Introduction
Designing the Mind - The Principles of Psychitecture is a book written by Ryan Bush. The main thesis of the book is that one of the only areas that we have near total control over are the things that go on in our mind. This includes aspects such as how we approach challenging areas of life, and even more how we respond to those challenges. This will be a longer review in the ‘Details’ section, as this book is one of those I found incredibly useful, so much so that I finished my second reading of it recently.
Summary
I agree whole heartily with the overall theme of this book. I believe this is a book that is incredibly useful useful for all people to read.
Out of a rating from 1-10, I’d rate this book a good 9 out of 10. From a stance focusing on the approach this person takes toward the message, it really resonated with me (more on this below). The reason I deducted a point primarily has to do with the fact this may be a bit unapproachable for some people. The book comes off a bit pompous slightly, and some of the language is more advanced than you find in other books of this classification.
That said, I think not only is this book worth people reading and implementing, but also studying - especially resources that fed into the creation of this book.
Details
Designing the Mind is primarily a book on self-improvement, but different than most other books of this classification. The fundamental difference lies in abandoning the need to “instruct people on what to do”, and more about “questioning why they’re doing what they’re doing”
In essence, this book is entirely one on Critical Thinking, even though they downplay this some and use the word “Psychitecture” instead. Psychitecture is defined as the following:
The deliberate reprogramming of one’s psychological operating system, organized into cognitive, emotional, and behavioral realms to achieve psychological mastery.
And, here we start to see why I rated this book a bit lower. Many people don’t understand what an “Operating System” is, let alone the idea of “reprogramming” it. But, in essence, this is the notion of questioning “what makes us tick” - that being, what makes us act a certain way. Action can be from reacting to something that happens, to the choices we make in life around hobbies and activities.
To put this another way, we need to follow a train of thought. Take for instance you’re on a road, and someone cuts you off. That event (input) causes us to react - but what happens in-between that? That’s what this book aims to have us question. The same level of thought can apply to what we do after work, what work we’re doing, and so on. Are we going through the motions, or are we being deliberate in how we approach life.
This book doesn’t really focus on “making us happy”, that being trying to answer all life’s problems and focusing on happiness. Instead, it focuses on more equanimity - which is defined in the book as:
A state of mental calmness and composure, undisturbed by external circumstances, representing the pinnacle of emotional mastery.
Our emotions, and the the time we can spend toward understanding and pivoting them leads to better behavioral and cognitive mastery.
Chapter 1 focuses on more theory than anything else. It pitches the idea that the mind is more machine than we originally think in our culture. While the book doesn’t reaffirm my personal belief that we need to stop treating the mind and body separately from ourselves, it does at least pitch the mind as something that we can influence and eventually control through enough effort. This chapter also talks about the fact that we can change the way we think, and this is regardless of age; which is another thing that bothers me about society in that after a certain age it’s assumed you can’t or shouldn’t learn more.
Chapter 2 focuses on biases. A bias in the terminology of the book is different than what most people may think of bias in our current social realm, but also includes that bias. Bias, in this chapter, focuses to anything that we take for granted (thus no thought given), that leads to poor decisions and emotional distress. It leads from the automatic portion of our brain firing, and us acting on that instead of questioning ourselves. A work example of this is I have a coworker who will commonly say “I had this happen in the past, thus did X”, where not only was the lack of thought on if it really happened in the past due to a system problem, or if it was user error, and is not considering that the issue isn’t even relevant now-a-days. This has led to a lot of discussions with this employee about questioning one’s bias as something continually needed.
Chapter 3 focuses on values - which is the “meat” to how we work as humans. Values drive our decisions; from what we do, to who we associate with, what we will do, and what we consider good or bad. I don’t think most people really define their values, really writing them down and analyzing their values. This is something I don’t even have a firm grasp of myself, and an area of improvement for me. It involves really thinking introspectively and trying to internalize what makes us click. Books like the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell [1] also talks about the importance of values.
Chapter 4 focuses on the cognitive portion of Psychitecture. It discusses the concept of what wisdom is, which they define as the capacity for judging rightly in matters of life and conduct through sound judgment of means and ends. It also discusses that the current “goal hierarchy”, that being that we are taught to strive for is primarily based off biology and is more “bottom up”, instead of necessarily aligning to our values, which is more “top down”. In other words, most people are driven from cultural norms and instinct from our biology. I’d argue that they’re also driven from their past, but that’s covered later. Still, the point of this chapter is to look at wisdom in a more deliberate light, one that we can actually attain in this framework, and to start looking at things - be that our behavior and thoughts, in a more objective light.
Chapter 5 focuses on the emotional portion of Psychitecture. They reference CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and other similar concepts pretty heavily. The idea is that our reactions are in our control, and are not really based on the specific event but our interpretation of that event. I’ll use that example of being cut off from earlier. When someone cuts you off, it’s not the very act of someone cutting you off that drives the reaction. What drives the reaction is when that event triggers the portion of our brain that claims “this isn’t fair”, or “they’re rude” that drives the reaction. That reaction can be “I’m going to tailgate them”, “I’ll get in front of them and brake check” or in some cases “I’m going to pull out my gun and shoot them”. Either way, the mere act of being cut off isn’t what triggers the response, but it clashing with our values (as an instinct), and either we being intentional about the response or driven by raw emotion.
Chapter 6 talks about desires. It also covers delayed gratification, and cites a few academic sources in addition to philosophy here. Suffering is based off our desires not being fulfilled in some fashion. For example, if you skip breakfast, you may have a desire for food - that desire not being fulfilled causes us to suffer (glucose dropping, bursts of anger, etc.). In essence, our desire and reality not being in line causes us to suffer. This chapter talks about various strategies for modulating those desires, making them stronger or weaker depending on the goal we have. For example, if we desire a new pair of shoes - and our current ones are fine, that we can down regulate the desire by thinking about the fact we have perfectly good shoes, or up regulating the desire by making use of it for performing a certain activity - which is covered later. Desires are part of being human, but desires that aren’t controlled make us no better than animals.
Chapter 7 continues on the emotional portion of Psychitecture, and ties it to equanimity as the ending goal. In chapter 5, it’s introduced, chapter 6 talks about desires which impact our emotions (both good and bad), and chapter 7 ties it up with the end goal being equanimity. It also goes into strategies around emotional responses, such as anger, envy and anxiety. The one area I disagree with this chapter is that “suffering” isn’t necessary for growth. Suffering is caused by our desires not being in line with reality - the desire to make those equivalent leads us to growth and change if done properly. But, this is all in context. If one’s intentional about their desires, and works at getting the reality they want then this leads to growth, but uncontrolled desires or an improbable reality leads to perpetual suffering or acting in a negative way.
Chapter 8 talks about dangers to the ability for us as humans to exhibit self-control. Our environment, crafted by society, can push us to conformity instead of intentional actions based off our ideals. For example, social media is often times pushing us for more screen time, “doomscrolling” [2], or social compliance with our preferred in-group. “Influencers” exist for a reason. Furthermore, this chapter touches on something I discussed in chapter 7, and that’s the dangers of being too comfortable (or seeking a perfectly comfortable life), which leads to stagnation. I have multiple stories of individuals I know who spent too much time “comfortable”, lacking any real growth, and then when the rug is pulled out from under them, they can’t adapt. This is a really good chapter.
Chapter 9 dives into the behavioral portion of Psychitecture. It discusses willpower, delayed gratification, and the importance of self-control. Multiple strategies are presentation this chapter including how we can organize our environment, designing the consequences for our actions, and designing goals that align with our ideals. What I enjoyed about this chapter is the focus and distinction between extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are things that come outside ourselves - be that money for a job, a pat on the back from our supervisor, or social status. Intrinsic rewards are the feelings we get internally from the actions we take - such as the pride we feel on doing a good job. Willpower is heavily de-emphasized to the intrinsic rewards we get. The book mentions that intrinsic rewards are often times obtained from the “building” of something, and less the rote work that goes into it. Goals can be defined with the outcome it gives (extrinsic or intrinsic), and customized to avoid too much draining of our willpower. It’s a dense chapter, and is far more “pragmatic” in the sense it gives clear strategies than the previous chapters.
Chapter 10 is more or less a summary chapter that tries to tie everything together. “Self-mastery” is the foundation virtue to lead a truly “great life”. I put “Great life” in quotes for a reason here, because this book isn’t really telling you what a great life really is, and is something you have to define. The general idea is that you define your ideals - the things that drive you, and your actions are in line with those ideals on a conscious level. When that’s done, essentially if you can truly wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror happy, then you are living the “Great life”. An important note here is that this life is one you define, and you implement. No one should be able to tell you what this really should be.
This book is quite good, and a very useful book in my view for all people. Overall, what I liked about it is that it’s not really telling you what you should do. These concepts can apply to any set of ideals one wants to hold true. This book also focuses pretty heavily in our energy being placed in the only place we really have full control and that’s our own minds.
It also pulls from many resources and methodologies - such as Buddhism, Stoicism, Nihilism, Research (papers, and concepts such as CBT) - and the book is extremely well cited. In the paperback version, there are 36 pages of the books just on citations used.
The negative of the book is that it reads - well, both a bit hard for many people and a bit unapproachable with the language used. This is especially true in the first few chapters. That said, this book is one I like and one where I’ve worked at implementing even before my first reading given my interest in Philosophy and Buddhism.
If you choose to buy it, I recommend you go with the paperback version of it. I have this book in 3 formats; including paperback, audio, and ebook - and my most recent reading of it was from Audible, but this book is better read through paperback. If your reading skill isn’t great, ebook is probably even better for the built-in dictionary on most devices. Audio/Audible has two problems. First, it’s been spliced together in some awful ways at times, and the jumps are jarring. Second, because this book is best done with reflection and course work. If you choose to read it, I suggest going slow and questioning not only the book’s contents but also your life and events based where you’re at in the book. You don’t need to read the entire book to implement anything, but if you just do a cursory reading of the book, you won’t get anything out of it.
Some links to the book are below. I don’t have these, or any, links on my page as affiliate links.
