When your mind starts building a case, the challenge is learning to question the evidence it collects
Your brain is a hell of a lawyer. Give it a position and it will start building the case. Decide somebody is against you and every look, comment and decision starts to prove it. Decide your department is broken and every bad call proves it. Decide things aren’t going your way and your brain will have no trouble finding examples.
Get sidelined after an injury or illness and it can start building a completely different case. You get enough distance from the job to realize how much of a grind it actually is. The shifts, the sleep, the calls, the bullshit, the constant switch from zero to a hundred. Things you barely noticed every day can look very different when you step away. Your self-talk can look something like this: Can I still do this job? Am I still good enough? Pay enough attention to those thoughts and your brain will start finding reasons to support them, too.
I always say I can talk myself in and out of anything. So I need to be extremely strategic and mindful of which thoughts I let mature. The problem starts when you become so committed to one conclusion that you stop noticing anything that argues against it.
How Fast a Story Forms
Psychologists have been studying this for decades. Confirmation bias is our tendency to favor information that supports what we already believe and give less weight to information that challenges it. Expectations can shape what we notice and how we interpret what happens around us. We like to think we collect the facts and then form an opinion. Quite often, we form the opinion and then start collecting the facts.
That should make all of us a little suspicious of ourselves. I have always been interested in framing, probably because I have learned I can make almost any situation better or worse depending on what I decide to focus on. That does not mean pretending something shitty is somehow good. A bad decision is still a bad decision. Losing an opportunity still sucks. Getting screwed over does not magically become a growth experience because you found a clever way to describe it. Sometimes the obvious assessment is the right one.
But what happens after that assessment, in my experience, is where you still have some influence. Firefighters are notorious for not leaving much room to be pleasantly surprised because we think we know how the world works. And to be fair, we are usually insanely accurate. That is exactly why reframing can take some extra effort. If my brain is already wired to look for evidence, then I want to get better at deciding what evidence I ask it to look for. Instead of asking, “Why does this always happen to me?” I can ask, “What am I missing?” Instead of spending three days proving someone else was wrong, I can ask whether there is anything in the situation that is useful to me elsewhere in my life. Instead of using one setback as proof that the whole thing is doomed, I can force myself to look for another explanation before settling on the first.
Interrupting the Automatic Case‑Building
There is research behind that, too. Psychologists have used an approach called “consider the opposite,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Take the conclusion you are already leaning toward and make yourself come up with reasons it could be wrong. It works because it interrupts the brain’s tendency to keep digging in the same hole. Cognitive reappraisal works along similar lines. You do not change what happened. You change how you interpret it and what you decide to do with it.
That is more useful to me than being told to stay positive. A good friend of mine used to say, “See the good,” all the time. It sounds almost painfully simple, but there is more work in that idea than it gets credit for. Seeing the good means getting past your first reaction long enough to question the story you are already building. It means looking for what else might be there, especially when you are already convinced you have the situation figured out. Because you can be completely right about how bad something is and still accomplish nothing by continuing to prove it.
So what happens if I actually believe I can do it? Not some idea that wanting something badly enough makes it happen. I mean believing enough in the possibility that I start looking for ways to get there instead of reasons I can’t. Same idea as that old saying about it taking fewer muscles to smile than to frown. Maybe I try something I would have dismissed. Maybe I recognize an opportunity because I was actually looking for one.
What You Look For, You Find
What I am interested in is what happens next. We get good at most things through repetition, and I do not see why this would be any different. The first reaction can be anger, disappointment, embarrassment, resentment, whatever shows up. Then comes the part you can work on. Catch the conclusion. Challenge it. Ask what else is true. Ask what can be used. Ask what needs to be discarded. Ask whether you are solving the problem or simply gathering more evidence for the story you already wrote.
We are always going to have barriers. Plenty of them. Getting better at life does not mean somehow graduating to a version where fewer things go wrong. It means becoming better at processing what does.
I do not need every experience to be good. I do not even need to find a silver lining in every one of them.
The truth is, if my brain is going to fight this hard to prove what I believe, I should be a lot more careful about what I believe in the first place.
