How Our Minds Create Our Experiences

The nutrient quality of our personal experiences is as important for the development of our minds and bodies as the nutrient quality of the food we eat. Experiences are personal to the extent that they affect us emotionally. The more emotion we have as part of an experience the more personal it is, and the more likely it is to be a part of our memories and life themes. If you want to be happier and healthier, consume more happy healthy experiences. This sounds easier to say than to do, but we can have more control of our experiences than we often realize.

Our minds create and manage our personal experiences whether we are aware of it or not. In fact, this is the main function they fulfill. They set the perspectives from which we approach new experiences. They guide our perceptions and evaluations of individuals, circumstances and events. Our minds influence how our experiences are stored and retrieved. Perhaps most importantly, they control the long term associations and regulation of positive and negative feelings that are the most critical part of our personal experiences.

Personal experiences are largely internal events that have two main parts: what we perceive that happens during situations and our emotional feelings and thoughts about what happens. In short, personal experiences are perceptions of situations that evoke emotions. Emotions are the most primal yet primary part of our personal lives! They originate and happen in our minds, and are exactly what give experiences personal meaning.
In contrast, situations are external events in our lives. They include our behavior, other people, places, conditions, actions and outcomes. They can be single events, series of events or frequently repeated similar events. You will see throughout this paper that examining experiences in terms of situations and emotions is relatively simple and quite useful. Most of this model of well-being is based on the relationship between situations and the states of emotional security, belonging and satisfaction with life.

Psychological Appraisal Gives Personal Meaning to Experiences

The feelings and thoughts that we have about what happens during situations, is stored as thriving and defending emotions that represent the personal meanings of those experiences. Stored personal meanings can and often do change substantially over time as we consciously and unconsciously re-evaluate them in light of our new personal experiences and continued reflections. This is what allows us to reach emotional resolution of distressing events. It also allows us to alter our identities and beliefs about others and our lives.
A line of theory and research integrating the functions of stress, appraisal and coping, pioneered by the late Richard Lazarus at the University of California-Berkley Stress and Coping Project, has provided a remarkably useful understanding of the ways in which our minds manage our experiences to deal with such stressful life challenges as failures, betrayals and traumas. This same theory also works well with thriving successes, personal growth and loving interpersonal interactions with others.

Lazarus proposed the term psychological appraisal to represent the mental process through which we assign the all important positive or negative personal meanings to the situations we encounter in our lives. On the broadest and most important level, the personal meanings of our experiences are based on our perceptions of the benefits and threats to ourselves presented by situations. Perceptions of benefit mainly derive from appraisal through the thriving system and perceptions of threats mainly derive from appraisal through the defending system. Without appraisal, experiences would have no personal meaning and we would have little sense of self and ability to plan for and control the events in our lives.

It may seem as if the appraisal process is a series of distinct emotional associations that remain stable over time, but this is not accurate. Appraisal is a continuous automatic and intentional process of creating meaning from the collective experiences in our lives. No one personal experience is appraised in isolation from others. Most of the emotional thoughts and feelings about ourselves, others and our lives are derived from the on-going re-appraisal of the situations that occur in our lives.

Through appraisal, the thriving and defending systems interact to keep us vigilant for benefits and threats that may contribute to or alter the meaning of our lives. This is especially true when we face challenges in life. These challenges occur as we respond to adversity, take advantage of opportunities and embrace personal growth. Appraisals of challenges are based on the perceived difficulties in coping with or embracing demands in life by using the personal resources one believes he has to accomplish this.

If an individual perceives that his personal resources, such as knowledge, skills, persistence and stress threshold are sufficient for a particular beneficial life challenge, he is more likely to engage it. If he understands that important new resources must be acquired to meet a significant beneficial life challenge or goal, he may engage that challenge in a growth state of tolerable stress. If his appraisal leads to the perception that a challenge is not beneficial or is too great for his current and future resources the challenge is experienced as a threat and avoided.

Psychological appraisal occurs in the mind and brain through the interaction of the thriving and defending appraisal circuits. Both the thriving and defending appraisal circuits involve the internal interaction of emotional feelings and thoughts. This interaction is accomplished largely through neural circuits between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The reactive/feelings part of appraisal is mostly related to the activity of the amydala, and the reflective/ thought part is mostly related to the activity of the prefrontal cortex.

While the reactive and rational parts of the appraisal process and their related neural structures always operate together, it is helpful to talk about the parts separately. Emotional feelings are mostly automatic neurological and hormonal responses. The intensity of emotional feelings spikes very quickly but subsides quite gradually. They give us gut feelings that activate our impulses to approach, avoid or attack persons or things. John Gottman at the University of Washington found that the dismissal of importance and avoidance of these intuitive feelings works against happiness, success and satisfaction with life.

We have to be careful about relying primarily on our reactive appraisals or emotional feelings. While they are rapid, they tend to be inaccurate at times. When appraisal is primarily based on our feelings, our thoughts naturally follow our feelings in emotional tone. Doing something that feels attractive and avoiding something that feels threatening seems to make sense to our minds. We refer to our subsequent actions as following our hearts or our guts.

In appraisal, emotional thoughts work primarily through the parts of the mind and brain that are most active during reasoning and language usage. They occur during the process of evaluating the personal meaning of our experiences by thinking, talking and writing about them. What makes thoughts emotional is the positive or negative tone they have. Thoughts that are neither positive nor negative are not emotional. Thoughtful and mindful appraisal lasts over time as significant personal experiences are processed consciously and unconsciously on a number of occasions. With practice, intentional rational reflective appraisal can become self-directed and powerful.

The rational reflective appraisal of challenging events alters or refines reactive appraisals, largely through inhibitory neural pathways from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Reasoning can inhibit erroneous reactive impulses to approach, avoid or attack persons and situations. Of course, this does not prevent individuals from making irrational appraisals when they are overwhelmed by stress and distress or misguided by very limiting perspectives.

The thriving and defending appraisal circuits strive to maintain a consistency between our emotional feelings and thoughts through what scientists refer to as emotional loops. Thriving feelings activate positive thoughts and positive thoughts maintain thriving feelings. Defending feelings activate negative thoughts and negative thoughts maintain defending feelings.

Our appraisals of distressing experiences can be either beneficial or limiting. Irrational thoughts can inflame and prolong negativity through a negative emotional loop often referred to as rumination. Conclusions reached and coping responses reinforced during defensiveness can interfere with thriving in subsequent situations.

An incredibly useful thing to understand about the appraisal process is the ways that emotional feelings and thoughts affect each other under reactive and reflective conditions. The force of thoughts to guide feelings is much weaker than the force of feelings to guide thoughts. When appraisal is primarily reactive, feelings exert a powerful force on thoughts to be consistent in emotional tone.

When appraisal includes adequate beneficial reflection, thoughts exert a moderate force on feelings to be consistent in emotional tone. Reflective appraisal may require time, repeated conscious sessions, and the experience of consequent constructive behavior and beneficial outcomes to be effective in guiding feelings.

When a new situation has some important similarity to old distressing situations, initial defensive feelings can be based on the perception of threats that may not be real. Through a process called generalization, the new situations can trigger defensive feelings that arose initially in old situations. Through adaptive reflection, initial defensive reactive appraisals of new situations that are based in generalization can be challenged and altered when they are not accurate or beneficial. When perceived threats prove to be marginal upon reflective appraisal, the resultant defensive feelings subside on their own. Through a process called extinction, subsequent initial emotional reaction to the same person or similar situation is reduced for new situations.

However, anything that is done to make feelings of threat subside can be attributed as the cause of relief and learned as a coping response. This can reinforce maladaptive as well as adaptive coping responses. Some coping responses are self-defeating. This could include attacking or avoiding another person or situation, abusing substances, or adopting a ritual such as excessive hand washing. Such responses can be unlearned by repeatedly withholding their use in safe but tolerable stress-provoking situations while initial negative feelings automatically subside through extinction.

It is difficult for the intentional mind to directly change the basic feelings that underlie the reactive part of appraisals. There is good evidence to indicate that the amydala responses to previously fear-provoking situations are quite resistant to change. Fortunately, automatic feelings activated by stored experiences can be dampened by intentional reflective appraisals of new experiences and re-appraisals of old experiences. Over time the prefrontal cortex can become adept at inhibiting amydala reactions to meet the actual threat of a situation. This emotional regulation mechanism underlies almost all adaptive coping responses to stress and distress.

Personal Experiences are Consolidated into Life Themes

It is tempting to think of personal experiences mainly as our immediate reactions to what happens in our lives in various moments. But, these experiences are much more than that. They are the things that are created, stored and retrieved by our minds to establish consistent and coherent identities and life stories. They are the source of our wisdom and guideposts to our behavior. Our stored personal experiences are in constant transformation to meet our needs for adaptation to our environments.

Our collective stored autobiographical experiences represent our identities, summarize our pasts and guide our futures. While we each really have only one mind with both conscious and subconscious functions, what we refer to as our subconscious minds are our stored personal experiences and life themes operating habitually and unconsciously to play these functions. When our stored experiences cross a threshold of brain wave frequency and amplitude, they operate in our conscious and intentional minds as memories, perspectives, imaginations and plans.

It may seem as if past experiences are like videos of events stored in vaults that we can take out and view in their original forms when we wish. But, in reality, our experiences are stored in networks of neurons that continuously change their interconnections. Through a process call neurogenesis, brain stem cells become new neurons to replace dying and discarded ones. New connections are continuously formed between both new and older neurons to represent each new personally relevant experience, and older connections are routinely altered in the process.

Because all of our stored experiences evolve through consolidation, we do not go through two days with the exact same stored experiences. When we wake up each day, we have somewhat different personal experiences stored in our brains, just like we have somewhat different cells in the rest of our bodies. Under the direction of our minds, experiences are continually formed, stored, re-formed in and retrieved from our brains.
Experiences are created in part out of the fragments of available sights, sounds, and other information selected from situations by our minds to help us determine the general and personal meaning of events. Different forms of sensory information are stored in and retrieved from different specialized areas of the brain in which they are first perceived. Sights are first perceived and then stored in the visual cortex, and sounds in the auditory cortex. Likewise, thoughts are perceived, stored in and retrieved from the reasoning and language areas of the brain.

As remarkable as the mind is, it's interaction with life is limited by what the brain can store, and very limited in what it can keep in consciousness. This is due in large part to the energy required for conscious awareness, and the brain's storage capacity for fuel or glucose. So the mind economizes when it comes to storing personal experiences just like it does for other information. Since the various elements of personal experiences are stored throughout the brain and body, processes called consolidation are required to tie them together into integrated experiences and re-experiences. Re-experiences occur as we think about past events and imagine and anticipate new events.

Consolidation is both a lay term and a technical term. Our personal experiences are consolidated in various ways at different levels of brain organization. First is the integration of our sensory experiences. This level of consolidation connects fragments from each sense together to give us integrated sensory experiences during life episodes, and in memories thereafter. Research has demonstrated that the mind gives priority to visual information over the other senses in most cases. Even at that, brain imaging studies have demonstrated that about 10% of the information that we use to make sense of what we see comes from the visual cortex, and the remainder comes in the form of interpretations from other areas of the brain.

Another level of consolidation integrates sensory experiences with emotions derived primarily from the life themes that summarize our past experiences. In this process, the mind gives priority to life themes over sensory experiences. We literally see and hear what our beliefs lead us to expect. During our individual personal experiences, and for a time afterward, short-term memories that combine integrated thoughts, feelings and sensory fragments are formed through consolidation in the hippocampus and made available to our conscious minds.

Stable theme consolidation takes place at another level as experiences of specific past personal experiences are transferred to long term storage, primarily in the cortex. Some personal experiences, especially those that are associated with intense feelings are initially stored in the hippocampus as life episodes with many details. However, all these episodes are eventually consolidated with other stored experiences in the frontal cortex into what scientists and mental health practitioners call schema, or I will call themes. These themes are like a collection of snapshots and ideas from many related emotional experiences that are all mixed together. Few real details from any one episode are retained.

Our life themes play two very important roles. First, they provide us with a life story, and an identity as the central person in that story. When activated, this function results in autobiographical memories and beliefs about ourselves, others and life. Secondly, they propel us into the future. When activated, this function results in the beliefs that guide our plans and the perspectives that guide our roles in the situations we encounter.
The effects of retrograde amnesia illustrate the importance of life themes and stories. Individuals with this affliction lose access to their life stories. Without life themes they have little sense of self. Not only do they lose their sense of past, but they find it very difficult to project themselves into the future through goals and planning. This observation led to the discovery through brain imaging studies that the mental processes of remembering the past and imagining the future operate on the same life themes and remarkably similar brain circuits.

Both thriving and defensive life themes operate on a rather continuous subconscious basis, and their levels of activation are related to the emotional intensity of our experiences during situations and as we think about them afterwards. The principle of brain plasticity requires that the brain cells in the web-like neural networks that are developed to store specific life themes fire together on a regular basis to retain their interconnections. Without regular activation, these networks lose their integrity as their neurons are co-opted for other purposes.

Low level activation of themes for thriving or self-defense purposes keeps them intact and poised to respond to trigger situations. As the neural networks are activated at high levels by situations and subsequent mental processing, the themes they store create perspectives and memories relevant to current life challenges. These processes of both low and high level activation influence our moods and guide our lives, whether we are aware of it or not.

Themes can be about individuals or groups of individuals. They can be about places or about circumstances. They are most often about oneself. Autobiographical themes are constructed around past experiences according to the emotional intensity that gives them personal meaning. The more emotionally intense a theme is, the more potential impact it has on our memories, perspectives and autobiographical plans.

Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin found that the degree of positive and negative theme activation can be seen in research subjects through recordings of activity levels in the left and right hemispheres of the frontal cortex. Themes that are created through the thriving system are primarily stored in and retrieved from the left hemisphere of the brain. They are open to new experiences, examination and re-appraisal, and tend to be positive and beneficial.

Themes created through the defending system are stored primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain. They are less open to new experiences, examination and reappraisal, and tend to be emotionally negative and limiting. Because they derive from two systems, it is possible to have both thriving and defending themes activated by the same person or situation
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Most autobiographical experiences are highly abbreviated by the time they are consolidated into long term storage in the cortex, and details are lost each time they are consciously accessed or integrated with newer experiences. The technical term for this is re-consolidation. So when we have memories from stored themes, we largely construct them out of the remaining snapshots, feelings and ideas left from the original experiences, filling in most of the details from the themes with which they are associated. These memories are more likely a reflection of emotionally active themes than accurate reports of real events. The same is true for the stories we tell about our lives; they are usually a reflection of current emotionally active themes as much as an accurate sequences of actual events.

Since their parts are stored throughout the brain and body, no specific experiences (i.e. memories) or themes are stored in an integrated form in any one place. The mind, mainly through the hippocampus, keeps track of where the parts are stored and activates them simultaneously when we have memories, perspectives and plans. So, we literally re-create memories and beliefs at the time we have them from our store of individual experiences and themes. Most memories of events are created from a few actual fragments, with the bulk of the memories crafted from activated themes to fill in the details and tie the fragments together.

Each time a specific personal experience is remembered or a different perspective arises in a new situation, it is re-experienced differently due to the re-consolidation process. We literally change our individual experiences, life themes and life stories each time we activate them by adding new experiences and interpretations to the mix.

Reconsolidation is especially important in resolving emotional distress from both recent experiences and lingering and expanding defensive themes. Both the self-defense system and the thriving system take advantage of reconsolidation to expand existing life themes. Defensive themes are expanded through the process of generalization when the situational cues from a distressing theme occur in new situations and result in an automatic appraisal of threat in that situation. This can occur automatically and unconsciously.

Continual re-consolidation enables us to resolve disappointments and traumas by subsequently altering stored personal experiences. Each time we activate or re-experience episodes and themes in a more rational and beneficial way, we have the opportunity to modify them by adding new helpful information and understandings. This allows us to change our life stories, even the present personal meaning of what has happened in the past. Scientists and mental health professionals refer to this process as re-appraisal or re-framing.

If we create new beneficial direct experiences in a safe emotional state, we may alter negative emotional intensity previously associated with active experiences and themes. This process is referred to as desensitization. Desensitization results from safely re-engaging situations similar, to ones in which we felt betrayed, deeply disappointed or traumatized.

Desensitization enables us to remember disappointments and traumas and approach previously threatening situations without re-experiencing distress similar to when they were first experienced. It allows us to re-engage areas of our lives that we have abandoned because of negative experiences. Re-appraisal and desensitization are responsible for much of the benefit we receive from counseling or psychotherapy. But they can also be practiced with another caregiver, or even by oneself.

Beneficial Perspectives are Created Through Mental Distancing

We help create events and situations by the ways in which we participate in them, guided mainly through our perspectives. Perspectives are constellations of relevant beliefs that arise when we have direct interactions with or think about (re-experience) persons, situations and ideas. They direct our expectations, focus and participation in events. That makes perspectives critical to our perceptions of what is and has happened during events. Perspectives include the thoughts, feelings and impulses that we often refer to as attitudes. For this reason, our perspectives make highly significant contributions to the types of lives we experience. The really good news is that we can be active participants in the creation of beneficial perspectives.

When we change a perspective we look at our personal experiences in different ways that lead to different personal meanings. Most change of perspectives involves a form of mental distancing. Mental distancing allows us to be significant forces in the directions of our own lives. It is the process of changing the focus of attention and thought from the self, from the present, and to a hypothetical reality. Mental distancing broadens one’s perspective, especially concerning personal experiences that are distressing or require delay of gratification in support of long-term goals.

In the midst of events and situations, the most compelling perspectives focus on oneself in the here and now of immediate experiences. When recalling specific experiences, we often return to the original appraisals and perspectives we had at the time. Researchers refer to these default perspectives as baselines because they represent points of low mental distance, and are more prevalent as situations become more challenging and attention-intensive. Without mental distancing, people would be primarily products of their genes, environments and habits.

Self-distancing changes one’s focus to other people and purposes and depersonalizes experiences. It can facilitate consideration of the needs, fears and perspectives of others that underlie compassion. Present-distancing promotes consideration of lessons from the past and projected future consequences and desired goal attainment. It can support difficult but constructive personal changes in lifestyle that mainly yield long-term benefits. Shifting focus to hypothetical realities allow us to imagine and plan futures that are improvements or enhancements over current situations. This section describes self-distancing in some detail, while other forms of psychological distancing are described in other sections.

As we have seen, experiences continue to evolve as themes long after specific events. The mind has a default structure for the way that themes are organized and activated. Themes about one self are the most central and emotionally intense. All other themes are arranged according to their connection to the self and each other in what neuroscientists refer to as mental maps. We are all self-centered, or what scientists call self-immersed by nature. In the self-immersed orientation to experiences, perspectives during situations and conclusions afterward are limited to those that support existing self-referential themes. This orientation undermines adaptive responses to life opportunities and challenges.

The more connected a theme is to the self, the more personal and potentially active it is in guiding our responses to our lives. Neuroscientists have identified areas of the brain that are reliably activated according to the degree to which the processing of experiences is self-referential. These areas are highly activated during perceived threats to oneself, and during efforts to regulate one's emotions and behaviors. Self-related themes are also active when we create memories, perspectives, and plans from stored episodes and themes. This can result in the creation of limiting perspectives that go unaltered by new experiences.

Self-referential themes are so central to how we observe and think about ourselves and our experiences that a self-distanced orientation to threatening and challenging experiences must be engaged to gain objectivity about related events, others and our selves. Self-distancing is a mental process that allows us to observe and reflect on how our active themes are benefiting or limiting us. Research has shown that spontaneous engagement in real life situations through this orientation results in lower negative emotional reactivity to potentially distressing events.
Distancing from self-concerns lowers perceived threats to realistic levels. Laymen refer to this as not taking everything so personally. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated that research subjects can be taught to differentiate between self-immersed and self-distanced re-appraisal and theme re-consolidation, and can consciously select one over the other when instructed to do so.

In self-distanced processing, individuals can observe their own thoughts, feelings and actions from the perspective of an unbiased third party. This does not restrict their normal interactions with life, but may influence those interactions. They can think about and frame their experiences afterward in ways that promote insight and resolution, a process call adaptive reflection. Adaptive reflection is our main way to constructively alter life themes, and the memories and beliefs that arise from them.

Our beliefs provide a consistency to our lives by allowing us to make explanations and predictions. Beliefs are groups of related thoughts and feelings that initiate and guide our behaviors. Thoughts that are connected with intense feelings guide behaviors that are hard to change, and the more intense the feelings the more difficult the change. When our beliefs are challenged we usually feel threatened, even when the challenge comes from inescapable reality. However, challenging our own beliefs is part of adaptive reflection, the most powerful way to create new healthy experiences.

The process of challenging limiting beliefs and creating beneficial beliefs is described when this paper addresses the practice of self-examination.
These three functions of the mind point to many ways in which the management of our experiences can be intentional. Self-distanced orientation, reappraisal and re-consolidation, and desensitization are powerful tools at our disposal to use both automatically and intentionally. Through intentional management of our experiences we can alter perspectives, broaden perceptions, challenge limiting beliefs, inhibit limiting fear responses and adopt the beneficial practices that promote thriving in life.

The Role of Intention

Ideally, most of the mental activity that manages our personal experiences is nearly automatic. Highly intentional and conscious mental activity requires the rapid use of the limited stores of glucose that our brains use for energy. Research shows that the depletion of those stores of glucose causes the brain to respond by slowing and limiting intentional mental activity. After research subjects struggle long enough to make a personally relevant life decision they begin to care less about that decision because of the depletion of mental energy. Likewise, after individuals struggle intentionally against a series of challenges to a personally relevant goal, they begin to lose motivation and focus for that goal.

This principle of mental energy depletion operates when high conscious and even unconscious mental energy is required to regulate negative feelings and thoughts. There is a fatigue factor that comes into play. The good news is that the intentional constructive regulation of thoughts and feelings at critical times through adaptive coping responses turns more automatic with practice. The regulation that is accomplished intentionally is stored in the cerebellum, the same brain structure that records the muscle sequences for writing one’s name or riding a bicycle. Through intentional practice, most mental activities can become nearly as automatic through the cerebellum-pre-frontal cortex circuit as riding a bicycle. One key to living deliberately is having well learned mental strategies for intentional self-regulation and learning to detect cues that activate those strategies.

Creating more productive and healthy experiences to help us meet challenges and grow personally often requires a reflective, conscious and proactive approach to life. Observing, understanding and controlling how our minds are working can aide in this approach. One of the main purposes of this paper is to explain and validate intentional mental tools that facilitate thriving in life. They derive in part from the mental principles of psychological appraisal, theme consolidation, and psychological distancing. These mental practices give rise to the positive and negative coping strategies that people acquire to respond to challenges in their lives.