Tag Archive for: Mind Reading

Unspoken Expectations: Why You Keep Getting Let Down by People

You get home from work. It’s been a brutal day. And the kitchen looks exactly the way it did when you left this morning. Same dishes. Same everything. You feel that hot little flash of “seriously?”

Before you say anything to anyone, here’s a question worth asking yourself. Did you tell anybody the kitchen mattered to you today? Or did you decide, somewhere on the drive home, that if they really cared about you, they would just know?

That second one has a name. It’s an unspoken expectation, and it’s behind a surprising amount of the frustration we feel with partners, friends, and coworkers. This post shows you how to find yours in about a minute, and gives you the two sentences that turn it into a real agreement.

Why “just communicate more” doesn’t fix it

Almost every piece of advice on relationships or workplace conflict says the same thing: communicate more, or set firmer boundaries. Here’s the problem. You can’t communicate a boundary you don’t even realize you’re enforcing.

Most of the time, not always, but most of the time, when somebody lets you down, they broke a rule they didn’t know existed. You made the rule. You never said it out loud. And then you graded them on it, and they failed.

There’s one sentence that gives it away, and it’s worth listening for in your own head: “If they cared, they would…” Every time that sentence shows up, there’s a deal behind it that you made by yourself. That’s what to start noticing. Not the dishes. Not the late reply. The sentence.

Why “they should just know” feels so reasonable

From where you’re standing, it really does seem reasonable. You’ve been stressed all day. You felt it the entire time. So you assume everyone around you could see it too.

There’s a well-studied reason that’s wrong. In the late 1990s, researchers at Cornell ran a series of experiments where people had to hide what they were feeling. In one, students drank something that tasted terrible and tried to keep a straight face while others watched. The drinkers were sure their disgust was written all over their faces. The people watching mostly couldn’t tell which drink was the bad one.

In another, people told small lies to an audience and then guessed how many people had caught them. About half the liars thought they’d been caught. Only about a quarter actually were.

The researchers called this the illusion of transparency: we consistently overestimate how visible our feelings are to other people (Gilovich, Savitsky & Medvec, 1998). A later study found the effect gets stronger the more intensely you’re feeling something (Kamada, 2007), which is exactly the state you’re in when you walk into that kitchen.

So when you think “they should have known I needed help today,” what’s usually going on is “I felt it so strongly that I assumed it was obvious.” It wasn’t obvious. That isn’t because they don’t care. Feelings are a lot less visible from the outside than they are from the inside.

Step 1: Find the deal

The first job isn’t to fix the other person. It’s to find the deals you made in your head that nobody else agreed to. Three questions, about a minute, in your head or on paper. Do it before you say anything to anyone.

  • Finish the sentence: “If they really cared, they would…” Whatever comes out is the deal. Don’t clean it up. If the honest answer is a little petty, write down the petty version. That’s the real one.
  • Have I ever actually said this to them, out loud, in those words? Not hinted at it. Not sighed loudly while they were in the room. Actually said it.
  • How much does this actually matter to me? Picture them never doing it. Not today, not next week, ever. If that’s mildly annoying, it’s a small deal and you can let it go. If it stings, if it feels like proof they don’t care about you, it’s a big one. The big ones are the ones you have to say out loud, because they’re the ones that turn into resentment when you don’t.

Try it on a free Saturday you’re already picturing: a slow morning, a walk, lunch somewhere. Finish the sentence: “If they cared, they’d want to do that too.” Have you said it? No, you’ve assumed it. How much does it matter? Picture them doing something else with Saturday, every Saturday. That stings. So it’s a big deal, and a secret one. When Saturday comes and they spend two hours on the phone, you won’t really be annoyed about the phone. You’ll be annoyed about a plan they never knew existed.

 

Where people take this too far

Some people hear this and decide the lesson is to lower their standards until nothing bothers them. Don’t. Over-correcting into silence makes things worse, and some deals are worth keeping. The point isn’t to want less. It’s to make sure that when you do have the conversation, it’s about something the other person actually heard.

And I’m not above this. I’m notorious for thinking people should know what I expect. For me it’s the house: I get home from a day with clients, there are dishes in the sink and things all over the living room, and my first thought is “don’t they know I hate this? They must be leaving it like this just to annoy me.” I know I’ve never sat anyone down and said what I expect. I know that. And I still feel like they should just know. Both are true at the same time, and that’s the problem. Knowing about it doesn’t make you immune. It just helps you catch yourself faster.

That thought, “they must be doing this to annoy me,” has a name of its own: mind-reading. If it sounds familiar, the post on how to stop catastrophizing walks through how to catch it.

The rule

A deal only counts if the other person heard it and agreed to it. If you’ve said it out loud, you’re allowed to hold them to it. If you’ve kept it to yourself, you’ve given up the right to be surprised.

Step 2: Say the deal

Once you’ve caught the deal, you have to say it. You only need two sentences, but the order matters.

  • Sentence one, admit you had a picture in your head: “I realize I had a picture of how this was going to go, and I never told you about it.”
  • Sentence two, turn it into a real agreement: “Here’s what I was hoping for. Does that work for you, or what would work better?”

The first sentence takes the blame off them before you ask for anything. Nobody gets defensive about a plan they’re hearing for the first time. What people get defensive about is finding out they were being tested and didn’t know it.

Back in the kitchen, done the right way: “Hey. I walked in tonight annoyed about the kitchen, and then I realized I never told you today was a rough one and I could use a hand. Can we figure out a way to do this where I don’t have to hope you’ll guess?” No lecture. No list of everything they’ve ever done wrong. No “you always.”

It works at the office too: “I had it in my head that you’d loop me in before that email went out, and I realize I never actually said that. Going forward, can we agree on when I get a heads-up?”

What if they agree and it still doesn’t happen?

Then you’re no longer dealing with a hidden expectation. You said it, they heard it, they agreed. If it still doesn’t happen, that tells you something real about the relationship, and that’s a different conversation.

One question to leave you with, the same one I had to ask myself: what’s a deal you held onto for years before you realized you’d never actually said it out loud?

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How to Stop Catastrophizing (Your Brain Picks the Worst Story First)

It’s 4:45 on a Thursday afternoon, and your manager sends you a message. Four words: “Let’s talk tomorrow morning.”

Before you’ve even put the phone down, you think you know what it means. You’re getting fired. The presentation last week must have gone worse than you thought, and now you’re already rehearsing what you’ll say in that meeting.

Nothing in those four words says any of that. Your brain wrote the whole story in a few seconds, and out of every story it could have picked, it picked the worst one.

That’s catastrophizing, and this page walks through a three-step way to handle it in the moment: catch it, check it, replace it. None of this is positive thinking. There’s a study further down on why positive thinking tends to backfire for the people who need it most. This is closer to fact-checking your own brain.

Step 1: Catch it by putting a name on it

When a bad thought shows up, don’t argue with it yet. Name it first.

That sounds too small to matter, so here’s what it does. When you’re thinking “I’m getting fired,” you’re inside the thought, and it’s happening to you. When you say “Okay, that’s catastrophizing,” you step back from it a little. The thought doesn’t go away, but now you’re looking at it instead of being carried along by it. Everything else on this page happens in that bit of distance.

There’s research behind this, with honest limits. At UCLA, Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues showed people upsetting pictures while they were in a brain scanner. When people put a word on what they felt, like “angry” or “scared,” their emotional response measured lower than when they simply looked at the picture. It was a small study, about 30 people, and the effect was modest.

A follow-up with people who were afraid of spiders found something similar. The group that described their fear out loud showed less physical fear a week later than the group that tried to think about the spider in a less threatening way.

One more honest note. Those studies tested naming feelings. Naming a thinking pattern is the same move applied to the thought behind the feeling, and it’s a standard step in cognitive therapy, but I don’t know of a study that tests it in exactly that form. So treat naming as a small thing that tends to help, not as magic.

The three patterns worth naming

Psychologists have catalogued a lot of these thinking patterns. Aaron Beck described them in the 1970s, and David Burns made the list famous in his book Feeling Good. Three of them do most of the damage:

  • Catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen becomes the only thing that could happen. “Let’s talk tomorrow” turns into “I’m getting fired.”
  • Mind reading. You decide you know what someone else is thinking, with no actual evidence. “They didn’t reply, so they must be annoyed with me.”
  • All-or-nothing thinking. One slip becomes a verdict on who you are as a person. “I missed one workout, so I have no discipline.”

Try it on the message from your manager. When the story starts, say this out loud if you can: “That’s mind reading, and it’s catastrophizing. The truth is, I don’t know what tomorrow’s meeting is about.”

That last sentence is the honest one. It doesn’t say everything is fine. It says you don’t know, and that’s the whole point.

Why these thoughts feel so convincing

Here’s something interesting about those three patterns. They aren’t only bad habits your brain picked up. They’re the same three moves ads and headlines use on you every day.

“Act now or you’ll lose everything” is catastrophizing, coming from a commercial instead of your own head. “They’re only saying that because they want you to fail” is mind reading, coming from a news segment. “You’re either with us or against us” is all-or-nothing thinking, coming from a podium.

I spent 30 years in marketing, and a lot of that was writing messages designed to make people feel something fast. These are the oldest tricks in persuasion. The only difference at 11 p.m. is that the ad is playing inside your own head, and you’re the one who wrote it.

That’s good news, because it means you can check your own thoughts the same way you’d check a suspicious headline.

Step 2: Check it with three questions

  • What is this thought trying to get me to do? Every one of these thoughts has a job. It might want you to panic, pull away from someone, quit, or send that apology text at midnight.
  • What’s the actual evidence? I mean evidence you could show to another person. Something you can point at, not a feeling.
  • What’s the boring explanation? There almost always is one, and it’s almost always more likely than the dramatic story.

Here’s how that runs on a real situation. You send a friend a text. You can see they’ve opened it and read it, and then nothing happens. Six hours go by, and the thought shows up: they’re annoyed with me.

  • What does this thought want me to do? Pull back first, so I don’t get hurt.
  • What’s the evidence? They opened the message. That’s the entire list of things I actually know.
  • What’s the boring explanation? They read it while walking into a meeting. Their phone died. They meant to reply, got busy, and forgot.

Any one of those is more likely than “my friend has turned on me,” and it took a few seconds to come up with all three.

Notice what happened there. You didn’t talk yourself into believing your friend loves you. You found out the scary thought couldn’t back itself up.

Step 3: Replace it with an accurate thought, not a nice one

Now you’re holding a thought that doesn’t hold up. If you just leave it there, it’ll come back around 11 that night, and it’ll bring a couple of friends. You have to put something in its place.

This is where most advice goes wrong. The usual advice is to swap the bad thought for a good one: “I’m not getting fired, I’m a valued member of this team.” For some people, some of the time, that helps a little.

Here’s the study I mentioned. Psychologists Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee had people repeat the sentence “I am a lovable person” and then measured how they felt. People who already felt pretty good about themselves got a small boost. People who already felt bad about themselves, the ones who needed it most, felt worse afterward.

The likely reason is simple. When a sentence is too far from what you actually believe, you argue with it in your head. Now you’ve lost twice: once to the bad thought, and once to the nice thought you couldn’t make yourself believe.

So the replacement is an accurate thought, and it has two parts:

  • What actually happened, said plainly, with no spin in either direction.
  • The next thing you can actually control.

Say you miss a workout, and the automatic thought is “I have zero discipline. I always blow it.” The positive-thinking version is “I’m unstoppable,” and you can feel how fast that one bounces off. The accurate version sounds like this: “I skipped today because I was exhausted. One day is one day. I’m back at it tomorrow at 6 a.m.”

That won’t make you feel amazing. It makes you feel accurate, and accurate is something your brain will accept, which is why it sticks.

The whole thing in one breath

Catch it: put a name on the pattern. Check it: ask the three questions. Replace it: say the accurate sentence, plus the thing you’ll do next.

The first time through, the full process might take a few minutes. By the tenth time, it starts to run on its own.

The honest limit

Sometimes the catastrophic thought is right. Sometimes the meeting really is about your job.

This tool doesn’t tell you everything is fine. It tells you what you actually know right now and hands you the next move. If the evidence from question two is real, act on it. Just act on the evidence instead of on the story in your head.

I’ve been on both sides of this

Years ago, I worked on an ad campaign for a roofing company. There had been a bad fire in a neighborhood along the foothills here in Southern California. The company had put a metal roof, the kind that doesn’t burn, on one house in that neighborhood. In the aerial photo taken after the fire, every home was burned to the ground except that one.

I couldn’t tell you what the inside of that house looked like. From the air, though, it looked like the roof had saved it, so that became the campaign: if you don’t have our roof, you could lose your home to a fire. That’s a fear appeal, built from a photo of other people’s worst day. I didn’t want to do that ad. The client insisted, it was do the campaign or lose the job, and I did the campaign.

Here’s the other side. My wife travels for work. When I text her from home and she doesn’t answer, I don’t think she’s busy. I start to worry that something happened to her. So I text again, then I call, and every unanswered call makes the thought a little more convincing, until I’m sitting there fairly sure something is wrong.

The last time this happened, she was in her hotel room watching TV, with her phone on silent under the blanket. That was the whole boring explanation.

I know exactly how this works. I’ve built it for a living, and it still gets me. That’s why practice matters.

The two-minute drill

At the end of the day, write down one entry with three parts:

  • What happened, and the thought your brain handed you.
  • Which of the three patterns it was.
  • The accurate sentence.

That’s it. You’re not fixing anything in the moment. You’re practicing while nothing’s at stake, so the steps are there when something is.

 

SCOPE NOTE

A note on scope: this is a thinking tool, not treatment. If worst-case thoughts are running your days or keeping you up most nights, a licensed therapist, especially one trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, is the right next call. The ideas on this page come from that same tradition.

 

I’m curious about one thing. Which of the three does your brain reach for first? For me, it’s mind reading, every single time. Tell me yours in the comments on the video.

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