2020 on the Two Minds Blog

As I feel a wave of relief that 2020 is finally over, I wanted to take a look back and a look ahead at the status of this blog. This year I wrote 27 posts for the Two Minds Blog, and there were 477 unique readers (many who came back repeatedly). That's up from 350 readers in the blog's first year; if you like what I've been writing here, please tell your friends and help readership continue to grow.

Last January I had promised to write on the following topics: more on mindfulness, more case studies about the "two minds of ..." individual people, more links between Two Minds Theory and other psychological theories, more on intervention strategies, and more clinical applications. We had many of those things, but also quite a few digressions on topics inspired by the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, some of the most popular posts were coronavirus-related, including one with initial thoughts on how to cope with COVID-related distress, one on how the difference between risk and uncertainty made it hard to know whether to open schools, and one about why some people still don't wear masks for COVID-19 prevention. I also wrote a popular post about how scientists use their two minds to get closer to the truth, which was written back in February but turned out to be very relevant year-round: Perhaps more than ever before, non-scientists were trying to make everyday decisions based on emerging science throughout 2020. Hopefully next year the pandemic will less often be a source of inspiration! 

In 2021, I anticipate writing about ...

• More specific clinical populations and applications, similar to this year's popular post on the two minds of adolescents, and one in April on how the Intuitive mind hijacks the brain in cases of opioid addiction. Next year I anticipate writing more about HIV research, which has occasionally featured in this space via articles on behavior change and fatigue research. In 2021 I will be part of a study using TMT-based tailored text messages to promote exercise for people living with HIV, and I expect to highlight some early work from that study in the next few months. My and colleagues' HIV research was recently featured in the CU Nursing alumni newsletter, including work by my PhD student Lucy Graham and the new HEALTH exercise study with colleagues Kathy Jankowski and Kristine Erlandson.

• More case studies that explore people's two-minds experiences. My 2020 blog posts in this genre included a piece about Dr. Vic Strecher's experience finding meaning in life after his daughter's death through both narrative and intuitive means, a post about the “out-of-time” experience that many of us had because of pandemic-related disruptions in our Intuitive-level timekeeping mechanisms, and a post on my own experience of conflict between the Narrative and Intuitive systems after a head injury damaged my sense of balance. I plan to continue writing about interesting two-minds case studies as these might come my way.

• More on theories and behavior change methods, such as two articles this year that applied the two-minds elements of Dr, Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory to COVID-19 related public health decisions, and to the political aftermath of the 2020 election. This year I also looked at Naturalistic Decision Making theory, which emphasizes the use of Intuitive-level strategies to achieve better results under conditions of uncertainty. I revisited the theories of Sigmund Freud to see whether psychoanalytic ideas might be interpretable through a Two Minds lens. And I took a deep dive into neuroscience with a post on historical patient Phineas Gage and how more recent research contradicts the notion of "executive control" that Gage's case was supposed to exemplify. The topic of interventions was relatively neglected, but in early 2021 I have a couple of pieces ready that identify Two Minds interventions in different schools of psychotherapy.  I also wrote less this year on mindfulness than I had expected to, perhaps because the constant pandemic-related stressors made it harder to be mindful! I plan to return to that topic in 2021.

• More on sensors and other measures to capture the workings of the Intuitive mind. In 2020 I wrote about using FitBits to predict fatigue, measuring people’s experiences in the moment using smartphone surveys, understanding the meaning of heart rate variability data, and the effects of sleep which is an Intuitive-level influence that’s measurable using the microphones on most people’s phones (try the free Sleep Cycle app, or the sleep-tracking function on Apple Health). In the coming year I expect to finish another paper on predictors of exercise using FitBit data, will hopefully have something new on heart rate variability as a predictor of treatment adherence, and might be able to share early findings from some new research using brainwaves. As technology continues to progress, we will gain even more windows into the Intuitive mind.

• More on everyday experiences and phenomena, an unplanned focus area this year that generated some interesting pieces: a post about the experience of learning another language, one about near-death experiences, and one about the challenge of making yourself do things you don't want to do such as exercise. This month I wrote about why it's hard to suppress unwanted thoughts. These kinds of phenomenological pieces are fun to write, and it's interesting to explore how Two Minds Theory can help us understand diverse aspects of human experience, so you will probably see more of them next year as well.

I have now been writing this blog for about 2 years, and sometimes I'm asked whether I do it for my job. The answer is yes and no: Blogging doesn't get you a lot of credit in academia, where "publish or perish" still means mainly peer-reviewed papers. So in that sense the blog takes time away from my day job for no immediate reward. But this type of writing is also a way to deepen and expand on ideas that I do use in my own research, and it has generated a lot of interesting dialogue. The more I write, the better I understand the ideas of Two Minds Theory and the better I am able to apply them in my work. So as long as people are still reading in 2021, I'll still be writing; I'm looking forward to more discoveries ahead!