Reading Notes: 3 Counterintuitive Mental Models
Today I’m jotting down three interesting psychology insights. They’re about: how to use identity to rewrite your habits, why we need delayed gratification, and how to protect yourself by shifting your perspective.
An Unconventional Weight Loss Trick: Hack Your Identity
Here’s a counterintuitive weight loss trick: download a filter app that makes you look fat, take a photo of yourself, print it out, and stick it on your fridge.
A lot of people worry this would program their subconscious to “get fat.” The opposite is true. The evolutionary logic of the human brain is to first “flee from negative things,” then “pursue positive things.” When you stick that photo on your fridge, you’re using a visual language that the mammalian brain instantly understands to create cognitive dissonance. No motivational quotes needed—the moment your brain sees it, it fires up and automatically plots a route to escape the current state and move forward.
But the deeper logic is this: identity is the ultimate hack for rapidly rewriting behavior.
Imagine you’re an Olympic athlete with a perfect physique and healthy eating habits. One morning you wake up, look in the mirror, and for some bizarre reason you’ve ballooned to 295 pounds. How fast would you get back in shape?
You’d probably set the world record for weight loss.
Because your identity is incompatible with that bloated body. Your drive is no longer the soft, wishy-washy “I want to be healthy.” It’s “this is not me.” When a state makes you feel “this is not me” or “this goes against who I am,” that identity mismatch becomes the most powerful motivating force there is—for yourself and for influencing others.
Diving Under the Car to Grab the Cat
Say you suddenly develop intense feelings for someone.
Or say you just went through a breakup and you’d do anything to get them back.
This should be a slow process, but we always think some “grand gesture” is the way out. It’s not.
Imagine a scared cat hiding under a car. You want to coax it out. So you decide to lunge under the car and grab it by the tail—if you miss, you’ll never see that cat again.
When we go through a breakup, or when we’re head over heels for someone, we’re doing exactly this—diving under the car and grabbing. We make grand gestures, trying to win the whole thing in one shot.
But what actually works is slowly approaching the car over several days, offering a piece of food or a bowl of water, proving you’re safe. It’s an investment that takes a lot of time and, more importantly, the ability to delay gratification.
And delayed gratification is exactly what we adults are worst at.
The Ultimate Defense: Downgrade Criticism to Information
Treating a comment like “you’re too loud” as nothing more than information rather than criticism is a brilliant strategy for getting past self-defense.
When someone says you’re too loud, if you treat it as criticism, you spiral into an internal debate: “Am I really that loud?” But what the other person is actually expressing is: for their ears, the current volume is uncomfortable.
That’s an indisputable fact about their personal experience, and it has nothing to do with your character. The only thing you need to do is decide what to do with that piece of information.
I even deliberately surround myself with people who are generous enough to offer this kind of information.
It’s like someone telling you there’s something stuck in your nose. You might feel annoyed that it’s there. But compared to looking in the mirror later and discovering it’s been hanging there the whole time, you’d absolutely be more grateful to the person who told you on the spot.
And here’s the beautiful part: whether the person’s comment comes from malice or goodwill, if you only treat it as information instead of criticism, they can’t hurt you, they can’t drain you. Instead, it becomes fuel for your own growth.
Source: THE BIGGEST WEIGHT LOSS HACK? Why Do Big Gestures Fail In Relationships? | Dr Max Butterfield How To Interpret Criticism | Rick Glassman