Metacognition is a very simple concept that is absolutely essential to the way we get through life, and especially how we think about our place, purpose, and maybe even our struggles in that life.

 

Most often associated with helping students to learn better, to learn more efficiently, metacognition has been widely adopted by the brain and mental health community to help humans deal more effectively with one of our biggest challenges of all. The way that we think.

Metacognition is about thinking about our thoughts, challenging how we think and why we think certain ways, how we process our thoughts. And getting it wrong contributes to so much of our self-inflicted mental malaise.

It’s widely thought that most human thinking is negative. That’s partly due just to the caveman brain that’s constantly on guard for danger but increasingly to the nature and reality of modern life.

Ancient Brains in a High Tech World

There are plenty of things for modern humans to think about, plenty of negative and troubling events, and an endless technology-based stream of all this bad news intruding into every waking moment. And we have a tendency to go looking for it. Food foraging has been replaced with info foraging, we’ve gone from horizon scanning to doom-scrolling.

Neuroscientist and neurologist Adam Gazzaley describes it as “ancient brains in a high-tech world.”

Negative news can be stressful, and the failure to process negative thinking might be at the core of today’s stress epidemic. Worry, anxiety, frustration, anger, rumination, regret, sadness, hopelessness, cynicism, self-doubt – all negative thinking patterns that can keep stress constantly elevated.

It’s often said that while we are not our thoughts, that we’re not what we think, we are very much how we think. Being more aware of our thinking, teaching ourselves to process our thoughts and frame them in a more positive and helpful way is essential not only to mental and brain health, but to happiness and even life success.

Challenging our thinking can also help address and remedy things like bias, prejudice, mistaken assumptions, and even help manage the growing threat of misinformation, disinformation, and a surge in deepfake news.

An Essential Skill for Teens

Metacognition is also increasingly being thought of as a way to help teens manage their mental health, and as a different approach to that health.

So much teen mental malaise, depression, anxiety, and insecurity stems from their inability to manage their chaotic thinking. If teens have the skills and tools to better and more appropriately process their thoughts, those thoughts in turn have less of a chance of becoming negative and turning into things like anxiety.

Central to Defeating Stress

Metacognition might be the cure for modern stress. Most stress is caused by stressors, internal and external things  that generate negative thoughts which in turn that have the potential to become stress if we let them. So learning to manage those stressful thoughts can easily prevent stressors from becoming stress.

Hans Selye, one of the earliest and most respected researchers into the condition of stress, talked often about stress and distress. How stressful thoughts or stressors only become distress if we fail to hold ourselves accountable for them.

The Battle Between Negative and Positive Thinking

Another great example of negative and unhealthy thinking is cynicism, which is also a major source of stress. Although it’s little more than a negative way of seeing the world and people around us, people who are constantly cynical don’t do so well in life.

They have fewer friends and relationships, they get sick more often, they don’t do as well professionally and financially, and they are more likely to die from heart attack and cancer. And all because of little more than the way they think about the world around them.

Conversely, positive thinking habits like kindness, gratitude, perspective, and joy are not only key to alleviating stress but numerous studies have shown that that can also contribute significantly to a more successful, more fulfilling and even longer life.

Partner It With Mindfulness

Metacognition is also an ideal partner for mindfulness, because mindfulness focuses on bringing everything for just a few minutes into the here, the now, the present, and trying to exclude everything else. Including negative thoughts.

And no better opportunity than in that moment, those quiet and still few moments, to reflect on our negative thinking and figure out better ways to handle those thoughts.

If you can get into the routine of training your brain to instinctively think for a moment about how you think certain ways, how you react to certain thoughts, inputs, how those thoughts become negative feelings instead of positive ones, your brain and your life will be so much better off for it.

According to Brendan Conway-Smith, who specializes in metacognition and AI with Harvard Medical School “We all engage with our immune systems each day. We have a vague understanding of why we should wash our hands, wipe the kitchen counter and wear a mask while chatting with people indoors.

Yet the science of immunology has given us a deeper understanding of our personal immune system and we can, in turn, use this knowledge to combat a global pandemic.

In a similar sense, the science of metacognition offers a more profound knowledge of how the mind can understand and control its own processes.”