Day 12: Jumping to Conclusions
Week 2 Diagnosis
You do it all the time. We all do.
You’re confronted by a situation and your mind automatically leaps to a conclusion. No evidence. No checking. Just instant judgement. And if you’re feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or worried? That conclusion you just jumped to isn’t just wrong. It’s damaging. And you’re going to believe it anyway.
In psychological circles, they call this inference-observation confusion. All it means is that you’re getting confused about what you actually see versus what you think it means. You observe something, then you infer the wrong meaning.
There are two main forms of this: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling. Both are unhelpful. Both will mess you up. And if you’re prone to anxiety or negative thinking, you’re probably doing both right now.
Mind Reading
Mind reading is when you think you know what someone else is thinking. You don’t. You can’t. But your anxious brain doesn’t care about that minor detail.
The way he looked at me means he really doesn’t like me.
I know they think I’m just stupid.
And you know this how, exactly? We’ve all taken a response from another person and completely got the wrong end of the stick. This type of thinking has probably caused more arguments and disagreements than anything else in human relationships.
Here’s the problem: you can’t actually read minds. So when you try to, you tend to get it spectacularly wrong. You distort what’s really going on. You go off half-cocked, poorly prepared, and what you do next often makes the situation worse.
Fortune Telling
Fortune telling is where you read something into an event that’s happened and immediately predict doom and gloom.
Now I’ll never be able to do it. I’ll only fail again.
If I try to stop smoking, I’ll only fail.
You can’t read the future. And predicting that something will go wrong needs to stop, because nothing’s going to stop you in your tracks as much as believing this type of cognitive distortion. Some people predict their own prophecies of doom and despair. And the more they stick to them, the more likely they are to come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies aren’t mystical. They’re mechanical.
Some people are mind readers. Some are fortune tellers. Some do both. Jumping to conclusions is genuinely bad for you. Things aren’t always what they seem to be. Bad decisions in all areas of life happen when you act on poor information or when you’ve got an absence of good evidence. Jumping to conclusions makes you judge others too quickly and personalise your failures.
As Sharon Lebell puts it in her rendering of Epictetus’s teaching: our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren’t there. We’re still doing it, two thousand years on.
What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain
When you jump to conclusions, your amygdala, the threat-detection system, spots something ambiguous. In milliseconds, it’s running pattern matching against every negative experience you’ve ever had. It finds a match, even if it’s a terrible match, triggers an emotional response, and floods your system with stress hormones. Your prefrontal cortex, the rational part, gets sidelined. By the time you’re consciously aware of what’s happening, you’ve already decided what that look meant, what that comment implied, what that silence revealed.
And you’re almost certainly wrong.
The research on this is extensive. Studies on attribution bias show that we systematically misinterpret other people’s behaviour, particularly when we’re stressed or anxious. We attribute negative intentions to neutral actions. We see patterns in randomness. We predict futures based on flawed pasts. It’s not your fault that your brain does this. Evolution wired us to jump to conclusions because sometimes it saved our lives. Better to assume that rustling in the grass is a predator and be wrong than to assume it’s nothing and be eaten.
But you’re not running from predators anymore. You’re sitting in an office, having a conversation, sending an email, living your life. And that ancient wiring is causing havoc.
Anchoring to Evidence
The antidote to fortune telling in its purest form is evidence. When your brain is jumping to conclusions about how something will fail, it’s working from imagination, not evidence. Cut through that by returning to what is actually, demonstrably real. Not the imagined future disaster. The documented past preparation and experience.
When you catch yourself fortune telling, don’t argue with the prediction. Don’t try to convince yourself it won’t happen. Just ask: what do I actually know? What preparation exists right now that my anxious brain is trying to ignore? What evidence is available that my jumping-to-conclusions mind has conveniently skipped past? That’s your anchor. Real, verifiable, yours. Use it.
What to Do About It
So what do you do? You catch yourself. You notice when you’re mind reading or fortune telling. You stop and ask yourself: what evidence do I actually have for this? Not feelings. Not hunches. Actual evidence.
When you think someone doesn’t like you, ask: have they actually said that? Or am I inferring it from a facial expression that could mean anything? When you think you’ll fail, ask: have I failed every single time before? Or am I catastrophising based on one setback?
Challenge your conclusions. Test them. Most of the time, they’ll fall apart under the lightest scrutiny. And when they do, you’ll feel the anxiety drop away. Not because the situation has changed, but because your interpretation of it has.
This takes practice. Your brain has been jumping to conclusions for years, maybe decades. It’s had a lot of practice at getting it wrong. Give yourself time to get good at catching it.
Start small. Next time you feel that surge of anxiety after an interaction, pause. Ask yourself: am I mind reading right now? If the answer is yes, you’ve just caught yourself jumping to conclusions. That’s progress.
Next time you predict failure, pause. Ask yourself: am I fortune telling? If the answer is yes, you’ve done it again.
Keep catching yourself. Keep questioning. Keep testing your conclusions against reality. Eventually, your brain will start to catch itself before you even have to think about it. The pattern will form and you’ll interrupt it automatically.
But none of this happens if you don’t start paying attention to the conclusions you’re drawing. Your self-talk is full of them. Listen for the mind reading. Listen for the fortune telling. They’re there. You just haven’t been looking for them.
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.
- Bandler, R. & Grinder, J. (1979). Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Press.
- Borkovec, T.D., & Inz, J. (1990). The nature of worry in generalised anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28(2), 153-158.