CHART OF THE DAY: The Wise Mind

08/30/22 08:45AM EDT

Below is a chart from today's Early Look written by Hedgeye U.S. Macro Analyst Christian Drake.  

Wise Mind is a core Mindfulness skill in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. It’s a kind of cognitive therapeutic that aspires to a state of mind whereby reason and emotion are balanced such that one can effectively navigate and communicate during emotional crisis periods.

The Wise Mind represent the overlap in the Venn diagram between Emotional Mind and Reasonable Mind and serves as the bridge between states.

Practically, attempting to engage with someone in emotional mind from a reasonable/logic mind perspective is terminally flawed.    

Such an approach faces a fundamental incompatibility as acute emotional distress fully occludes executive functioning leaving the (emotional) person incapable of processing or internalizing your rational overtures, however ‘correct’ or well intentioned.  They literally cannot hear you.   

Similarly, engaging with an emotional mind to someone who is also in emotional mind produces a kind of constructive interference that generally only serves to amplify the emotional state of both individuals.    

The therapeutic goal, distilled, is to progressively build a new default reflex to emotional stress. That objective can be sufficiently simplified to “Go Opposite”

All emotions activate us to respond and the type of activation has evolved as a biological heuristic. Go Opposite builds the capacity to respond opposite from what our biological response would activate us to do.

Go opposite is a type of dialectical therapeutic primitive.  A base-layer conceptual anchor that can be built upon with supporting strategies that all tether back to and serve that simple fundamental objective.   

CHART OF THE DAY: The Wise Mind - CoD1 Wise Mind

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