metacognition

The key is to train yourself to experience ordinary reality with less automatic judgment, more curiosity, more wonder, and greater flexibility in how you interpret things.

You don't need to hallucinate to experience something profound. You can change how you pay attention, what you notice, and what meaning you give things.

There's a useful distinction:

Here's how I'd practice it.

A 20-minute daily practice

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1. See familiar things as if for the first time — 5 minutes

Look at a tree, your hand, or a glass of water. Notice colors, shadows, textures, reflections, and movements without immediately naming them.

Ask: What would this look like if I'd never seen it before?

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2. Observe your mind thinking — 5 minutes

Sit comfortably and notice each thought as it appears. Rather than following it, quietly label it memory, planning, judgment, or imagination.

Ask: Can I watch a thought without becoming absorbed in it?

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3. Deliberately change perspectives — 5 minutes

Take something you believe and imagine three genuinely different ways of understanding it. For example, a rainy day could be inconvenient, nourishing for plants, or visually beautiful.

Ask: What else could be true? What am I failing to notice?

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4. Cultivate awe and interconnectedness — 5 minutes

Consider how your body depends on sunlight, food, water, ecosystems, and countless other people's work. Try to feel gratitude rather than merely think about it.

Ask: How many things had to happen for this moment to exist?

A powerful exercise: The ordinary object experiment

Pick up an ordinary cup.

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CHOOSE A WAY TO SEE IT

Perception

Science

Connection

Imagination

Imaginative perception

Imagine you are an alien seeing this object for the first time. What strange ritual might you think it serves? Invent three completely different uses.

What happens when I stop assuming I know what it is?

The interesting thing is that the cup hasn't changed, but your experience of it has. That's a trainable ability.

The deeper skill: Changing your relationship to thought

There are three particularly useful disciplines here.

Mindfulness: Learn to notice experience before automatically reacting to it.

Metacognition: Recognize that the meaning you assign to an experience is constructed by your mind, and can often be reconsidered.

Cognitive flexibility: Practice holding multiple interpretations without needing to immediately decide which one is correct.

This connects beautifully with Marcus Aurelius's Stoicism: distinguish the event itself from the judgment you form about it. The difference is that you're not merely trying to become more rational. You're also learning to experience more beauty, playfulness, and curiosity.

One more exercise I'd recommend: once a day, take a 20-minute walk without headphones or a phone. Find ten beautiful, surprising, or strange things that you'd ordinarily ignore. Don't force yourself to feel anything; practice noticing.

After two weeks, look for changes in your everyday curiosity, emotional flexibility, and appreciation rather than trying to reproduce a drug-induced state. These practices won't reliably reproduce psychedelic effects, but they can help cultivate some of the qualities people value in those experiences.

The goal isn't to be in an extraordinary state all the time. It's to become extraordinarily attentive to ordinary life.

Yes! Consciously examining and changing your judgments is a form of metacognition. More precisely, it combines metacognition, deliberate reasoning, cognitive reappraisal, and what the Stoics called assent.

This is a powerful skill because it allows you to change not just what you do, but eventually how you interpret reality, what you feel, what you value, and what you desire.

1. What exactly is metacognition?

Metacognition means thinking about your own thinking.

Ordinary cognition is thinking about the world. Metacognition is observing and evaluating how your mind is thinking about the world.

For example:

Ordinary cognition

Metacognition

"That person dislikes me."

"Why do I believe they dislike me?"

"I'm failing."

"What standard am I using to judge success?"

"This is terrible."

"Am I exaggerating how bad this is?"

"I need their approval."

"Why do I consider their approval necessary?"

"I don't want to exercise."

"How did I learn to associate exercise with unpleasantness?"

Metacognition creates a distinction between having a thought and evaluating whether to believe it.

2. How conscious deliberation changes a judgment

Consider someone who doesn't respond to your message.

1. EVENT

They haven't replied to my message.

2. AUTOMATIC JUDGMENT

"They don't care about me."

3. METACOGNITION

"Wait. I'm interpreting their silence as rejection. What evidence do I have?"

4. DELIBERATE REASONING

"They could be busy, distracted, uninterested, or dealing with something. I don't know yet."

5. REVISED JUDGMENT

"Their silence doesn't establish my worth or tell me exactly what they're thinking."

6. DELIBERATE ACTION

"I'll respect their space and continue living according to my values."

The remarkable thing is that your emotional response may change as your judgment changes.

Instead of experiencing only rejection, you may experience uncertainty, patience, or acceptance.

You haven't changed what happened. You've changed what you believe it means.

3. The four mental skills involved

Skill

What it does

Metacognition

Notices and monitors your thinking

Critical reasoning

Evaluates whether your beliefs are justified

Cognitive reappraisal

Reinterprets a situation in a more accurate or helpful way

Self-regulation

Chooses how to respond instead of automatically following an impulse

In psychology, cognitive restructuring is a related technique used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to identify and evaluate potentially distorted thoughts.

In Stoic philosophy, the related practice is called examining an impression before giving it your assent.

4. Marcus Aurelius: You don't have to agree with every thought

The Stoics distinguished between an initial impression and your judgment about that impression.

Imagine someone insults you.

Your first impression might be:

"They've disrespected me!"

You feel anger.

But then you consciously deliberate:

"Did their words actually damage my character? Am I confusing their opinion of me with my worth? What response would demonstrate wisdom and courage?"

You might conclude:

"I don't need to retaliate. I can correct them calmly, establish a boundary, or walk away."

Notice something important: Stoicism doesn't require you to pretend that mistreatment is acceptable. You can judge a person's behavior as wrong while refusing to judge it as a catastrophe that must control your response.

5. Can you consciously change what you desire?

Yes, sometimes—and usually gradually.

Suppose you want to become someone who genuinely enjoys helping others.

Initially, you might think:

"Helping is inconvenient. I'd rather do something enjoyable."

Through deliberate reflection, you could examine that judgment:

"Why do I consider helping a burden? What do other people experience when someone helps them? What kind of person do I admire? How do I feel after making someone's life better?"

Then you act: you volunteer, help someone, or practice generosity.

You observe the results and update your evaluation.

Eventually, helping may become something you intrinsically value, rather than an obligation you have to force yourself to fulfill.

This is where metacognition connects to character formation.

Your repeated judgments shape your choices. Your choices create experiences. Those experiences can reinforce or revise your future judgments and preferences.

6. Practice Socratic questioning

Here are seven questions you can use to examine almost any judgment:

You can practice this in 60 seconds, or spend 20 minutes journaling about a deeply held belief.

7. The most advanced level: examining your standards of judgment

There is an even deeper form of metacognition.

Instead of asking, "Am I successful?" you ask:

"Why do I define success this way?"

Instead of asking, "Do people respect me?" you ask:

"What do I believe makes someone worthy of respect?"

Instead of asking, "Am I happy?" you ask:

"What do I believe happiness consists of?"

This is called metacognitive reflection or reflective self-examination, and it overlaps with philosophical inquiry.

You are no longer simply correcting individual thoughts. You're examining the principles that generate thousands of thoughts.

That can profoundly change how you live.

8. One crucial distinction: changing judgment isn't forcing belief

You cannot always convince yourself of something just because you want to believe it.

Good deliberation is not:

"I'm sad, so I'll convince myself everything is wonderful."

It's:

"I'm sad. What happened? What am I interpreting? Which parts of my interpretation are supported? What can I learn? What remains uncertain?"

Sometimes careful reasoning leads you to recognize a real loss, injustice, or mistake. The goal is accurate, compassionate judgment—not artificial positivity.

And you may still feel sadness after changing a judgment. Emotions don't always update immediately.

A deeper idea: You can train the faculty that makes judgments

Marcus Aurelius repeatedly discusses the ruling faculty—the part of the mind responsible for judgment and deliberate choice.

His ideal wasn't someone who never experiences fear, anger, or desire.

It was someone who increasingly develops the ability to notice impressions, evaluate them carefully, and choose actions according to reason and virtue.

One useful way to think about the progression is:

Awareness → Metacognition → Deliberation → Revised judgment → Deliberate action → Repeated practice → Character.

And here's the question that takes this philosophy further:

If you can change your judgments, can you also change the standards by which you decide what is good, beautiful, desirable, or worth living for?

Yes, to a meaningful extent. That's where metacognition becomes not merely a tool for managing emotions, but a way of deliberately cultivating wisdom and character.