Two Minds Blog

With Laura McGladrey; adapted from presentations for CU Nursing Doctor of Nursing Practice students and the AACN Business Officers of Nursing Schools (BONUS) annual meeting in April 2022. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Surgeon General's office released a first-ever report on workplace mental health and well-being . But many workplaces feel a long way from mentally healthy right now, as both employees and employers continue to struggle with changes ranging from infectious disease, to equity and inclusion, to remote work. In this blog, we will look at ways in which both employees and employers may be struggling with the lingering effects of trauma, and what kinds of small steps organizational leaders could take to help us all get back on track. Stress and the Intuitive Mind Stress is pernicious. It affects us in ways we might not even recognize, coloring our perceptions and our reactions to events. This is partly because stress tends to push our thinking out of the Na

  Two Minds Theory  (TMT) talks about two different mental systems that all people have, the Intuitive mind and the Narrative mind. These are based in contemporary understandings of neurobiology that were popularized by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, first in his Nobel prize acceptance speech and later in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow . The Narrative mind is logical, sequential, and language-based; it also has some pretty severe limitations on how fast it can work or how many things it can attend to at once. The Narrative mind is also abstract, cold, and disembodied -- these can be good things in some contexts like a legal proceeding , but many people find them alienating in daily life. The Intuitive mind is fast, great at multitasking, often insightful or creative, and expert at tasks that it has performed many times. On the negative side of the ledger, the Intuitive mind is also prone to biases, stereotypes, and dumb mistakes , and because it exists mostly outside of language it