The Thoughts We Mistake for Reality [2 of 7]

How meditation changes our relationship to thoughts, memories, and mental chatter.

“I would like a cookie.”

This wasn’t just a random thought; it was an Earth-shattering insight. A simple but important truth delivered from the universe to me, sitting quietly on a meditation cushion in my hut.

It had been at least three weeks since I’d spoken to anyone, and hours of daily meditation had settled my mind enough that I’d become aware of much of the goings-on in there. It wasn’t always pretty, but I was only halfway through the retreat, so it was getting easier to disentangle from unhelpful and irrelevant thoughts. And it was clear that this thought was an important one.

Before ending a meditation session, whether it’s at the sound of a bell or due to an important interruption like this one, it’s best to make sure everything’s going well. “Set everything in place before you stand up” is the sort of advice I give when teaching. So, I relaxed the tension building in my shoulder, released all control of my breath and reset my attention.

And then I laughed.

Partly at the sudden and complete lack of desire for a cookie, but mostly at the potential of such an unremarkable thought to derail something as important as a meditation session. After all, I’d organised a two-month break and flown halfway round the world for no reason other than to meditate, but for a brief moment, I let a cookie take control. And not even a real one, just an imaginary one that existed only in my mind.

If you’ve ever done some meditation, it’s likely you’ll have had the experience of a random thought, memory, or image float through the mind without affecting you. You’re aware of it, but it just shows up and then goes away without a ripple.

Other times, this mental activity will show up full-force, and you’ll relive an event of the past, or start to live out a fantasy that’s never happened. Absorbed to the degree that you’re no longer fully aware of the meditation session you’d sat down to do.

You may even have noticed that the same thought or memory can have a different impact at different times. The thought of a cookie might drift through your mind with no more effect than a butterfly in your neighbour’s garden at one time, and another it tasks you with the most important seek-and-destroy mission in history.

Why this happens is no mystery.

Imagine a retreat centre in Tuscany with a small café serving delicious baked goods.

Sitting alone in a small retreat hut nearby, it’s possible to develop a mental image or thought about the biscotti. This could be intentional or not, but the important part is this: it’s a mental representation of the biscotti, not the actual biscotti. The actual baked goods are in a café a few hundred metres away. Nonetheless, the mental representation of biscotti can still make your mouth water and cause you to act as if it’s right there in the hut with you.

The reason for this is simple: you are treating the thought or image as the actual biscotti. In technical terms, we call this treating the representation (thought or image) as the referent (the actual biscotti), and it applies to all mental activity. A mental image of a loved one in another city might make you smile as if they were there with you. Something that is not your loved one will spark an emotional reaction as if they were there.

The meditation session that had almost been derailed by cookies was slightly different. It wasn’t that I was treating mental images of cookies as cookies, but that I was treating a random, unbidden thought as a fact. The thought “I would like a cookie” can drift through the mind with no effect if I treat it as just the random thought that it is. But once I treat it as a fact, it solidifies into a very real desire for a cookie. And this can drive behaviours.

The mechanism extends to memories, which are mental representations of past events. I can feel the crowded excitement of walking into Madison Square Garden to watch an ice hockey game fifteen years ago, and the disappointment of my Toronto Maple Leafs’ 7-2 loss. Even though the memory is not the event.

The emotion isn’t sparked by the content of the memory. It’s not just remembering the crowd, the noise, the iconic location, or even crunching through the snow between the subway stop and the Gardens. It’s about treating the memory as if it were the event.

Or more accurately, mistaking the representation for the thing itself.

It’s a concept that gets a lot of attention in Buddhism and is becoming increasingly common in modern psychological research, where it’s known as reification. The solidifying of thoughts, feelings and perceptions as accurate depictions of reality, rather than mental processes. It’s a mechanism we don’t even know is running, and it’s hard to fully appreciate how pervasive it is in our lives. It’s driving daily decisions and interactions, and even our broader values and worldview.

In the last post, I mentioned that flow states have been shown to reduce the rigidity and uncontrollability of trauma responses. Treatments such as music and surf therapy have had a genuinely positive impact for people with past trauma.

But we can go deeper.

Flow states break up our rigidity, but don’t produce a lasting change in how we relate to our own minds. For all the benefits I found in music, surfing, and mountain biking, it wasn’t until I got serious about meditation that I saw how deeply we can change our patterns and reactivity.
It wasn’t till I studied Buddhism in depth that I understood why.
And it wasn’t till my PhD that I could see the pervasive relevance of reification in modern mental health conversations.

A paper I relied on heavily in my thesis posited this mechanism as one of the three fundamental outcomes of all mindfulness practices¹, only they frame it in the reverse: dereification. So the power of a random thought, “I would like a cookie”, to derail a meditation session depends on how much I reify it.

The reified thought of a loved one can make me smile.
The reified memory of a hockey game can get me excited (and make me wince).
The reified thought I’d like a cookie can get me up off the cushion and out the door.

And we can go into less comfortable territory.

The unreified memory of an argument can’t harm me.
The unreified thought to procrastinate won’t interfere with my work.
The unreified thoughts of a public talk or difficult conversation won’t spark worry or anxiety.

And this scales up. The same principle that applies to a cookie also applies to trauma — to the memories and responses that cause the most suffering. At that level, the practice is best approached carefully and with support.

Research has found that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. This means that the thoughts and memories of regular meditators lose their concreteness as meditation experience increases. This can make them less reactive and less susceptible to rumination, worry and other types of thinking that lead to anxiety and depression. Meditation training also makes a subtle but profound shift from the more common “content-oriented cognition” to the less common “process-oriented cognition.” This makes thoughts, memories, and opinions appear more as models and possibilities than as accurate depictions of reality.

And it’s not just loosening the grip of isolated, individual thoughts and memories throughout the day. There are much bigger issues at play.

This dereification of mental activity plays an important role in our worldview. As content-oriented thinking shifts toward a more process-oriented approach, people are more likely to believe they can change their bad habits and to offer help and support to others. It seems this type of thinking gives people more flexibility and nuance in how they see ethical issues, which can lead to a less polarised view of the world².

In my own work, I found that while 8 weeks of mindfulness training didn’t reduce mental chatter, it did “defang” the chatter so that it was no longer related to anxiety, depression, or even the worry and rumination that drive them. In short, as people develop a more process-oriented cognitive style, the chatter bouncing around in their minds becomes less likely to cause mental distress.

If the reification of thoughts, opinions and memories is what gives them power, not their content, yet we naturally tend to live in a reified “content-oriented” world, what does this mean? Where does this leave us as people trying to be happy in an increasingly unpredictable world? The good news is we can train ourselves to stop believing everything we think. In fact, the training has been practiced and refined over thousands of years, and there are different approaches to suit different people.

In the Indo-Tibetan system I’ve trained in and translated to English, there are practices designed to give ourselves mental flexibility and freedom by dereifying all the stuff bouncing around in our minds. It’s like taking a chaotic and poorly organised storeroom, where just the thought of looking for something in there is upsetting, to having a neat, tidy, well organised storeroom where you can find what you need to navigate the 21^st century.

And it’s best if you start small.

I give guided meditations as short as five minutes for two reasons. Partly because we’re all short on time: fitting one or two 5-minute sessions into a day is more achievable than a single longer session. And also, for people under pressure, a ten- or fifteen-minute meditation session can be too long – if it feels like a heavy chore, we won’t develop the consistency we need to achieve the deep, lasting effects we’re looking for.

We need to build momentum over time, because there isn’t a reification “off switch” that we’ll find in a flash of insight. It sits on a continuum, somewhere on a scale of 0-100. If we develop our mindfulness skills just a little, we’ll start to experience the world less as a fixed place with problems to overcome, and more as an ever-changing context that we can adapt to.

We’ll gain the flexibility to change our reactions, to flip the script on unhealthy responses and to act from a clearer sense of what matters.

And you can start with this five-minute guided session right now.

Dereification isn’t a concept to understand — it’s a skill to train. Ground State is where I teach it directly, using the same framework my PhD research was built around: practices drawn from Tibetan Buddhist training and tested against modern psychological science.

If this post made the mechanism click, Ground State is where you put it to work. This is where the practice begins, and there’s a community exploring it with you.

1. Lutz, A., Jha, A. P., Dunne, J. D., & Saron, C. D. (2015). Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective. American Psychologist, 70(7), 632. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0039585

2. Poletti, S., Bauer, P., & Lutz, A. (2024). Worldviews from within: a qualitative investigation of metaphysical and ethical beliefs among European long-term Buddhist practitioners and novice mindfulness practitioners. Mindfulness, 15(10), 2647-2667. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02448-w