The Art of Critical Thinking: Key Steps to Free the Mind

Critical thinking is essential for freedom of thought and effective reasoning and decision-making. It’s required to attain higher degrees of awareness, truth, and wisdom, helping you spot faulty thinking that could hold you back and sabotage your development and wellbeing. On the collective level, critical thinking is necessary to question the information presented in the media and by other influencers seeking to win our consent. In doing so, it enables you to dismantle the most insidious of propaganda and misinformation and to break through any false consciousness limiting your potential, authenticity, and self-realisation. Finally, critical thinking helps you recognise, honour and protect the enlightened ideas and values that, when embodied, raise your consciousness and uplift our culture and society.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the skilful use of reasoning to make correct judgements and keep the mind free from illusions. It involves such skills as:

• Questioning assumptions, beliefs, statements, and behaviour
• Thinking logically about an argument
• Evaluating reasoning
• Analysing information
• Synthesising information
• Identifying and releasing cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and fallacies

Why is Critical Thinking So Often Missing?

Critical thinking is often lacking because we often fail to be mindful enough to think about our thinking, let alone other people’s thinking. This thinking about our thinking is called metacognition. Egocentricity bias, where we tend to believe we are right all or most of the time, doesn’t motivate us to examine and question our thinking, even if we have convinced ourselves that we are self-critical. Neither does authority bias, where we accept more what we’re told by people in authority than the messages from others or our inner selves. However, we can change all this and enhance our metacognition through the right mindfulness practice.

Critical thinking is more challenging when our attention is held hostage and our overstimulated emotions hold sway, distorting our thinking and reinforcing cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. In an era dominated by media technology, fake news, and propaganda, the relentless bombardment of information and images, coupled with the growing censorship of free speech and free thought, only serves to amplify distortions of thinking, making our critical thinking ever more vital.

Humans are innately social, which can bias us towards conformity and groupthink (conformity bias) if we don’t stimulate the higher faculties of the mind and consistently engage in critical thinking. But, buoyed by critical thinking, we can harness our social nature to build networks of support and community that foster higher values and higher expressions of consciousness that will start to set our collective minds, hearts, and spirits free.

Steps to Free Your Mind with Critical Thinking

1. Develop a mindfulness practice and increase your metacognition

The number one step to free your mind with critical thinking is to take back your attention and redirect it onto your thinking so that you can evaluate your thinking and correct it where it’s faulty. It involves spotting distortions of thinking, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies of reasoning.

To develop this kind of mindfulness practice, begin by becoming aware of your attention and where it’s being unconsciously placed, hijacked, or stolen, and then bring it back under your conscious control. Try anchoring your attention upon your breath and returning it to your breath whenever it wanders. This will naturally place you in a metacognitive state and is a basic mindfulness meditation practice you can repeat regularly to strengthen the control of your attention. It’s like strengthening a muscle after a long period of inactivity. Commit to at least six weeks of this daily practice and it will rewire your brain. Once you’ve developed a strong centre of awareness through this mindfulness practice, you’ll be more in control of your attention and able to direct it more consciously onto your thinking so that you’re less likely to think automatically and be taken over by reactive thoughts and emotions. With your mind under control, you’ll be more able to allow intuition and higher levels of awareness, including spiritual experience, to develop. For more on developing a mindfulness practice, check out my posts 9 Powerful Benefits of Mindfulness and How to Meditate.

2. Spot your cognitive biases and correct them

We all have cognitive biases. They are our tendencies to think automatically in ways that deviate from neutral thought. As they are often unconscious and reactive, they don’t always serve us and can keep us confined to a biased perspective and experience of life. They usually form as a result of social conditioning, limited perspectives and resources, emotional overwhelm, and unresolved experiences. Poor metacognition can distort our personality so much that we may, for example, become a pessimist (pessimism bias) or a people-pleaser (conformity bias) by nature.

Here are some of the most important cognitive biases to be aware of:

• Egocentricity bias: the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s judgements. Until we’re humble and willing enough to question our own thinking and assumptions, and acknowledge the possibility of being wrong, we’ll remain ignorant of our faulty thinking. This bias must be fully addressed to ensure all others can be too.
• Conformity bias: the tendency to think and behave in the ways that other people do, unconsciously adopting their beliefs and behaviour to conform and experience a sense of belonging and connection with them. This bias, along with its minimisation of conflict and difference, can lead to groupthink and self-sacrifice, where the potential for true individuality, alternative perspectives, and freedom of thought and expression is stifled. Until we can think for ourselves as individuals, we cannot hope to be free.
• Authority bias: the tendency to value the opinion of an authority figure more than the opinion of others (or ourselves) and to be more influenced by that opinion as a result. Until we’re willing to question authority (however powerful or popular) and consider all opinions equally for validity, we cannot hope to enrich ourselves with a diversity of information that can be synthesised with the wisdom of the whole.
• Belief bias: the tendency to evaluate the logical strength of an argument based on how believable its conclusion is to us. Until we open our minds and are willing to accept what was previously unacceptable to us, no matter how incredible, we’ll always see information how we want to see it.
• Confirmation bias: the tendency to seek out and favour information that confirms our existing beliefs. Until we’re willing to revise our beliefs and search for truth in everything, we’ll always filter out what we don’t agree with.
• Negativity bias: the tendency to focus more on negative thoughts, information, and events, and to be affected by them more than neutral or positive ones. This bias can disempower us and cause us to fear moving forward. Not surprisingly, it’s a common bias among people experiencing depression, anxiety, and learned helplessness. Until we look for the positive and find balance through it, our light will remain either dimmed or extinguished.
• Optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate positive outcomes. We often see this at the time of voting in elections, when we’re convinced major changes for the good of our nation will occur. They rarely do, and yet we often continue participating in the same ritual each time, thinking once again that the outcome will be what we hope for. This delusory thinking is of course masking what we don’t want to acknowledge. Until we clear our delusions, we’ll continue to live in false hope and be taken advantage of by those who manipulate our gullibility.
• Pessimism bias: the tendency to overestimate negative outcomes. We often see this in depressed people, in people with low self-worth and apathy, and in people who are underachievers in life. Until we look for the genuine positivity and positive potential in life, we’ll continue to wither in the shadows of inattention and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To start debiasing your thinking, adopt a mindful state of non-attachment to your thought processes, where you can witness and acknowledge your biases as observer. Choose to perceive things differently, free from distortion, by challenging the perceptions and assumptions underlying the bias and questioning the reasoning. Mindfulness will help you to increase the required emotional regulation for this, and being aware of the cognitive biases in advance will help you to recognise them.

One useful exercise to practise is to think as if everything you’ve ever believed could be wrong. By doing so, you can use critical thinking to challenge everything, including the assumptions that would slip under your radar.

You can also challenge the perception and assumptions of others who have cognitive biases, and question their reasoning. Don’t be afraid to do this verbally with them. If they’re receptive, you can help them to debias, even if it’s just by increasing their awareness of the cognitive biases in question. Of course, you could be biased about their thinking, so always seek the evidence with critical thinking before claiming certainty!

3. Spot cognitive distortions and correct them

Cognitive distortions are basic patterns of distorted thinking, which are often unconscious and present in cognitive biases and logical fallacies. If left unchallenged, they can lead to faulty beliefs, impaired decision-making, and negative emotional states that limit freedom and wellbeing. They are often activated by stress and emotional intensity. Effectively challenging cognitive distortions in our thinking and the thinking of others is a crucial yet underrated life skill. Here are some of the most common cognitive distortions:

• Overgeneralisation: making a general rule based on the experience of one or few instances.
• Filtering or selective thinking: focusing on selected, often negative, information and filtering out the rest that is often positive.
• Jumping to conclusions: reaching conclusions, often negative ones, with little, if any, evidence.
• Magnification: exaggerating the importance of something bad.
• Minimisation: reducing the importance of something good.
• Emotional reasoning: believing something based on the emotions.
• Black-and-white thinking: believing that something can only be one thing or another.

To challenge and clear a cognitive distortion, you first need to adopt a mindful state as observer, placing your attention on your thinking and examining the statements you say or think. Do this whenever you feel limited, stuck, confused, or upset, but also as a regular check-in on your everyday thinking, which you may not always be fully conscious or critical of. Below are some typical statements of everyday, uncritical thinking that contain cognitive distortions:

• I can’t do anything about it!
• Everything is ruined!
• What a disaster this is!

Once you have greater awareness of your thinking, you can then look for the cognitive distortions at work to see how you distort your thinking and how to reverse this. For example, if you diminish the importance of your worthiness with the cognitive distortion of minimisation, you can do the opposite by giving more importance to your worthiness with appreciation and gratitude. You test the validity of the faulty statement by listing the evidence for and against it, and with sufficient diligence, you’ll clear the distortion, open up to a bigger picture, and arrive at a more truthful statement or belief. To achieve a breakthrough in this way, you’ll need to be in a resourceful state, which is more likely when you’re centred with mindfulness.

4. Spot the logical fallacies in reasoning

A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that produces an invalid conclusion, even if it appears to be true or is said to be true—no matter how many times or by how many people, whoever they are. The reasoning (inference) that connects the premise with a conclusion is simply wrong.

There are many fallacies, but here are some of the most important to look for in both your own reasoning and that of others as a critical thinker:

• Faulty generalisation: drawing a general conclusion from only a few instances of something (insufficient evidence).
• Fallacy of exclusion: using information that confirms a position, while ignoring information that contradicts it.
• Argument from incredulity: dismissing something as false simply because it’s not imagined to be true.
• Personal attack: attacking the person making a claim, instead of the claim itself.
• Appeal to authority: a claim is accepted as true because of the authority of the person asserting it, rather than because the reasoning of the claim is correct.
• Appeal to emotion: manipulating the emotions of others to get them to accept a claim, regardless of the validity of the reasoning. Putting others into fear to get them to accept a claim is a common example of this.

To expose logical fallacies, it will help if you understand the structure of a logical argument. It starts with a premise (an initial statement or statements about something) and uses reasoning to infer a conclusion from it. Even if the premise is true, the reasoning that seeks to connect the premise to the conclusion still has to be valid (without fallacy) for the conclusion to follow from the premise. Once you know this, and are aware of the important fallacies listed above, you’ll be able to start validating the reasoning behind the claims you or others are making. Of course, you also need to know that the premise is true, and this should always be questioned before looking at the validity of the reasoning that tries to derive a conclusion from it.

Here is an example of an invalid claim that uses the fallacies of personal attack and appeal to emotion. John is an alternative thinker who is seen by traditional conformist thinkers as extreme. These traditional conformist thinkers, who feel threatened by him, argue that nothing he says is true:

1. We all know John has extreme views (premise is true).
2. He is a complete madman (personal attack) and his extreme views are dangerous (appeal to emotion with fear).
3. Nothing he says is true, and we need to shut him up (conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise).

Do you see how fallacious statements like this can misguide us and keep our minds closed to alternative views if we don’t apply critical thinking? A simple way to challenge the above argument would be to say:

Just because John has extreme views, it doesn’t follow that nothing he says is true and that I shouldn’t listen to him.

A person who doesn’t have confirmation bias or conformity bias (see above), and is willing to listen to alternative views, would have no difficulty listening to John. Do you also see that a logical thinker in pursuit of the truth would challenge the cognitive distortions of jumping to conclusions, emotional reasoning, and black-and-white thinking in the argument above? If you think critically, you’ll spot these in lines 2 and 3.

Cognitive Dissonance Challenges Critical Thinking

The world is a challenging place for information processing. Inevitably, as you use critical thinking, you’ll have to deal with conflicting beliefs or views that raise the stakes in your life. You may not want to believe something is true if doing so would cause you to see something you don’t want to. This dissonance between conflicting and inconsistent beliefs is why some people blindly accept something that can easily be picked apart, by either pretending it’s not there or by trying to justify it with cognitive distortions and logical fallacies.

Any cognitive dissonance offers you an opportunity for massive personal growth in place of neurosis. It’s about maturing, taking responsibility for your growth, and championing the truth in a world that desperately needs it. To achieve this growth, control your mind with a solid mindfulness practice so that the fear or anxiety that comes up doesn’t overpower you or distort your thinking. You are eminently resourceful when centred, and connecting with like-minded people to support you in living your truth and championing the truth in the world is one of the best things you can do.

The Vital Role of the Critical Thinker

Beliefs have power over our thoughts, perception of choices, and behaviour. If our beliefs stem from false ideas, we remain victims unless we apply critical thinking to them and act upon the better judgement it gives us. In today’s information age, where technology can make so many people passive absorbers of information, mass-produced ideas and beliefs threaten the very truth of our world if they aren’t questioned with critical thinking. The process of passively absorbing and acting upon mass-produced ideas without engaging in critical thinking is barely distinguishable from robotic programming.

When large numbers of the public are held in bondage by their conformity bias, standing for and championing critical thinking becomes an act of immeasurable and necessary valour. Championing truth in the face of widespread misinformation or delusion is crucial for preventing substantial and significant harm. The witch trials that occurred between the 15th and 18th centuries, leading to the execution of thousands of innocent people, represent just one of many historical examples of the dangers of misinformation in society. Consider this carefully.

As a critical thinker, you can step up into the role of a leader or advocate for free thinking by mere dint of your ability to expose distortions of thinking and champion the truth. By freeing your mind with critical thinking, you’ll articulate things that others cannot because their thinking remains partly unconscious. This places you in a position to facilitate free thinking for others, showing them alternatives in thinking and living. Critical thinking isn’t just applied to ideas: it’s also applied to behaviour and its outcomes. Seeing the truth and acting upon it completes the circuit of authenticity.

To raise public awareness and elevate the standard of living through the application of critical thinking, we need to network and collaborate with other critical thinkers, particularly if we’re daunted by the scale of distorted thinking and false consciousness in society. It’s crucial for our critical thinking and leadership that we don’t unconsciously engage in cognitive dissonance. Along with a solid mindfulness practice, our support networks will help us prevent this and stay true and authentic. What can you do today to start such a network? Who can you reach out to? What conversations can you start?

Perhaps, with critical thinking, we can all recover a sense that our lives are more meaningful than we thought and that they don’t have to be reactive and robotic. And then, perhaps, we can all commit to creating a more meaningful, free, and authentic life in which we live from our true selves and embody higher consciousness, shining our light.

Next Step: to free yourself from hidden cognitive biases, cognitive distortions, and logical fallacies as part of your self-development, or to learn how to do this for others, empower yourself by booking a Guidance Call with me.