The Mountain Is You

WHAT IS A LOGICAL LAPSE?
Think of something that you aren’t afraid of, maybe something 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 logical lapse there.

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You can visualize yourself going on an airplane and successfully getting off
without freaking out. You can visualize 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 conclusion. 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 yourself 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 nothing ever goes wrong.
It is believing that we have the capacity 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.

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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 appropriately to them.
So often in life, our biggest anxiety comes not from what’s actually
happening, but how we think about what is happening. 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 familiar 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 retention. 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.

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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 inability 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 extract meaning and understanding
from things that others simply take at face value. This is why people who
have extremely 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-dimensional. They think more deeply than
is often necessary. This gives them their ability to create, understand,
strategize, and invent.
In the same way that the endomorph’s excellent metabolism can work
against them, so too can a highly intelligent person’s brain. This is because
at times, they make something 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 anxious 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 experience. The smarter you are, the
better you become at this.
However, the more you avoid a fear, the more intense it becomes.