What nobody teaches us about the mind. (Why managing the mind might be the thing keeping us stuck.)
Your mind isn’t a problem, you just weren’t given the user’s manual.
I feel genuinely passionate about everyone knowing that we have an old survival machine mind, taking everything it says seriously. And then we wonder why we feel so overwhelmed. The mind was designed to scan for threat, by replaying the past and predicting danger. That’s the design.
The trouble is we’re living modern, complex, overstimulated lives with ancient hardware, and nobody told us we don’t have to believe everything it says.
This morning I was driving my boys to school with no music or podcast on. My mind was chattering away - catastrophising quietly in the background, as it does. But I noticed it. And I just let it be there in the background. That’s not a spiritual achievement or a year-long practice, it’s just what happens when you understand what you’re actually dealing with.
Thoughts are not facts, and they’re not calls to action either. They’re not even reliable predictions of what’s actually going to happen. They’re largely old patterns, imagination and habit, running on repeat.
We treat them as truth because nobody told us otherwise. So we argue with them, manage them, or try to think our way out of them. Which is exhausting, and it doesn’t actually work. I call this mental busyness - it’s a habit of staying busy mentally.
There’s also a distinction that I find quietly transformative once you see it - the difference between the situation and the thinking about the situation. They’re not the same thing.
The situation is what’s actually here. The thinking about it is largely a story - often an old one, rarely accurate, almost never helpful in the way we imagine. Seeing through the story, acknowledging it’s like a movie the mind creates, helps us to take it less seriously.
Last night my son said he had anxiety. We slowed down together and looked at what was actually happening right now. And where the problem was. Not where his mind said it was. The situation was manageable. The thinking about the situation was not, because we can’t do anything about something that’s not happening now!
Most of what we call anxiety, overwhelm and burnout isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that you have a mind doing exactly what minds do, in a world that was never part of the original design brief.
The whole self-improvement industry, the techniques and optimisation, is largely pointing you at something that was never quite the problem to begin with. You don’t need to fix your mind or manage it more carefully. You just need to see how it works.
Once you do, you stop being ruled by it. The chatter is still there, mine was this morning in the car, but it sits in the background rather than running the show. It’s like a noisy, repetitive backseat driver.
Your mind isn’t a problem, you just weren’t given the user’s manual.
🔻I’m Suzie Yeulett - the One Point Coach, author of The Point of Now, and host of The Spirit of Enquiry podcast - now at episode 50.
I believe we should learn more about how the mind really works - and what’s helpful, and what’s not - in school. It could quietly change mental health.