The Mountain Is You

WHAT IS A LOGICAL LAPSE?
Think of something that you aren’t afraid of, maybe some-
thing that other people might find scary.
Maybe you aren’t afraid of flying in an airplane. Many 
people are. Maybe you aren’t afraid of being single. Many 
people are. Maybe you aren’t afraid of commitment. Many 
people are. Surely you can think of at least one thing in 
your life that you are truly unafraid of.
Why aren’t you afraid of it? Because you don’t have a log-
ical lapse there.
You can visualize yourself going on an airplane and suc-
cessfully getting off without freaking out. You can visu-
alize yourself being happily single or happily committed. 
Even if the worst were to happen, you can think a situation 
through in its entirety, from exposition to climax to conclu-
sion. You know what you would do. You have a plan.
When you experience a logical lapse, the climax becomes 
the conclusion. You imagine a situation, you figure that 

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you would panic, and then because you’re scared, you 
never think through the rest of the scenario. You never 
think about how you’d get through it, what you’d do to 
respond, and how you’d eventually move on with your life 
afterwards. If you were able to do this, you wouldn’t be 
scared of it, because you wouldn’t think it had the power 
to “end” you.
This is why exposure is the most common treatment for 
irrational fear. By reintroducing the stressor into your life 
in a safe way, you are able to reestablish a line of thinking 
that is healthier and calmer. Basically, you prove to your-
self that you will be okay, even if something scary does 
happen (which most of the time it does not).
Either way, mental strength is not just hoping that noth-
ing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the ca-
pacity to handle it if it does.
Maybe you don’t have that self-belief yet. That’s okay. It’s 
not something you’re born with; it’s something you build 
slowly and over time. It’s something you develop with 
practice, by addressing small problems, and then learning 
healthy coping mechanisms and effective reasoning skills.
The thing is that there are millions of scary things that can 
happen to us in our lives. That is true for everyone. When 
we are hung up on one scary thing over another, it’s not 
because it’s a more imminent or likely threat; it’s because 
we are less convinced we would be able to respond to it. 

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To heal, we don’t need to avoid it. We need to develop 
logic to see situations for what they are and respond ap-
propriately to them.
So often in life, our biggest anxiety comes not from what’s 
actually happening, but how we think about what is happen-
ing. In that, we reclaim our emotional freedom and power.
FA U LT Y I N F E R E N C E S A R E H O L D I N G 
Y O U B A C K F R O M S U C C E S S
If you’re familiar with body typing, you’ll probably be fa-
miliar with the terms endomorph, mesomorph, and ecto-
morph. Though everyone actually falls somewhere within 
the spectrum of these (meaning that everyone has varying 
degrees of each), the traits you default to are typically your 
primary body type.
10
If you’ve studied these types, you’ll know that endomor-
phic bodies are often associated with increased fat reten-
tion. The assumption here is that these people have the 
worst metabolisms, but that is false. Endomorphs actually 
have the best metabolisms of anyone. They are alive today 
because their ancestors adequately adapted to survive. 
Their metabolisms do precisely what they were intended 
to do: store fat for later use.
Something similar happens with highly intelligent people 
who experience high levels of anxiety. You assume that 

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because these people are smart, they would be able to use 
logic to disrupt illogical fears. (Logical lapses, or an in-
ability to adequately reason, often generate anxiety.)
However, their brains are doing exactly what they were 
meant to do, which is to piece together unrelated stimuli 
and identify potential threats.
Highly intelligent people have a psychological function 
others do not, which is the ability to infer. They can ex-
tract meaning and understanding from things that others 
simply take at face value. This is why people who have ex-
tremely high IQs often struggle with basic things such as 
social skills or driving a car. Where others see the world as 
one-dimensional, the highly intelligent see it as three-di-
mensional. They think more deeply than is often neces-
sary. This gives them their ability to create, understand, 
strategize, and invent.
In the same way that the endomorph’s excellent metabo-
lism can work against them, so too can a highly intelligent 
person’s brain. This is because at times, they make some-
thing called “faulty inferences,” which are when fallacies, 
biases, and incorrect assumptions are made from valid 
evidence.
What’s happening in your brain when you’re very anx-
ious is that you’re taking an often innocuous stimulus and 
extracting some kind of meaning or prediction from it. 
When you’re scared, your brain is working in overdrive to 

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identify the thing that can potentially hurt you and then 
creatively come up with ways to completely avoid that ex-
perience. The smarter you are, the better you become at this.
However, the more you avoid a fear, the more intense it 
becomes.