Eyeopening Psychology Facts About You, Others and Reality

9 Eyeopening Psychology Facts About You, Others and Reality

Reality is truly stranger than fiction! When you examine our human psyche you start to realize that we are not just influenced by it, but it literally renders the world we live in. It’s like a program, more like an operating system, that is individualized by each user.

However, everyone’s operating system is governed by a couple of rules. Everyone’s psyche has the same underlying mould. This fundamental code renders reality in the same, or very similar manner for everyone in the world.

Here are 9 truly mindboggling psychological facts that will give you a glimpse behind reality!

  

9 Eyeopening Psychology Facts About You, Others and Reality:

1. Everyone in your life is a fragment of your psyche.

The people you meet in your life are living beings, do not get me wrong. However, the people you perceive are projections of your psyche upon these living beings. We all do this!

That’s why we hate, we love and we understand different people.

The monsters we create in our mind are projected upon individuals who fit in our description of these monsters. The people we worship fit into the description of idols we project upon them.

But in reality, they are all just people, with flaws and problems like everyone else.

2. Your mind always looks for reasons to reinforce your beliefs.

Whatever you believe in, no matter how strange it is, your mind will filter out everything else that contradicts this belief and emphasize the couple of reasons of why this belief might be true.

Our mind does this for a biological reason. It’s a way of saving us energy so we can survive.

It defends our established belief structure because, to remove just one belief means that we have to reevaluate all the other, and this takes a lot of energy.

When people are presented evidence that contradicts their core beliefs, they will get an extremely uncomfortable feeling called cognitive dissonance.

Because of this cognitive dissonance, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny everything that doesn’t fit in their core belief. People will get stuck with their false beliefs, defending them and ignoring reality, for the sake of saving energy.

3. The people that you fall in love with represent undiscovered qualities in your personality.

The things you love about the people you are attracted to or in love with, are holes in your personality you try to fill. Those are the things you haven’t yet figured out how to meet in yourself and you are projecting unto them.

You recognize these things in them, these aspects that are asleep in you. You recognize yourself in them, the best version of yourself, and that’s who you fall in love with.

That’s why after a break up, majority of people miss the person they were with their partner much more than they miss their partner. Of course, this does not mean that we don’t ever really love each other. Real love for others is a different kind of love that you keep for them even after a break up.

4. There is not a person in the world that thinks of themselves as evil.

Whatever anyone does, no one wakes up with the thought that they are truly evil. No person can survive, not yet have motivation to do anything, if they think what they are doing is wrong.

People are unable to to act, completely sober, if they are not doing anything right in their own mind.

People are really good at justifying their errors, so they will find a way to rationalize their deeds in some way. They will either put themselves in a victim role, in a superior role of a savior, or being lead by some higher power.

5. At least 1/3 of your memories are false, slightly edited or completely forgotten.

Think about your last meal. Now think about your best friend. Think again about the last meal that you had.

The second time you thought of the last meal you did not thought of the event itself. What you actually thought of was the memory of the last time that you remembered this event.

We do not remember events, we remember thought patterns that we associate with those events. And each time we recall a memory we slightly change the thought pattern.

Memory is a network of brain cells which stretches across different regions of the brain and is constantly being updated. This constant updating is an important function that allows us humans to learn new things and to problem-solve, among other skills.

But as a result, it slightly changes each time you think of it. You maybe dropping in new details, weaving in tidbits you really heard from somebody else, or forging new, and possibly inaccurate or misleading, connections.

6. What you hate about others are your own insecurities that you suppress in your shadow personality.

In Jungian psychology, the ‘shadow’ refers to an unconscious aspect of the character which the conscious ego doesn’t identify in itself, or the entirety of the unconscious.

An example of this is when you see yourself as a disciplined person, your lazy part is being repressed and hiding in the shadow.

This disowned part influences your behavior, and thus, keeps on challenging the disciplined part in you. That’s why we hate someone, because they keep challenging a part of our personality we tried so hard to maintain, even by disowning a part of ourselves.

7. Reality is first rendered by your subconscious mind and then projected upon the world.

There is the outer world, and there is your inner world. Reality is what’s rendered from the stimuli of the outer world by your inner world. That’s the world you live in. Everything you see, hear, touch, smell, taste, is first rendered by your brain and then presented to you. Everything you perceive is filtered.

We all live in a different world because we all have a different filters. Each of our subconscious minds filters out different elements and emphasizes other.

We all have different memories, fears… we all have different moods and interests at a particular moment. All these things paint our reality differently from others.

8. Mood affects what you perceive.

The way you feel determines the details that you will perceive.

For example, if you feel sad you will notice more details that you associate with sadness. If your mood is that it’s just not your day, your mind will perceive details that reinforce this assumption.

When you are in a positive mood you tend to ignore these negative details, even though they are still around you.

9. Your identity is not you.

Who are you?

When someone asks you this question you are probably thinking of the story of yourself you keep telling yourself. This story becomes your identity and you feel repulsion of everything that you do not identify yourself with.

Most people feel extremely negative emotions when they do something that questions their identity. But this story is not you. It’s just a way we can define ourselves. However, our nature and potential is infinite.

Most people do not let good things happen in their life because they do not fit in their story.

You are not the story about yourself, that’s just your identity and an identity can be tweaked.

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References:
– https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pieces-mind/201208/few-the-many-ways-we-distort-reality;
– https://academyofideas.com/2015/12/carl-jung-and-the-shadow-the-hidden-power-of-our-dark-side/;
– https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/02/08/planting-false-memories-fairly-easy-psychologists-find.html;

Source: https://www.lifecoachcode.com/2017/12/23/psychology-facts-about-reality/

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