CBT: Self Doubt

This post is part of a series of posts exploring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] techniques, their application, and my experiences with them.  All posts in this series begin with the tag 'CBT' so you can use the search feature of this blog to read the other posts.

When it comes to confidence levels, self doubt can be incredibly destructive, as it leads you to question yourself, it makes you unsure of your actions, and it can prevent you from taking action out of fear for the potential consequences of those actions.  It's important to realise here however that self doubt in this instance is interrupting a thought process and causing an obstruction that effectively blocks that thought process.  You can probably put 2 and 2 together and see where this is going.  When you are experiencing anxiety it is often the case, although not always, that the anxiety stems from a thought process that is prevailing and causing you to feel that way as it influences your emotional state.  Given that self doubt is effective in derailing a thought process it is therefore a natural conclusion that it has potential to be consciously invoked to disrupt negative thought processes.

When it comes to anxiety and depression it can be incredibly useful to employ self doubt, especially if it can destabilise the trigger of your anxiety or the origin of your depression.  When using the Unconscious Thought Tracking CBT technique we keep a record of what we think and how it makes us feel.  These unconscious thoughts are sometimes referred to as automatic thoughts, that is, they are thoughts that occur on their own, we didn't consciously choose to contemplate these ideas they simply occurred to us.  Our ego likes to believe it is always right and when we allow it to believe this to be true then we start to believe everything it tells us, our automatic thoughts go beyond contemplation and become instruction when this happens.  The Probability Pie Chart CBT technique offered us a way to identify when the ego is actually jumping to conclusions and allows us to put everything in context to weaken the argument it presents.  The pie chart technique however only dealt with providing context, it didn't give us a way to prevent the thought process it lead to from taking hold even if we knew the outcome we were fixated on was not the most likely, and even when it is the most likely outcome there can still be reasons why we wouldn't want to fixate on it, for example everyone will die eventually but fixating on the fact you will die isn't healthy even if it is a mathematical certainty that you are going to die at some point.

It is important to doubt yourself to an extent and be able to balance your thought process, in a healthy mind the ego would do this for you but when you know that your ego is biased and your mind is leaning towards one side more than the other then it is important to challenge your ego with counter points in order to remain critical and be able to form well reasoned beliefs.  In this regard self doubt needs to serve its purpose by challenging what our ego tells us with the ultimate goal being the identification of core beliefs, or the root of our thoughts.  These are the foundations upon which all thoughts we have are built upon, they are the trunk from which everything branches, if these core beliefs are unbalanced then every thought we have has a statistical imbalance too and it's difficult to have thoughts occur organically that are balanced.

For example, when we tell ourselves we are not good enough we need to trace that branch back to the trunk and back to the root to identify what core thought causes us to feel that way.  The easiest way to trace these thoughts is simply to ask why we think that way.  By successively asking why, we can trace the origins of our thoughts.   If we reach a blank and we can't identify why we feel a certain way then either the ego is hiding the root of that thought from us, or it isn't attached to our core beliefs at all, in which case it is a belief that has been planted there and become entangled in our own and needs to be cut out of the tree.

To give another example, if we don't think we are smart enough then we need to ask why we believe that, and continually pursue the questioning of each belief until you reach the core belief and the root of those thoughts, where it ultimately stems from, what makes you think this is or isn't true.

The negative connotations of self doubt in regard to confidence are partly to blame for our aversion to self doubt as a useful tool.  When we chronicle our thoughts and determine how they make us feel we need to analyse those thoughts and ask ourselves objectively if those thoughts are based in truth and what the repercussions are.  To that end, it is important to discard the ego in those moments and look at what we think and be honest about whether it is in fact true.  In many cases we can recognise that the negative thoughts we have are often used as excuses or explanations for shortcomings when in reality those tend to be things we can't actually control, or they lead us to thoughts as a root that form a core belief that does not in reality have any evidence to back it up, or at the very least has evidence for which alternate explanations and alternative conclusions could also be drawn.

Self doubt can be created by using the tools that CBT techniques offer us but ultimately within a healthy mind this doubt should come from the ego itself and if the ego is not capable of self doubt then we need to teach it to incorporate self doubt into its decision making process.  It is not possible to discard the ego entirely, it is important to recognise that and understand that when you place it to one side in order to employ these techniques it is still watching and observing and despite the portrayal of the ego as something evil and unwilling to listen, the reality is the exact opposite.  The ego takes its cues from our experiences, it observes and it reacts the same way it reacted before because that is what it knows and that is what it does best.  If you want to change the way it is acting you have to recognise that your thoughts and your actions are part of a constant reinforcement algorithm like an artificial intelligence your ego represents an agent and everything it does is informed by the policy it has created from the data that it has been fed.  If you want to alter the actions of the ego you have to feed it data that will alter the policy.

I am not going to lie, I had somewhat of an existential crisis contemplating this technique, not least of all for the realisation that human intelligence does not actually differ that much from artificial intelligence after all.  I have written about AI many times and discussed that the main difference is that humans are capable of processing both priori and a posteriori knowledge as defined by Philosopher Immanuel Kant that is to say humans can possess knowledge that is objectively true yet independent of experience, as well as knowledge that is derived from and built upon experience.  AI is only capable of the latter at present and has not yet been developed to accurately model the former as the inability to connect knowledge to existing knowledge makes it difficult to use logic to provide a proof that validates that knowledge.

This distinction is best demonstrated with a halting problem, if I were to give you and an AI both a locked box and hand you both a key ring with an infinite number of keys on it, you would both set about trying each key until you found one that opened the box.  The human being would stop eventually, they are capable of a level of reasoning in this situation that is not based on experience, there is a realisation that occurs in the process that the task is likely to be impossible and the box will never be opened.  An AI on the other hand will find it incapable of determining when to stop as the fact that the key ring is infinite means that it is a mathematical certainty that a key will exist at some point on the keyring that will open the box.  There is the possibility that the AI may never find that key, but there is no reliable way of instructing the AI when to stop.  Giving it explicit instructions to stop after 100 attempts for example is not allowed in this scenario as that is an instruction you are giving it, not a realisation it is coming to on its own.

This was a belief of mine for a very long time but through using this CBT technique I had to question that belief at one point and the realisation that CBT is designed to help remove branches from your tree of beliefs that are not connected to your core beliefs made me realise human intelligence actually breaks down when it relies on a priori beliefs, and that CBT and fields of study like it attempt to remove this and revert our thought processes to being a posteriori belief based essentially throwing into question the reliability of any knowledge in the process that is also differentiated by this distinction.  The only way I can reconcile the cognitive dissonance this caused was to assert that beliefs and knowledge whilst both shaping our thought process have to be considered separate even though they are almost impossible to separate.  I'm not going to lie this made it very difficult to present any logical coherent argument that would stand as a proof that neither you nor I were in fact computer programs part of a simulation.

I over-think things, did I mention that?  This technique should be taken with moderation.  Doubt has its purpose but you can't pursue it to an extreme because you will doubt your very existence if you do.  It's important to bring this back to a very serious point, CBT is designed to disrupt thought patterns and thought processes and it does that quite well, the only real conclusion I have from this entire exploration is that the only effective way to ensure CBT works is to remove the stimuli that caused the situation or mental state that necessitated its use in the first place.  That and the main point that CBT always came back to was that every thought and feeling when it is overwhelming needs to be put into context to determine its true magnitude.  The sun in the sky is blinding, its light in daytime covers the surface of the planet exposed to it, the light is so strong we can't see beyond the sky that it illuminates, but at night in darkness we can see the cosmos beyond our planet, when you ascend into that cosmos and you look back at our planet, the sun is a bright star but it does not obscure the rest of the cosmos, its true brightness can be seen with context.  It's important to be able to recognise when you are being blinded by something in the moment that will pass in time, even if it is something that you will have to deal with time and again, it will pass.

I would encourage people to use self doubt as a tool when they are feeling anxious and even in your everyday life it does have a purpose but moderation is key and recognising that you can take conscious control of that doubt to use it to your advantage is something that can be very useful even beyond CBT.