Leah Benson Therapy

11/14/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

The reason you cannot tickle yourself is because your brain perfectly anticipates the resulting sensation and automatically cancels the sensory feedback.

⏰Why this is important ⏰

Being able to tickle yourself is the sign of a brain that isn’t doing its job right and can hint at serious mental health illness. Don’t ignore it if this is you.

Learn more in this month’s featured blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

https://leahbensontherapy.com/the-secret-architecture-of-your-mind-12-nuggets-for-understanding-why-you-feel-stuck-or-detached/

11/12/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

To interact effectively with the world, your mind must routinely and automatically ignore most of the basic signals coming from your own body. In other words, to be graceful you need to ignore most of your own highly predictable, self-generated inputs so you can focus on external goals.

⏰Why this is important ⏰

The more you can’t ignore yourself, the harder it is to enjoy life and be easygoing. Constant self-scrutiny generated by living on social media ruins this ability.

Learn more in this month’s blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

https://leahbensontherapy.com/the-secret-architecture-of-your-mind-12-nuggets-for-understanding-why-you-feel-stuck-or-detached/

11/11/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

Attention is how your brain decides how much importance to assign to any incoming information from the outside world. Your attention is like a "confidence dial." When you focus on something, you are telling your brain to treat that information as highly trustworthy and important for navigating life.

⏰Why this is important ⏰
Focusing is control; by choosing what to attend to, you are fundamentally shaping what you believe to be true.

Learn more in this month’s blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

https://leahbensontherapy.com/the-secret-architecture-of-your-mind-12-nuggets-for-understanding-why-you-feel-stuck-or-detached/

11/08/2025

🤙

11/07/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

You take actions not just to change the world, but to gather information that confirms that your brain's guesses about the world are correct. That means movement is a form of self-
confirmation.

⏰Why this is important ⏰
Constant movement confirms that your internal map of the world is accurate. This is why people freak out in sensory deprivation tanks and solitary confinement—their brain stops getting evidence that they exist.

Learn more in this month’s blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

https://leahbensontherapy.com/the-secret-architecture-of-your-mind-12-nuggets-for-understanding-why-you-feel-stuck-or-detached/

11/05/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

The feeling you have of being a continuous "self" is actually a story your brain is constantly
building and updating. In other words, you are a hypothesis that the brain maintains to explain
the information coming to it from the other organs and your actions.

⏰Why this is important ⏰
You are always a work in progress, not a fixed identity; your sense of self is a probabilistic best
guess your brain uses for planning, so it can always change.

Learn more in this month’s blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

Linked in Bio under "Featured Post"!

11/04/2025

🧠⚙️ November: A month of Predictive Processing and “The Self”🧠⚙️

Your mind is fundamentally a prediction machine dedicated to avoiding surprises and maximizing the evidence that you exist.

⏰Why this is important ⏰

Because your brain prefers boring certainty over chaotic novelty, which explains why deep
change often feels challenging or threatening.

Learn more in this month’s blog post:

“The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or
Detached”

https://leahbensontherapy.com/the-secret-architecture-of-your-mind-12-nuggets-for-understanding-why-you-feel-stuck-or-detached/

11/03/2025

Hyper-vigilant attention often stems from a feeling of uncertainty about your environment and a belief that you're not in control.

11/02/2025

Night night.

11/02/2025

If I've said it once, I've said it 1000 times - and it turns out, so is its founder, Richard Schwartz. What a surprise. It's everything I keep saying and more. Here's an excerpt:

"On Instagram last month, he announced a new development in the evolution of IFS: Parts are actually 'spirits.' Schwartz knows this, he said, because he personally was 'picked to bring this model' to the world. And these don’t only live in a patient’s inner world but can enter in from the outside. Perhaps they are 'the ancestors,' he said. Or perhaps they are the invention of an ambitious therapist.




https://share.google/1vJwJ1je1ww2nczZk

Internal Family Systems is a widely popular trauma treatment. Some patients say it’s destroyed their lives.

10/31/2025

Happy Halloween, people. 💀👻

10/31/2025

Precision is like the 'volume k**b' of your brain, determining how much attention you pay to your expectations versus new sensory information.