[a wild bare guide] to mental self-defense

how to build a personal filtration system of discernment and reject cognitive manipulation

This is the second installment in a growing series of guides—small, focused drops that blend systems thinking, self-reflection, and subtle structure for people building a more conscious, creative life. These guides are designed to be returned to, not just read once.

The first guide explored the foundations of self-sovereignty—how to reclaim your energy, attention, and agency in a culture that profits from your confusion. This one builds on that groundwork by offering mental tools for staying grounded in a world that’s optimized for manipulation. This isn’t a one-off concept. You’ll see it running through everything I write moving forward, because more than just a toolkit, mental self-defense is becoming the root system of my entire framework: how I think, how I create, how I self-regulate.

If you find value in this kind of thinking, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. Paying readers get access to every guide in the series, all twelve weeks of THE DAILY 5 journaling framework, my full archive of paid essays, and ongoing bite-sized art histories featuring my favorite creative muses.

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A 7-part blueprint for mental self-defense in a destabilized world—built for clear thinkers, creative independents, and anyone trying to stay intact amidst emotional manipulation, algorithmic chaos, and narrative warfare.

• 01. Why Mental Self-Defense Matters

  How modern inputs hijack clarity, and why we need stronger filters, not stronger opinions

• 02. The Purpose of Mental Models

  A primer on how to use thinking tools as scaffolding for discernment, not weapons for debate

• 03. Core Models to Train With

  8 of my most-used mental models and how to wield them in real time, under pressure

• 04. The Role of Mental Models in Media Literacy

  Common ways thinking gets hijacked—mimicry, frame traps, identity inflation, and more

• 05. Mental Model Maintenance

  How to avoid “model bloat,” pick only what’s useful, audit regularly, discard what’s no longer needed, and tailor them to your context

• 06. Integrating Models to Maintain Self-Sovereignty

  How this connects to self-sovereignty, clarity, and building a worldview that resists collapse

• 07. Building Your Own Filtration System

  How to actually train mental self-defense in daily life; prompts, rituals, and rhythm via THE DAILY 5 framework

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WE’VE REACHED A POINT where thinking clearly (or just thinking at all, really) feels harder than it should. It’s not that people are incapable of critical thought. It’s that the surrounding environment has become so saturated with input, so engineered for reaction, that thinking now requires more conscious effort than most people realize. We are no longer operating in a world where information is neutral, or even just excessive. We are living in a culture where information is actively shaped to manipulate how we feel before we have a chance to decide how we think.

Most of what we interact with today—whether it’s the news cycle, social platforms, or even personal conversations mediated through group chats and algorithms—is built to steer attention. And more often than not, it’s doing that by hijacking your emotions, narrowing your frame of reference, or subtly reframing a question so you’re already halfway toward the answer it wants you to choose. This isn’t always malicious, but it is systemic. It doesn’t need to be coordinated to be effective. The net effect is that many people walk around with a vague sense of cognitive whiplash, unable to trace how they arrived at a given opinion, or why they feel anxious and mentally depleted by the end of the day.

In that context, mental self-defense becomes a core skill. It’s not about cutting yourself off from the world or retreating into some perfectly curated headspace. It’s about being able to participate in reality without losing contact with your own internal compass. You can’t stop the information from coming in, but you can build better systems for deciding what gets through—and more importantly, what it does to you once it’s inside.

MENTAL SELF-DEFENSE IS the process of protecting your attention, your clarity, and your cognitive baseline in a culture that profits from their erosion. It’s the ability to pause before responding, to step outside a manipulated frame, and to choose how you want to orient yourself in relation to what you’re seeing. It’s about maintaining a functional relationship with your own perception by building enough structure in your thinking that you’re not just reacting to stimuli, but interpreting them in a way that aligns with your values, your priorities, and your long-term goals.

What makes this difficult is that much of what we’re asked to engage with—especially online—is presented as urgent, moral, and obvious. The modern media ecosystem does not reward coherence or nuance. It’s built to keep you reactive, fragmented, and emotionally engaged just enough to keep scrolling. The internet doesn’t care if you’re informed or misinformed. It cares that you’re paying attention, and it prefers that your attention is slightly destabilized—confused, outraged, uncertain, tribal. That’s how engagement loops are built.

Without some kind of filtration system, it’s easy to mistake the most emotionally charged content for the most true. And once that habit takes hold, it becomes difficult to tell when you’re actually thinking versus when you’re just participating in someone else’s emotional arc.

THIS IS WHY DEVELOPING a personal filtration system of discernment—not just to decide what’s “true,” but to clarify what’s useful, what’s manipulative, and what’s simply noise, is essential. You don’t have to engage with every headline. You’re allowed to opt out of frames that feel like traps. You don’t owe your nervous system to content that was engineered to bypass your critical thinking. In the same way you might build physical strength or emotional resilience, you can train yourself to recognize and reject cognitive manipulation before it sinks in.

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This guide is about recognizing that pattern and replacing it with something more intentional. It’s about developing a set of tools that help you stay steady, curious, and mentally intact when everything around you is optimized to knock you off balance. I call this mental self-defense, and for me, it starts with building out a personal set of mental models—not because they make you smarter, but because they give you somewhere to stand when the ground starts shifting. They won’t make you infallible. They won’t guarantee that you’re right. But they’ll help you think in more structured, resilient ways—ways that resist manipulation, minimize confusion, and allow for thoughtful response rather than reflexive reaction.

And no, this isn’t about avoiding discomfort or shielding yourself from difficult truths. Quite the opposite. Mental self-defense sharpens your ability to meet reality head-on without being swallowed by misinformation, distortion, or the sheer velocity of a manipulated news cycle. You can think of it as a filter for bullshit.

What follows is a collection of 8 of my most-used mental models. These are the internal structures I return to when the noise gets loud, or when I can feel myself getting pulled into someone else’s momentum. I don’t think you need an endless library of them. I think you need a handful that you trust, that you’ve tested, and that you know how to use in real time. Below are the models I return to almost every day—whether I’m analyzing news, making decisions, or recalibrating how I see myself.

That’s also why I built THE DAILY 5—a five-minute daily journaling ritual designed to help you develop this exact kind of discernment on a day-to-day level. It’s not a productivity tracker or a mood diary. It’s a practical framework for noticing what’s shaping your attention, what’s pulling on your energy, and how your own patterns are evolving over time. If mental models are the tools, THE DAILY 5 is the gym where you can develop them.

See also:

Recommended reading for developing greater self-awareness and mental immunity.

25 prompts for getting UNSTUCK

30 journaling prompts for September

50 concepts that rewire how you see the world

Models discussed:

1. First-Principles Thinking

2. Inversion

3. Second-Order Thinking

4. Occam’s Razor

5. Hanlon’s Razor

6. Map ≠ Territory

7. Energy Accounting

8. Skin In The Game