"Your mind can be a prison... or it can be the key. (Sound of a key turning in a lock). This is Mind the Truth: Psychology for Recovery. We break down the science of healing into truths you can use. No judgment, just understanding. Find us and subscribe."

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. In early recovery, a little bit of success can lead to a dangerous overconfidence, causing us to neglect our routines, skip meetings, or put ourselves in risky situations. This episode is a compassionate exploration of humility, teaching you how to maintain a "beginner's mind" and respect the lifelong nature of the recovery journey, ensuring that confidence doesn't turn into complacency.

An availability cascade is when a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse. This happens inside our own heads, too. One thought of relapse, repeated over and over, can turn into a perceived certainty. This episode teaches you how to interrupt this internal echo chamber, fact-checking your own catastrophic thoughts and grounding yourself in the reality of the present moment.

Our emotions have a huge impact on our judgment. The affect heuristic is our mental shortcut of making decisions based on our immediate emotional response, rather than objective analysis. A feeling of boredom can make the "fact" of relapse seem less dangerous. A feeling of anger can make a destructive choice feel justified. This episode teaches you emotional literacy and mindfulness, creating a crucial pause between feeling and action so your logic can catch up.

After a setback, it’s easy to fall into the hindsight bias, telling ourselves "I knew this would happen." This isn't just unhelpful; it's a cognitive distortion that reinforces feelings of hopelessness. We'll explore why our brains create this false sense of predictability and how to counteract it. You'll learn to analyze setbacks with genuine curiosity, extracting valuable lessons for the future instead of using them to confirm a negative story about your past.

William James described consciousness not as a series of static thoughts, but as a flowing "stream." For those of us with busy minds, this stream can feel like a raging river of anxieties and cravings. This episode explores James's foundational concept, teaching you the art of becoming an observer of your own thoughts. You’ll learn mindfulness techniques to sit on the riverbank and watch your thoughts float by, without having to jump in and be swept away by them.

The fear that something is about to be gone forever makes us want it more. This scarcity principle is a powerful trigger, creating intense FOMO and convincing you that you’re missing out on the "fun" of your old life. We'll break down this cognitive bias and show you how to reframe your thinking from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance, focusing on what you are gaining in recovery, not what you are leaving behind.

One of the most powerful psychological forces is reciprocity—the obligation to give back what you have received. This can be a trap in recovery, where old friends might use past favors as leverage to pull you back into unhealthy situations. Drawing on Cialdini’s Influence, this episode teaches you how to recognize and navigate the reciprocity trap, allowing you to be a generous person without compromising your well-being.