Left Alone the Mind Poisons Itself

On Introspection and Mental Health

After I publish a book, I get better and better with its elevator pitch. In the months following a book's publication, I often give long, windy answers whenever someone asks, "What's it about?" But after doing a few podcasts about the book, I become better at distilling its central theme and arguments.

Here's how I've increasingly come to describe a our predicament in The Shape of Joy, the observation that sets the agenda for the book, why the book exists.

Our modern pursuit of mental health has becoming increasingly introspective and self-referential. This self-referentiality keeps us stuck within ourselves, trapped in our own minds. But psychologists are discovering that introspection isn't good for us. This turns the story we've inherited from Sigmund Freud completely upside down. Here's how the psychologist Ethan Kross explains where the science is at:

In recent years, a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good. It undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. It can also promote violence and aggression, contribute to a range of mental disorders, and enhance our risk of becoming physically ill.

Simply put, the Freudian "turn inward," digging into ourselves in the pursuit of mental heath, has significantly undermined our emotional stability.

Next, notice what so many of our current mental health recommendations--mindfulness, flow, gratitude, and awe--have in common. None of them involve introspection. In fact, mindfulness is explicitly aimed at stopping introspection, ceasing the inner chatter. Less well known in relation to mindfulness, gratitude, and awe is the research on humility, but it makes the same point. Humility isn't about thinking less of yourself (it's not a self-esteem move) but is, rather, thinking about yourself less. That is, humility is a hypo-egoic state, a capacity for self-forgetfulness. Note, again, the connection: Self-forgetfulness, rather than self-focus, is the path toward mental health. And on top of all this, the commonsense, but very powerful, recommendations to "go take a walk" or "go bake some bread" when anxious or distressed, finding some mental occupation to focus on to pull you out of yourself and stop your emotional looping.

A question I've been asked since the publication of the book is the role of therapy in our mental health journey. Doesn't therapy cause us to focus inwardly, asking us to become introspective in the search for self-awareness? The answer is that some therapeutic approaches do exacerbate rumination. But the most effective therapies, as I recount in the The Shape of Joy, make it a treatment goal to prevent cognitive rumination. So yes, therapy works, but it works best when it gives you the skills to stay out of your head.

So, that's how the opening argument from The Shape of Joy has evolved into a tighter elevator pitch:

Our mental health has become self-referential. We're trapped within ourselves. And left alone, the mind poisons itself. Freud was wrong. The research on mindfulness, gratitude, awe, and humility all tell the same story: We need to get out of our heads.