How to Think Better

Master your mind in four (4) learnable steps

The mind generates some 6,200 discrete thoughts per day according to a Canadian study using functional MRI scans. Most of this mental chatter is wrecking your life. Take for example Worry Wart who spends hours lying awake in the early hours worrying about fuel prices. These useless streams of worry loop around generating anxiety, destroying sleep and undermining problem-solving.

What if you could catch unhelpful thoughts, focus on what is important and craft creative solutions for the short and long term instead? You can. Here is how:

1. Catch and stop worry and rumination, get back into the present moment

2. Learn to focus your attention 100% on what matters now

3. Practise zooming in to detail and then cycling back to big-picture awareness

4. Develop the knack of crafting multiple alternative creative thoughts

First, a brief scientific overview. While neurobiologists argue about mind and consciousness, we can agree on four levels of life—biology, neurobiology, cognition and consciousness. For more read Joseph LeDoux, The Four Realms of Existence, 2023. No question, we need functional biology and a working nervous system.

Most cognition—or thinking—is unconscious. LeDoux calls it mentalese. An endless chatter of stories about self and what is around you. This is similar to System 1 thinking (Kahneman). It is biologically cheap—an easily derailed stream of assumptions. Not helpful in the world of work or important relationships.

Mentalese is hazardous under pressure and in uncertain times. This is worry about the future, rumination on the past, and the endless stream of chatter that is embarrassing to witness. Know that person who just cannot stop talking over coffee? Unfortunately, we (or the subject) have little awareness.

Conscious thinking, which happens in the very front of the prefrontal lobes, is expensive but packed with potential. Whilst some believe in determinism (Sapolsky, Determined), others like LeDoux, Damasio and Dennett argue strongly that it is something we can learn to master.

It requires that we learn to pay attention to thoughts, push into the present moment, generate creative options and select the best alternative. Below is a diagram from LeDoux demonstrating these two levels of mind—pre-conscious mentalese and conscious high order thinking.

Ref: diagram of Higher Order Consciousness from LeDoux, The Four Realms of Existence.

We have much to learn. Already, methodologies that apply this concept have proven their power. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is very effective in depression, and a recent study shows a five-fold reduction in depression and post-traumatic stress (Cognitive Resilience Training, Wild et al, JAMA, 2026).

Imagine what we could achieve with a healthy mind in a professional context?

Here are the practical options to access the conscious thinking that drives long term planning, error correction, social signalling and collective problem-solving. In short, a much better, purposeful and successful life—a unified subjective experience.

1. Metacognition (thinking about thinking)

Catch and stop both worry and rumination to get back into the present moment. Metacognition is the ability to pause the mentalese or chatter and step back to think about your thinking. If it is not useful, stop it. At first this seems impossible. Start by distracting yourself—sing your favourite song, go for a walk or talk to someone.

Second, focus on your body and specifically on slowing your breathing. Stay with your breath—six seconds out, four seconds in through the nose. This will bring you into the present moment and the chatter settles down. Relief!

2. Mental focus

Learn to focus your attention on what matters now. Multitasking and distraction rupture our capacity to focus. Choose one thing that matters and give it 100% of your attention for at least 3 minutes. This may be listening, completing a task, performing a challenging exercise, reading a chapter, or simply meditating.

3. Attentional flexibility

Practise zooming in to detail and then cycling back to big-picture awareness. This is a key discipline to advance your leadership, professional career and capacity to execute complex tasks. This one requires a bit of planning and conscious decisions. Start with focusing in on a task to completion. Then, step back and review the situation, your learning, progress and the next priority. Then dive back into the next detailed task.

4. Predictive modelling

Develop the knack of crafting multiple alternative creative thoughts. First, you must define the exact thought that you want to work on. Write it down and evaluate it for accuracy, relevance and value. Then see if you can adjust it. For example: “I always” to “sometimes” or “wow that was not ideal”. In time, “everything bad always happens to me” might be “like many, sometimes I make an error in this specific task”. Your happiness has already improved.

The second step is to generate multiple different explanations and solutions. Mentalese loves to catastrophise (this is an absolute disaster). Actually, this could be an opportunity. Looks like there are five ways we can take advantage of this.

How does this look in practice? Jenny wakes up worrying about a comment in a client meeting yesterday. Catching the worry (metacognition), she slowly exhales, focuses on a smooth 10 second breath cycle (in the present moment) and falls asleep knowing that that dream sleep will help solve the problem.

Waking fresh, she plans a review meeting (focus) with the team and switches to her priorities with full attention (flexibility). The team review the meeting fully engaged and identify some issues. They come up with solutions and Jenny presses them to seek ways to capitalise on the situation (predictive modelling). They leave focused on innovative ways to build this client relationship and feeling good about their own team.

Oh, and never worry alone.