How to offset your brain

Listen to this essay 24 minute listen You slide your hand into your coat pocket and find an old, folded $100 bill. In the other pocket, you find a coin. Now, here’s the gamble: flip the coin. Heads, you win another $300. Tails, you hand over your $100 bill. Do you take the risk? Mathematically, you should. One coin flip gives you two equally likely futures: in one, heads, you gain $300; in the other, tails, you lose $100. Because each future has a 50 per cent chance of happening, you count half of each outcome: half of $300 is $150, and half of $100 is $50. Balance those against each other, and taking the gamble puts you $100 ahead on average. Decision scientists call this positive expected value. Even when someone grasps the mathematics, however, it’s hard to take the risk. Why? About 50 years ago, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that this hesitation is not random. People depart from logic in patterned ways. One of the most durable patterns is loss aversion: our tendency to feel the pain of losing more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent, or even greater, gain. This is where mindfulness becomes interesting. Mindfulness is usually defined as paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without immediately judging what is happening. In practice, that can mean noticing a thought before believing it, feeling an emotion before acting on it, or returning attention to the body, the breath, or the world around you. At its simplest, mindfulness creates a pause between what arises in the mind and what we do next. That pause helps because many of our choices are made before we have fully examined them. We may think we are deliberating over the coin toss, but often the body has moved first: recoiling from loss or preserving a decision simply because we have already invested in it. These mental shortcuts are called cognitive biases, and the study of this kind of human misjudgment is central to decision science. When we hesitate at the coin toss, we might be deliberating – but often, we’ve already decided. Some biases are driven by emotional projection, some by inattention, and others by a failure to stay engaged Impulse has its benefits. A mind that had to reason from scratch every moment would be paralysed. But when these shortcuts override reflection, they can distort the decisions we make. Without careful thought, a patient may fail to seek the best medical care. People lose wealth because they cling to their current savings plans. You might know the feeling of preserving a job or a relationship simply because you invested so much in it. Internally, these cognitive biases feel instinctive. The question is whether we can catch these instincts before they harden into choices we mistake for reason. I came to this question from two directions. I teach and research behavioural economics, where we study the systematic ways people depart from logic, and I also work as a licensed therapist, where I watch those same patterns play out in higher-stakes places: in relationships, in health, and in the stories people tell themselves about who they are. I have long been interested in the tension where a person knows better but cannot quite do better. Over time, I became less interested in theories of irrationality and more interested in what helps people catch themselves before their old reflexes take over. Mindfulness kept appearing as an answer. But it was an imprecise one. If mindfulness means present-moment awareness without immediate judgment, what exactly is doing the work? Attention? Emotional steadiness? Curiosity? Acceptance? Biases do not all arise from the same source. Some are driven by emotional projection, some by inattention, and others by a failure to stay mentally engaged with a changing situation. So it would be surprising if one version of mindfulness could interrupt all biases in the same way. After all, what we call mindfulness is a cluster of distinct capacities: attention, nonreactivity, acceptance, curiosity and openness to novelty. Different biases may yield to different forms of the mindful state. Loss aversion, for instance, may depend on how well we tolerate discomfort. Delay discounting, our tendency to overvalue immediate rewards, may depend on whether we’re attentive to change, nuance and emerging possibilities. Mental accounting – our habit of treating the same dollar differently depending on which mental bucket it lands in – may ease when we pay attention to all our money at once. So, what are the different ways the mind slips off track, and how can mindfulness pull it back? To answer that question, it helps to distinguish the two strands that shaped modern mindfulness research. One is rooted in curiosity and active noticing, the other in meditative, nonreactive awareness. The first school of thought is represented by the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who believes that active noticing – engaging curiously with the environment – leaves us better equipped to deal with uncertainty and change. The second path comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first encountered mindfulness through meditation. A PhD student in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s, Kabat-Zinn asked whether the Zen Buddhism, Vipassana and other forms of meditation he studied could be adapted to secular medicine. Not long afterward, he launched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and used meditation, yoga and other mindfulness practices to help patients relate differently to stress and chronic pain. Put side by side, the contrast between the two versions of mindfulness is telling. Langer teaches us to open our eyes and notice something new. Kabat-Zinn teaches us to close our eyes, accept and let go. One form of mindfulness keeps us engaged with the world; the other helps us disengage from unhelpful inner patterns. Both begin with attention to the present moment, but they train attention to do very different psychological work. If biases arise from different sources, the kind of mindfulness that eases one may not touch another. If it still feels abstract, try this thought experiment. Imagine that I’m a local researcher, and I’ve asked to meet you at your school or workplace. You walk down the familiar hall and sit at your usual spot. Surrounding you is the same flooring, windows and lights as usual. I want you to notice three new things that you’ve never noticed before. It might not seem like much is happening, but actually you’ve just entered a much more mindful state. Following those instructions, you influenced how your mind was taking in the world around you. As you twisted your neck to find a chip of paint or a dusty corner, you interrupted your usual way of being in the moment and, instead, engaged with it. It may seem like I was just making you more aware of your surroundings. But, actually, I was switching off your autopilot – your mindlessness – and bringing you into the present moment, where details, nuance and context abide. Your brain probably didn’t feel that interrupted. But it followed this cognitive movement enough to reach a mindful state. It is mindfulness not as stillness, but as fresh contact with the world. This is the novelty-noticing task designed by Langer. It triggers a specific form of mindfulness, and she and her team have shown how even a small shift in attention can change behaviour. In one experiment, Langer and her colleague, Philip Maymin, assembled a string of decision tasks designed to measure 22 cognitive biases: loss aversion, the endowment effect (valuing something more once you own it), availability bias (how likely something is based on how easily examples come to mind) and more. They recruited a group of subjects online and administered decision vignettes. (You did a version of one when you decided on the coin toss.) After completing all the decision tasks, the experimenters measured everyone’s mindfulness levels. They found that when people were induced into a state of mindfulness by noticing novelty, they were more likely to resist almost all the cognitive biases. The more engagement, the more capacity for mindfulness. They were pausing, looking again, and asking not just ‘What is this?’ but also ‘What might I be missing?’ The behavioural scientist Carey Morewedge, professor of marketing at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, built something that tested whether that kind of noticing could be trained. In 2014, he and the game designer James Korris created a video game, Missing: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes, to help US intelligence analysts reduce cognitive bias. Instructed to search for clues, you enter a missing woman’s apartment, where carefully planted cues steer you toward biased conclusions. For instance, when Terry’s brother says: ‘I hope nobody grabbed her,’ that single phrase can anchor your judgment. To do well, you must stay open, widen your perspective, notice new details, click to turn objects around, and resist settling on the first explanation that presents itself. This is precisely what distinguishes mindfulness from an analytical mindset: even a concentrated mind can be captured by a misleading cue. The training Morewedge developed worked. A single session reduced three biases – bias blind spot (believing yourself less prone to bias than other people), confirmation bias (favouring what you already believe), and fundamental attribution error (over-reading personal disposition and under-reading circumstances) by at least 32 per cent immediately after play, with reductions of at least 24 per cent still present two months later. Morewedge’s game may have been training a Langerian form of mindfulness. Consider what players were doing. They were not passively receiving information or analysing harder. They practised a wider form of monitoring. They were pausing, looking again, and asking of each object not just ‘What is this?’ but also ‘What might I be missing?’ The players were opening their perception to the world. This is where the plot thickens. Langer’s version of mindfulness reduced many biases – but not loss aversion. Why? Perhaps because loss aversion was never a cognitive problem to begin with. It’s an emotional one. It is about the heart’s deep reluctance to surrender the comfort of a long-term relationship, the certainty of a career path, or the belonging of a community. It’s the instinct to avoid difficult conversations, not because they won’t help, but because they might cost you comfort, approval or a sense of control. It is the reluctance to leave a life that no longer fits, because the shape of the old life still feels safer than the unknown. That’s where Kabat-Zinn’s softer approach, focused on emotional regulation, comes in. While running an outpatient stress clinic in the 1970s, Kabat-Zinn noticed that many people with chronic pain were abandoning hospital treatment because it failed to resolve their symptoms. Suffering, he came to believe, cannot always be eliminated; it can, however, be held differently. Mindfulness through meditation, he posited, could change a person’s relationship to suffering rather than the suffering itself. Years later, he put that idea to the test. In a randomised controlled trial of 37 patients with psoriasis – a condition that can crack the skin into raw fissures – everyone underwent ultraviolet light therapy, but Kabat-Zinn assigned half to listen to guided meditation tapes during their sessions while the rest received the light alone. The skin of patients who meditated cleared nearly four times faster than those who did not. Since then, larger trials and neuroimaging studies have suggested that mindfulness may shrink the brain regions tied to threat response while strengthening those involved in decision-making and perspective-taking. To get a feel for the emotional regulation version of mindfulness, try this for a moment: straighten a little. Relax your shoulders. You’re already breathing, but now pay attention to it. Notice the rise and fall of each breath. If it feels good, deepen your next one. Your mind may wander to discomfort, memories or random thoughts. Simply notice them and gently return to the breath. Notice how you were able to slow down the situation. You feel a sensation rise to the surface. An image floats through your mind. You don’t fixate on it but return to stillness. Is there a better illustration of resisting an impulse? What just happened in that moment is easy to miss. When thoughts appear, you stabilise your attention, gently practise exposure without avoidance, and recognise the feeling without being subsumed by it. This is the power of mindfulness training through meditation – the shift from being carried by a thought to observing it. To a beginner, this might feel like a minor achievement. But it’s not. Every practice of stillness is an act of self-regulation, and every moment offers opportunity for clearer judgment. So, if this form of mindfulness can help us manage emotions, maybe it can manage our emotional cognitive biases too. This form of mindfulness helped them emotionally regulate, so they could sit with the discomfort longer Lucy Tan, a clinical psychologist at the Singapore campus of James Cook University, did some intriguing work on what happens when we face loss aversion after meditating. In her study, subjects had to complete tasks like pumping air into a virtual balloon on a computer screen, one tap at a time. Every tap made the balloon bigger and added a little cash. But every once in a while, unpredictably, there’s a pop! Push too far and the balloon bursts, and that round’s earnings vanish. Subjects had to make the same choice one after the other: ‘Do I pump again, or do I stop now and keep the money?’ About a third of them were randomly asked to do a five-minute breathing meditation, much like the one you did earlier. What Tan and her team found is that meditators pumped the balloon about 22 per cent more of the time, compared with controls, exhibiting a significant reduction in loss aversion. Why did that happen? One possible explanation is that this form of mindfulness helped them emotionally regulate, and so they could sit with the discomfort a little longer. Emotional regulation, after all, is one of the paths that brain-imaging studies have linked to lower loss aversion. In a study conducted by Peter Sokol-Hessner, a psychologist at the University of Denver, participants faced decisions that invoked the bias of loss aversion, but were asked to pause and remember that this was just one choice among many. Then the researchers sent them through an fMRI machine. What they found was that when people regulated their emotions, their loss aversion subsided. If you were lying in Sokol-Hessner’s fMRI scanner, and the fear of loss was looming, the scan might show a stronger blood-oxygen response in the amygdala. And if you regulated, that amygdala response to losses might soften, and you might be less likely to avoid the loss. Emotional regulation through mindfulness is, at its core, the opposite of avoidance. It asks us to stay. To notice. To face what’s happening instead of bypassing it. It makes us more willing to remain present to what hurts, and in doing so, makes us a little less ruled by the need to escape it. This is an example of what meditation experts call non-reactivity. It’s a facet of mindfulness. Sometimes, it means calming yourself down. Other times, it means reinterpreting what’s happening, so it feels less threatening. And sometimes, like in meditation, it simply means allowing a feeling to be present without immediately trying to escape it. That possibility led to a question of my own. If loss aversion yields less to curiosity than to emotional regulation, what kind of mindfulness seems to matter most? In a preliminary study, I found an early hint. My team and I recruited about 500 individuals and measured several facets of mindfulness alongside personality traits. We measured the engagement and novelty-noticing that Langer likes to study. We also tested the more emotion-related mindfulness invoked by meditation. Then, we asked participants to do the same types of ‘coin toss’ decision tasks that you and Langer’s subjects faced. What we found is that the people most resistant to loss aversion were not the novelty-seekers. Nor were they the high-focused or the nonjudgmental ones. Instead, people who were able to stay in the present moment as they moved through the day were about 30 per cent more likely to resist the loss-aversion impulse. When people kept their attention rooted in the now, the imagined sting of a potential loss didn’t affect their choices as much. What are the implications here? First, loss aversion feeds on projection: what if this goes badly? How awful will that feel? To be loss averse, you have to do more than register the numbers. You have to simulate the pain of losing, feel it in advance, and let that anticipated sting outweigh the objective upside. Those rooted in the moment may still see the risk, but they may not elaborate it into a full emotional movie. They may also be less likely to avoid discomfort. The simplest definition of a cognitive bias is a systematic mental detour, and detours are designed to help us avoid something: fear, pain and other uncomfortable states. If you can stay with a knot in your stomach without treating it like an emergency, then the feeling of possible loss has less power to run the decision. Finally, present-moment awareness may create a little more space between sensation and choice. The emotion arrives, but it doesn’t immediately become a command. In that small interval, the person is no longer reacting only to imagined loss; they are able to choose. But loss aversion is only one form of bias. Another, called mental accounting, responds not so much to emotion as to shifts in attention. Let’s say you want to save for a vacation. You’re known for budgeting, and it’s going well, with money compounding in a high-yield savings account earning 4 per cent annual interest. Then, after a few months of medical costs and car repair, your credit card debt has piled up. You calculate your incoming payments this month, and you can’t pay off the debt quickly. That means the bank will keep charging its 25 per cent annual interest rate. What do you do? Logically, there’s a clear next step. Your credit card’s interest charges are more than six times higher than what your savings account will pay you. It’s time to move funds around. And yet, draining your travel fund over something that’s not for travel feels so wrong. The money is not supposed to be for that. So, you may feel inclined to lock your savings and pay your debt another way. We all do a version of this to some degree, and it’s called mental accounting: our tendency to treat money differently depending on the category we assign it to. We can become more loyal to the category than to the reality. This may seem like a small problem, but people slip into serious debt and forgo wonderful investments because of this cognitive bias, eroding their financial freedom and sense of agency. Richard Thaler, the behavioural economist who coined the term mental accounting, stresses that budgeting and financial management are complex. People don’t fall into it because they’re dumb. Attending to your finances responsibly is complicated, and it requires attention: the ability to concentrate, not get pulled off course, and hold one thing in mind. It’s possible that this mindful trait helps people focus long enough to see that a dollar is still a dollar, no matter which category it came from. In our study, a modest bump in focused attention corresponded to a nearly 47 per cent increase in the likelihood of solving the mental accounting problem logically. You face the choice to serve the self that is easiest to be now, or the self you hope to grow into later If mental accounting depends on sustained focus, delay discounting – the tendency to value an immediate reward more than a larger reward in the future – appears to depend more on flexible engagement: the ability to notice that time can be framed, felt and valued differently from the way impulse first presents it. Human beings have a strange relationship with time. We plan for the future, long for the future, fear the future. And yet, when the moment of choice arrives, it is often the present that wins. The reward in front of us feels better or more tangible than the one waiting in the distance. Perhaps that is because the future is always, in some sense, unreal until it arrives. Maybe time feels too abstract. Or perhaps, deeper down, we always feel that we are running out of it. Whatever the reason, time has a way of distorting value. It is no mystery that people often prefer a disproportionately smaller reward today to a larger one later. Delay discounting shows up in almost every area of our life: health, relationships, even our own identity. After a long day, the immediate reward of doomscrolling can easily outweigh the delayed rewards of a workout. You also face this bias every time you disagree with a loved one. You could say the sharp thing that might feel satisfying immediately. Or you could choose to say the more vulnerable and compassionate thing that will sustain trust down the line. One option gives the reward of emotional release now. The other gives the greater reward of emotional safety later. Even as you read this, you may hold a version of yourself that you want to become. Every day, you face the choice to serve the self that is easiest to be now, or the self you hope to grow into later. Whatever the case, delay discounting shows up whenever the present self gets louder than the future self. In our study, the people who were better at resisting delay discounting were not just calm or curious. They were more engaged with the world around them. They were more likely to notice other people, more open to thought-provoking conversations, and more alert to change and new developments. If someone moved from about average on that ‘engagement’ trait to well above average, their odds of resisting delay discounting rose by about 46 per cent. Tversky and Kahneman showed that our choices are shaped as much by how an option is framed as by the facts behind it. One way out of that trap is to learn to loosen the frame itself. Stay present and regulated enough to see from another angle. Breathe and widen your gaze until the larger picture comes into view. These are all parts of mindfulness. When it comes to interrupting cognitive bias, we may focus too much on thinking harder, and too little on noticing what we’re already thinking. Mindfulness is not, by any means, a magical override. It can’t make you impervious to generations of evolutionary hardwiring to avoid loss, pocket quick gains, or let labels do the thinking. Nor does it make you perfectly rational about money, life or love. But it can change our relationship to the moment before a bias becomes a decision. Instead of trying to outsmart every impulse, we might learn to meet it with a wider field of awareness: the irrational, the intelligent and the habitual all present at once. That shift could matter in the choices that shape a life – how we seek care, save money, argue and reconcile, pursue work, or remain trapped in fear, shame and rumination. Clearer judgment does not come from pretending our biases are not there. It comes from allowing them safely into awareness, where they become something we can see rather than something we simply obey. Piece by piece, that awareness becomes a freer kind of decision-making.