Decompile Your Mind: An Engineer’s Guide to Thoughts and Emotions

No one enters an engineering profession expecting it to be easy. But even after mastering topics like structural mechanics and thermodynamics, sometimes an even more daunting set of tasks remains: coping with the stress and pressures inherent to the profession while striving for the kind of mental wellness that so often eludes our complex and mysterious human brains.

If your mind were simply a sophisticated computer program, you might imagine hardwiring it into a software decompiler, in an effort to get to know it better; reverse-engineering the code to explore how it works, what its limitations are, and why its behavior can sometimes surprise you. In Decompile Your Mind: An Engineer’s Guide to Thoughts and Emotions, clinical therapists Alison West and Audrey Gilfillan provide this same experience, without the costly neural interface. Drawing on cutting-edge psychological research and their years of experience working with engineers, the authors reveal the inner workings of the mind and challenge you to learn from what you find beneath the surface of your consciousness.

What does it mean when an unwanted thought pops into your head? Is rational, logical thinking always the best approach to dealing with a difficult situation? And why do some of us struggle so much with self-doubt or procrastination? This indispensable book explores these questions and many, many more through vignettes, metaphors, systematic models, and exercises, all tailored to the language and experiences of anyone who identifies as an engineer or an engineering student. The result is a set of comprehensive self-assessments and mental wellness tools, custom-built for the logical thinker.