The Mountain Is You

CONFIRMATION 
At any moment in time, your brain is inundated with stimuli. 
To help you process, your conscious mind is aware of about 
10% of it or less. Your subconscious mind is still paying at-
tention, logging away information you might one day need.
However, what determines what makes it to that 10% of 
our conscious awareness has a lot to do with what we al-
ready believe. Our brains are literally working to filter out 
information that does not support our preexisting ideas, 
and then to draw our attention to information that does. 
This means that we are subject to a “confirmation bias,” 
which is that we literally seek out and sort through stimuli 
that supports what we want to think.

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EXTRAPOLATION
Extrapolation is when we take our current circumstances 
and then project them out into the future. Ryan Holiday 
says it best: “This moment is not my life. It is a moment 
in my life.”
Extrapolation makes us think that we are the sum of our 
past or current experiences, that whatever stressors or 
anxieties we are currently experiencing are ones that we 
will grapple with for the rest of our lives. Unable to see 
through the problem at hand, we assume it will never re-
solve itself. Unfortunately, this can become a self-fulfilling 
prophecy. If we are so easily defeated and exhausted by 
the idea that we will never get over our problems, then we 
make it more likely that we will hang onto them instead 
of logically trying to resolve them, for a lot more time 
than is necessary.
SPOTLIGHTING
Everyone thinks that the world revolves around them. 
You are thinking about you and your own interests all day, 
every day. It can be challenging to forget that others are 
not thinking about us with such intensity; they are think-
ing about themselves.
The spotlight effect is what happens when we imagine 
that our lives are performative, or “on display” for others to 
consume. We remember the last two or three embarrassing 

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things we have done and imagine that others are thinking 
about them actively as well. Can you recall the last two or 
three embarrassing things someone else did? Of course 
you can’t. Because you aren’t paying attention.
Spotlighting gives us the false impression that the world 
is all about us, when it is not.
These biases plus others, when combined with psychic 
thinking, or the idea that our assumptions and feelings 
about the world will transpose into reality, are harmful 
and mostly incorrect. Instead of trying to predict what will 
happen next, our energy is better used when it’s focused 
intently on the moment—the infinite “now,” the mystics 
would say—because the truth is that the past and future 
are illusions in the present, and all we have is the present.
Instead of trying to use your intelligence to hack what’s 
next, try to get better at where you are currently. That’s 
what’s really going to change the outcomes of your life.
L O G I C A L L A P S E S A R E G I V I N G Y O U 
P R O F O U N D A N X I E T Y
Most of the anxiety you experience in life is the result in 
inefficient critical-thinking skills. You might assume that 
because you are anxious, you are an overthinker, someone 
who obsesses about unlikely and scary outcomes more than 
is reasonable. The reality is that you are an under-thinker. 

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You’re missing a part of your reasoning process.
Let’s start at the beginning. Anxiety is a normal emotion 
that every person experiences at some point in their lives, 
typically when circumstances are stressful, tense, or scary. 
When anxiety is chronic and begins to interfere with day-
to-day functioning, it becomes a clinical disorder.
We understand the importance of speaking about men-
tal health with the same degree of legitimacy as physical 
health. However, in the same way that we’d question 
what someone keeps tripping over if they repeatedly 
sprain their ankle, a lot of anxiety is similarly circum-
stantial, as many illnesses are. Specifically, anxiety tends 
to be the result of an inability to process acutely stressful 
and ongoing circumstances.
If we want to heal, we have to learn to process.
This applies to everyone, not just those with a diagnosis.
One of the hallmarks of anxiety is rapid thinking. Because 
you are focusing on some issue so deeply and for so much 
time, you assume that you are also thinking through the 
issue thoroughly and arriving at the most likely conclu-
sion. However, the opposite is happening. 
You’re experiencing a logical lapse. You’re jumping to the 
worst-case scenario because you aren’t thinking clearly, 
and then you are engaging your fight-or-flight response 

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because the worst-case scenario makes you feel threatened. 
This is why you obsess about that one, terrifying idea. Your 
body is responding as though it’s an immediate threat, 
and until you “defeat” or overcome it, your body will do its 
job, which is to keep you in defense mode, which is really 
a heightened state of awareness to the “enemy.”