IV: Core Psychological Algorithms

Welcome to the unofficial, irreverent user manual for your mind — written by someone who knows that your brain is less like a wise old wizard and more like a caffeinated squirrel with a label maker and a lot of unresolved issues.

Your brain isn’t just one thing. It has several modes — psychological operating systems that work together (and sometimes against each other) to create the person who screams in traffic, cries at dog commercials, and inexplicably procrastinates starting a paper they had three months to write, until three hours before the deadline.

We’ll start with Modes I–III — your foundational automated systems. These are the default settings. The survival software. The factory-installed operating modes. The next two — subconscious drama and your quest for meaning — will get their own deep dive later. But first, let’s tour your mind’s control panel.

Behavioral Algorithms (Mode I): The Reflex Machine

(Or: Why You Still Flinch When Someone Says “We Need to Talk”)

Picture your brain as a high-rise. Behavioral Algorithms (what I will refer to as Mode I for simplicity) rest in the basement — dark, damp, full of wires, and run by a lizard wearing a hard hat named Reflex.

This is the oldest part of your brain. It doesn’t think. It just reacts. Reflexes are our evolutionary cheat codes. They’re fast, efficient, and mostly silent. Touch a hot stove? Jerk back. Hear a tone of voice that reminds you of a middle school breakup? Emotional panic.

Some of these reactions are found in newborns. Others are wired by our experiences through classical and operant conditioning.

Ivan Pavlov accidentally stumbled upon the idea that dogs (and people) can learn to associate two unrelated stimuli. Ring a bell, serve food, repeat. Eventually, the bell alone causes drool, ie. classical conditioning.

B.F. Skinner took it further. He taught pigeons to play ping pong. His trick? Operant Conditioning. Reinforce a behavior and it gets repeated. Punish it, and it fades. Basically, behavior is a slot machine. If the reward is juicy enough, you’ll keep pulling the lever.

 How Behavioral Therapy Hacks This Mode

Behavioral therapy works like code refactoring for your nervous system. It identifies the bug in your behavioral loop—maybe biting your nails or avoiding social situations—and rewrites the script.

It’s not about feelings. It’s about function. If you’ve got a habit, you can debug it.

3-Step Toolkit:

1. Identify the loop

   Ask: What’s the cue? What do I do? What’s the payoff?

   Example: Feeling stressed → Biting nails → Feel calmer (briefly).

   
   

2. Replace the behavior

   Find something incompatible with the old habit.

   Try: Fidget toys, gum, deep breathing — anything that physically blocks the bad loop.

   
   

3. Reinforce it like you're training a puppy

   Track your wins. Consistently and immediately reward even small progress with a treat that you actually want. Habit apps help.

   
   

Best For:

• Phobias

• Obsessive or compulsive habits

• Smoking, nail-biting, doomscrolling

• Kids and teens (whose emotional vocabulary is often limited to “hungry” and “ugh”)

Emotion Algorithms (Mode II): The Emotion Engine

(Or: Why a Side-Eye Can Ruin Your Whole Week)

If Mode I is the basement, Mode II is the mood lighting and dramatic soundtrack. It is your limbic system, emotional reflexes that evolved to keep you alive — it just hasn’t updated since the saber-toothed tiger era, but it is lightning fast. It doesn’t wait for rational debate. It hits the panic button and floods your bloodstream with cortisol. This is why you can go from chill to nuclear in 0.3 seconds because your partner used that tone again. Or why you shut down emotionally every time someone raises their voice, even if they’re just excited about a football game.

And then — once the storm has passed — your conscious brain wanders in like a confused intern trying to piece together what just happened: “Okay, okay… obviously I yelled because I care deeply about dish hygiene... Right?”

These emotional reactions are wired from birth, shaped by trauma, and reinforced through repetition. They’re the reason your heart races at a tone of voice or your stomach drops when a text starts with “We need to talk…”

DBT: Emotional Jiu-Jitsu

Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is what you get when you blend behavioral science, Buddhist mindfulness, and sheer emotional grit. Developed by Marsha Linehan (who, fun fact, turned her own pain into a playbook), DBT helps you regulate your emotional chaos without pretending you don’t feel things.

Emotional Reflexes:

• You feel before you think.

• Emotions override logic.

• Your brain confuses “minor social discomfort” with “life-threatening exile from the tribe.”

  
  

How to Actually Use DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy)

DBT is like Jedi school for your emotions. Equal parts mindfulness, communication coaching, and emergency emotional CPR.

The Four DBT Superpowers:

1. Mindfulness:

   Goal: Notice the feeling without becoming it. How:

   • Label emotions like “anxious,” “disappointed,” or “tired,” not “everything is awful.

   • Use the “WHAT” skills: Observe, Describe, Participate.

   • Try 5-sense grounding: What are 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, etc.

     
     

2. Emotion Regulation

   Goal: Understand what triggered the emotion and what it’s telling you. How:

   • Keep an emotion diary. Tip: HALT — Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired? Start there.

   • Ask: Is this feeling based on facts or assumptions?

   • Practice opposite action (e.g., feeling hopeless → take one action anyway).

     
     

3. Interpersonal Effectiveness

   Goal: Get what you want without burning bridges. How:

   • Google the DEAR MAN technique: Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce, Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate.

   • Practice boundary-setting scripts: “I can’t make it tonight, but I’d love to reschedule.”

   
   

4. Distress Tolerance

   Goal: When it’s all too much, don’t spiral. Survive first, process later. How:

   • Try ice water on your face, paced breathing, urge surfing, or another distraction techniques (TIPP skills) such as holding a frozen orange or focusing fully on the sound of a ticking clock — seriously, it grounds you.

   • Build a crisis survival kit: playlist, textures, scents, affirmations.

     
     

Best For:

• Intense emotions

• Relationship drama

• Trauma survivors

• Anyone whose default setting is “Feel everything now. Regret it later.”

  
  

This is the emergency brake your emotional brain never got. It won’t stop feelings — it just keeps them from driving the bus..

Cognitive Algorithms (Mode III):

Automatic Negative Thoughts & Beliefs

(Or: How to Argue With Your Inner Drama Queen)

Mode III is the penthouse office of your mind. Here lives your Inner Narrator — the one writing your life story in real time, often with the subtlety of a reality TV editor.

CBT assumes your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are tangled in a loop (as illustrated above) — thoughts shape emotions, which shape behaviors, which reinforce the original thought.

It’s where overthinking lives, and your brain tells you elaborate fables like “They hate you because they didn’t use an emoji.”

How to Actually Use CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)

Your thoughts feel true — but often, they’re just rehearsed. CBT is like hiring an internal investigative journalist to fact-check your brain.

3-Step Mental Reboot:

1. Catch the ANT (Automatic Negative Thought):

Example: “If I mess up this report, I’ll get fired.”

• Write down what triggered the feeling.

• Ask: What thought went through my mind?

2. Challenge It Like a Lawyer:

What’s the actual evidence?

Is this always true? Can you think of any alternative plausible explanations?

What would you say to a friend thinking this?

3. Replace It with a Better Thought

Something more realistic— just useful reframing.

Reframe: from “I’m a failure” → “I had a rough day”or

“I’ve made mistakes before and fixed them. I can handle this too.”

Use “yes, and…” instead of catastrophizing.

Ex: “Yes, I made a mistake, and I’m learning from it.”

4. Behavioral Experiments:

Test the thought.

Prove your inner critic wrong by doing the thing and observing the results.

5. Thought Logs & Journals:

Write it out. Pattern recognition is easier on paper than in your head.

Best For:

• Anxiety spirals and Social phobias

• Depression loops and Catastrophic thinking

• Self-criticism and Perfectionism

  
  

CBT is cognitive aikido. It takes your mind’s momentum and redirects it. Over time, your brain starts auto-correcting like a smarter Google Doc.

In the next Chapters: What Lies Beneath? What’s Beyond?

Let’s just say: if the above are your brain’s survival software, what about the stuff below and beyond all that? Those will take another section, but here is what lays ahead.

Subconscious Modifiers: The Invisible Strategist

This is the internal script you didn’t write. It’s full of defense mechanisms, inherited beliefs, self-deceptions, and stuff Freud would love. You’ll meet your projections, avoidance patterns, and the subconscious algorithmic modifiers guiding your decisions without you realizing it.

Maslowian Needs and the Actualization Algorithm: The Meaning-Maker

Once survival is handled, your brain starts seeking higher needs, tribal needs, for love, belonging, esteem. For tens of thousands of years, exile from our tribe often meant death, a more prolonged and ultimately more painful death than the rapid release that being devoured by a lion provides. These tribal needs at times pit us against ourselves, or draw us to maladaptive behaviors that provide a temporarily release, a distraction, doom scrooling as it were. And only once these tribal needs are met is self actualization possible.

The tribal needs evolved from when we first began to organize into clans, cities and cultures but many of them are learned from our families, our peers and our culture. And the algorithms that we use to meet these needs, these are perhaps the most diverse and maleable of all. Sometimes, the path they take us down can be a dark one. As subsequent chapters illuminate, maladaptive patterns adopted to temporarily meet these tribal needs can lead even high functioning people to join cults, shoot up schools or assassinate politicians and CEOs. The cultures that are experiencing an increase in these phenomena in recent times point to their failure to lead people onto constructive pathways to meet their tribal needs to belong, and feel relevant.

Only once our needs for love, belonging and esteem are at least partially, constructively met, do we begin asking: “What’s it all for?” This is your self-actualization engine kicking online. Your inner monk, philosopher, or startup founder. This is where you stop playing defense and start building meaning. Where trauma becomes purpose. Where healing becomes art. These are the functions, that once they come online allow us to thrive, both as individuals and as a species. This is where we begin to understand who we really are, what we are here for, and why we should lift up as many people to self actualization as possible.

Too Long, Didn’t Repress: Summary Table

Processes	Description	Therapy	Personal Changes	Social Changes (Future Chapters)
Automatic Behavioral Algorithms	Reflexes, habits, addictions, behavioral loops	Behavioral Therapy	Replace triggers, reinforce new habits, start small	Social Planning, Increasing Access to Mental Health Care, Tuning Welfare Systems to Lead to Lasting Changes
Automatic Emotional Algorithms	Emotions on autoplay	DBT	Use mindfulness, emotion regulation, and crisis skills	Increasing cultural knowledge of effective DBT skills versus counterproductive ones, Expanding Mental Health and Group Therapy
Automatic Cognitive Algorithms	Thought patterns & inner critic, false negative beliefs	CBT	Catch, challenge, and reframe automatic thoughts	Increasing cultural knowledge of automatic negative thoughts beliefs. Expanding Access to Mental Health Care. Social Planning
SubconsciousAlgorithmic Modifiers	Subconscious drives, self deception, defense mechanisms	IFS, Psycho-dynamic	Explore old patterns and integrate shadow parts	Increasing Psychodynamic Training Programs and Expanding Access to Psychotherapy, Revamp fines, jail & other punitive measures.
Conscious Tribal Algorithms	A sense of belonging	Humanistic, Maslowian	Identify unmet needs and maladaptve patterns, set realistic plans to work on these needs, build better narratives, learn to identify and reject judgment, tribal thinking	Automate away processes that frequently contribute to stress (tax preparation, insurance hoops, childcare, bank fines, improve public transport) in order to minimize cognitive waste & friction, Expand Community Centers, Expanding Access to Nature, Improving Culture Cohesion, Identify and address maladaptive paths that lead to school shootings and assassinations.
Self Actualization Algorithms	Purpose & meaning	High Order Existential, Spiritual	Help others meet their needs, Minimize Cognitive Waste and Friction both in others and in yourself	Actively work towards a post-scarcity utopia, experiment with different ways to make the public active stakeholders and beneficiaries of improved efficiencies such as universal basic income, enable centrally planned corporate cities with alternate systems only as long as full transparency and public access is guaranteed

You’re not broken. You’re a brilliantly confusing, upgradeable system. And the best part? These modes aren’t flaws — they’re features. You just need to learn how to navigate them.

So next time you find yourself biting your nails, being overwhelmed by feelings, or your brain says “You’re doomed,” try this instead:

• Pause.

• Ask: “Which algorithm am I employing right now?”

• Use the right tool for the job.

• And if nothing else — pet a dog, eat a snack, and breathe.