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A Psychiatrist’s Three-Step Test for Self-Deception

Woman looking into mirror.
Can you trust what you see?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Some time after the publication of Hide and Seek, I received a letter from a reader, asking:

Are common, ordinary things like seeing the bright side, a silver lining, or an opportunity in misfortune just feeble rationalisations to help us live in a comfortable illusion? Your example about ‘sweet lemons’, a rejected love interest explained away as a blessing in disguise doesn’t feel to me as an illusory or self-deceptive belief. If a cancer patient is glad that they can respect life more fully after getting sick, surely they’re not just dwelling in self-deception and rationalising away things, clinging to some mistaken belief.

Could you clear things up a little about the murky world of self-deception? It’s true that someone rejected for a job opening might say that they’re ‘keeping doors open’, that they got ‘life experience’ or that setbacks are a part of life, and this would allow them to feel better, but I’ve never considered this to be some sort of self-deception.

I replied: 

That’s a very good question. How do we know when we’re deceiving ourselves, rather than learning or growing from our experiences, or just making the best out of a bad situation? By its very nature, self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth, or the external, objective truth.

That a belief comforts us does not make it false; that it pains us does not make it true. What matters is whether we arrived at the belief because it fits the facts, or because we need the facts to fit the belief.

To establish the direction of fit between your beliefs and the world, here are three tests you can apply.

1. Feel It

First, trust your intuition, and ask yourself: ‘What does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting?’ Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Am I taking the welfare of others into consideration, or is it just all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or am I left feeling small, anxious, and a little ashamed?

2. Test It

Try to falsify the belief—that is, to prove yourself wrong. Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme and can often be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the belief or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Ask others for their opinion. If they challenge or disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The nature of your reaction and its congruity can speak volumes about the character of your motives.

3. Project It

Finally, project the belief into the future and consider where it is likely to lead. Truth is constructive and adaptive, whereas lies are destructive or self-defeating. So how useful is the thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear to get by, or creating a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line?

Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.

Woman looking at herself in a mirror

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.

‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.

What Emotions and Feelings Are Not

Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.

Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.

Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.

Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.

The Example of Pride

If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.

Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person. 

Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.

It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.

That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.

So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?

Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling. 

An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.

Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.

In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.

Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.

This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.

Now Let’s Start Talking

Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.

For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.

If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.

Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.

Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.

Emotions as Ways of Seeing

Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.

The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Synonyms, or Opposites?

Socrates at his trial
Socrates: humble, but not always modest.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If you are brilliant and know that you are brilliant, is it arrogant to say so? And if you pretend that you are not, is that humility—or merely modesty?

‘Modesty’ and ‘humility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are actually very different concepts.

‘Modesty’ derives from the Latin modus, ‘measure’ or ‘manner’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Uriah Heep is characterised by his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in an attempt to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and moral. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

Indeed, modesty can sometimes be a subtle form of vanity or advantage-seeking. By conspicuously understating some trait or achievement, we may be inviting others to contradict and praise us, or to like us better. The ego has not disappeared; it has merely become more cunning.

‘Humility’, like ‘humiliation’, derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Unlike mere modesty, true humility derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a spore on a crumb of cheese.

Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself superior or inferior to another, nor does it concern itself with what other specks of dust might or might not think.

Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself.

In sum, to be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or small, and attack us in turn.

Because genuinely humble people often have a great deal to be modest about, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty, or simply give up the game.

Humble people do not, as is often thought, have a low opinion of themselves. Instead, they have an accurate opinion of themselves, and, probably, of us as well. They neither elevate nor diminish themselves, but seek to see themselves and everything else for what they truly are. Erasmus (d. 1536) could not have put it more pithily when he said, ‘Humility is truth.’

If humility is truth, modesty is often a lie—so that the two can sometimes come into conflict. Modesty may require us to gloss over the truth to spare the feelings of others; humility, on the other hand, may demand that we speak the truth. Whereas Uriah Heep was modest without being humble, Socrates was humble without always being modest.

The Case of Socrates

In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was indicted for impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’.

At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates addressed the jurors, saying:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chaerephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the priestess of Apollo replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ 

Was Socrates lacking in humility before the jurors? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he deliberately put on a brazen display because he wanted to die, because he understood that by dying a martyr his teachings would be preserved for posterity.

Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant.

The more arrogant someone is, the more modesty they require from others.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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If Not Physical Fitness, What Was Yoga Originally For?

Indian yogi in meditation
The original purpose of yoga was not to strengthen the body, but to free the mind.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Millions of people practise yoga for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. These are genuine benefits. But they were never yoga’s original purpose.

The first yogis were not searching for physical fitness. They were searching for freedom.

More than two thousand years ago, Indian philosophers concluded that the root of human suffering lies not in the body but in the mind—or, more precisely, in our mistaken understanding of who we are. Yoga emerged as a practical method for overcoming that mistake.

The First Meaning of Yoga

One of the earliest surviving discussions of yoga appears in the Katha Upanishad, composed around the fourth century BCE. There, the brahmin boy Nachiketa rejects wealth, power, and a long life to ask Yama, the god of death, a single question: What becomes of us after death?

Yama replies that this knowledge cannot be gained through study alone, but only through yoga, which he defines as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’:

When the five organs of perception become still, together with the mind, and the intellect ceases to be active: that is called the highest state.

From the beginning, then, yoga was not a form of exercise but a discipline of inner stillness.

Why We Suffer

Classical yoga rests on Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy. It seeks to explain both the nature of reality and the origins of human suffering.

According to Samkhya, reality consists of two fundamental principles. The first is Purusha, pure consciousness or the witnessing self. The second is Prakriti, which includes not only the physical world but also the body, the senses, the ego, and even the mind itself.

An ancient Indian image captures the idea beautifully. Two birds perch in the same tree. One pecks eagerly at the fruit, tasting now sweetness, now bitterness. The other simply watches. The first bird represents the self absorbed in the changing experiences of life; the second, the silent witness that remains untouched by them.

Yoga teaches that we mistake ourselves for the first bird when our true nature is the second. We identify with our thoughts, emotions, and fears, forgetting that these are passing experiences rather than our deepest identity.

Yoga Beyond Meditation

Composed in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, the Bhagavad Gita broadened the meaning of yoga. Alongside meditation, it described the yoga of knowledge (Jnana Yoga), selfless action (Karma Yoga), and loving devotion (Bhakti Yoga).

Its central message is that freedom comes not from withdrawing from life but from living without attachment to success or failure. Like Stoicism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that peace of mind depends less on what happens to us than on how we meet it.

As the god Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna:

Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom.

Yoga was no longer confined to the forest or meditation hall. Everyday life itself could become a spiritual practice.

Patanjali’s Yoga

The philosopher Patanjali transformed these ideas into a practical discipline in the Yoga Sutra, the foundational text of classical yoga. He famously defined yoga as:

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

To achieve this, Patanjali described an eightfold path combining ethics, posture, breath control, concentration, and meditation, culminating in samadhi, complete absorption. Significantly, the physical postures (asanas) formed only one stage of this much larger discipline.

How Yoga Became Exercise

If yoga began as a path to liberation, how did it become associated with stretching and physical fitness?

The answer lies in its long evolution. Later traditions, especially Hatha Yoga, placed increasing emphasis on physical postures, though still in pursuit of spiritual liberation.

The decisive shift came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Indian teachers such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya presented yoga in dialogue with Western physical culture and modern medicine. Their students—including B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois—introduced these new forms of postural yoga to Europe and America, where they proved enormously popular.

Modern yoga is therefore not a misunderstanding of the tradition so much as one particular branch of it. While its philosophical roots remain ancient, its familiar image as a form of exercise is surprisingly modern.

The yoga practised by millions today is therefore only one chapter in a much older story.

The Original Purpose of Yoga

Millions of people come to yoga hoping for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. The first yogis hoped for something altogether more ambitious: freedom from suffering through a deeper understanding of the self.

Whether or not we accept their answers, the first yogis were asking one of humanity’s oldest and most profound questions:

Who am I?

For them, the search for that answer was the true purpose of yoga.

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To learn more about yoga and the world that it unfolded from, see my book Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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Why Are People No Wiser Than Before?

The priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (Oracle of Delphi)
 
The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.

Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.

They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.

They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.

Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.

The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.

This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.

Cognitive biases explain how our thinking goes astray. Self-deception explains why.

To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.

More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.

For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.

Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.

Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Know thyself.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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