives.
The underlying mechanism here is contrast bias: as explored thoroughly in that mental model, humans have a strong tendency to notice changes. But, as Nobel prize-winning behavioral economist Richard Thaler puts it in my favorite book, “ Misbehaving” :
When we have adapted to our environment, we tend to ignore it. – Richard Thaler
In a personal context, this is often known as the hedonic treadmill.
Shawn Achor drives home in “The Happiness Advantage” that our lives are often a series of statements that go something like:
WHEN X happens, THEN I’ll be happy
Of course, the second we get to X, we just move the goalposts, as Shawn explains. And now our life story looks like:
WHEN Y happens, THEN I’ll be happy
Y, of course, is replaced by Z, and we cycle through the alphabet a few times on our way to our graves.
Achor explores this concept in depth in “The Happiness Advantage.” He is, of course, not the only person to make this observation… but he is the funniest. (See his TED Talk – he is really hilarious. It’s better than stand-up comedy, even if you don’t care about the topic.)
In the aforementioned “10% Happier” , Dan Harris observes how rarely we:
“bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives.”
On a meditation retreat that Harris attends, the leader, Goldstein, makes a point that’s right out of the Achor playbook:
“How often are we waiting for the next pleasant hit of… whatever? […] We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience […]
we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’e had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?”
There are two fairly obvious take-homes here.
The first is that an important part of making more accurate emotional judgments – i.e., being happier if we’re down – is simply taking the time to notice all those “pleasant experiences.” Achor notes that the simple practice of identifying and vocalizing (or writing down) three things a day that you’re grateful for can rewire our brains to search for positives and counteract our natural tendency towards loss aversion.
The second is that when we miss the proverbial plane, we need to develop a sense of equanimity based on our logical understanding that how we’re feeling now is not how we’ll always be feeling. We need to realize that if we face challenges, we’ll adapt to them; again, very little of our happiness is predicted by outside circumstances.
Mindfulness x Framing x Contrast Bias x Agency: Positive Psychology (“Belief Behavior Matters”)
One of the most well-replicated – and yet overlooked – findings in science is the placebo effect.
The reason that researchers have to run blind experiments is that, in many cases, participants simply believing they’ve taken a pill can be quite effective. Shawn Achor cites some research in “ The Happiness Advantage” to this effect:
“placebos are about 55 to 60% as effective as most active medications like aspirin and codeine for controlling pain.”
Johann Hari makes a related point in Lost Connections, citing research by Irving Kirsch showing that much of the benefit from antidepressants is also explained by the placebo effect rather than by chemical action. He argues that this doesn’t make the relief any less real; it simply underscores how powerful belief and expectation can be in shaping our mental and physical well-being.
The underlying mechanism, per Achor:
“expectations create brain patterns that can be just as real as those created by events in the real world.”
Achor refers to this power as “belief behavior matters” – he goes on to cite some astonishing research from Ellen Langer in which a group of old men was put back in an environment where they were constantly made to think they were 55.
Their memory, eyesight, flexibility, strength, and other measures improved meaningfully; objective observers judged them to be younger-looking (by their pictures.)
Josh Waitzkin even claims in The Art Of Learning that, by visualizing himself using a muscle while he recovered from an injury, he was able to prevent it from atrophying. I was skeptical, but Achor actually cites research with directionally similar findings – maids who were primed to view their daily work as exercise, for example, saw measurably higher results in fitness.
Achor, elsewhere, observes that his work has benefited even those suffering from severe, incurable medical conditions like multiple sclerosis (MS).
This isn’t to say that aging isn’t a real phenomenon (it is), or that medical conditions can be cured by positive thought (they can’t). Anyone who tells you either of those two things is a scam artist. But the point is that notwithstanding our (very real) external circumstances, we still have a lot of power over how we choose to view them.
Or, as Stephen Covey put it in the landmark ‘ The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” :
Between stimulus and response, we have the power to choose. – Viktor Frankl via Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey goes on to note:
It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.
I admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else’s behavior.
But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”
I discuss this in more depth in the agency mental model, with assists from those like Stephen Colbert.
In the context of mindfulness, one important conclusion integrates two mental models. The first is framing – the idea that the way information is presented to us impacts how we perceive it – and the second is contrast bias – which, discussed earlier, means we tend to be sensitive to changes, and also that we tend to naturally “compare” things.
Beck uses this to patients’ advantage with a technique she calls the “cognitive continuum” – as she explores in “ Cognitive Behavior Therapy” , it can be helpful to re-frame a given thought by finding additional context points.
For example, if you’re frustrated about your performance on a test and think you’re the worst student ever, actually create a mental graph of the worst student ever. You’re still in college and getting a decent GPA overall… there are a lot of students off way to the left: the ones who are getting worse grades, the ones who dropped out of college, or the ones who didn’t even make it to college.
So, yeah, maybe you’re not the best student ever – but you certainly aren’t the worst.
This process of adding “vantage points” is discussed extensively by Achor in “ Before Happiness” . One particularly memorable example of re- framing: Achor asks you to imagine you go to the bank, and a robbery happens, and you get shot in the arm.
You basically have two choices at this point: you can moan “oh, why me?”
Or, you can be grateful that you were only shot in the arm.
Contrast bias. It’s amazing just how much this little technique can change the way you think about the world. It transforms you from someone who walks into a restaurant and notices all the things that are wrong – the slightly tilted poster, the fact that the waiter forgot to bring your iced tea – into a person who notices all the things that are right. How great the food us. How funny and caring your friends are.
It’s a simple choice, but the results are powerful.
Mindfulness: The AI Angle
Used wisely, AI can be a cognitive mirror, helping us catch automatic thoughts or mistaken assumptions in the moment, and creating a better schema before it hardens into a habit. A number of studies have shown that AI can be effective at basic therapy; at the very least, talking out frustrations can be helpful.
Of course, there are downsides too. The anger over the release of GPT-5 was, at least in part, due to many people forming parasocial relationships with an LLM which they had anthropomorphized. The release of GPT-5 drastically changed the “personality” of ChatGPT, in many people’s view, which essentially felt like the loss of a friend. So it’s important not to let conversations with AI crowd out the rich, real-life social connections that data show are important for our mental well-being.
