How Your Mind Works
Discover the hidden machinery behind your daily thoughts, focus, and reactions. Learn practical ways to manage mental noise, direct your attention, and understand why your brain interprets the world the way it does.
Like Duolingo, but for How Your Mind Works. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Steering Your Daily Thoughts and Decoding Your Mental Patterns. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in How Your Mind Works
- The human brain constantly generates automatic thoughts as an evolutionary survival mechanism to scan for threats
- A thought occurring spontaneously does not mean it reflects external reality or factual truth
- Treating every thought as a certified fact causes unnecessary stress reactions
- Noticing a thought as an observable mental event ('I am having the thought that...') creates distance between the self and the thought
- Being entangled with a thought makes it feel like an absolute identity or command rather than a mental event
- Stepping back to observe stops an immediate, automatic emotional reaction from taking over
- Trying to actively push an unwanted thought out of your head creates a mental monitoring loop
- Checking whether you are still thinking the forbidden thought keeps bringing it right back into awareness
- Forced mental suppression paradoxically increases the thought's frequency and emotional intensity
- Attaching a neutral category label to a thought disarms its emotional charge without needing to argue with it
- Debating the specific details of an anxious thought tends to keep you trapped inside its narrative
- Recognizing the mental habit (such as planning, worrying, or regretting) breaks identification with the story
- Thoughts naturally drift away on their own if you refrain from both feeding them (agreeing) and fighting them (suppression)
- Both arguing with a thought and surrendering to it give it active mental attention and power
- Allowing a thought to exist like passing weather or background noise lets it run its course without dictating mood
- Conscious attention acts as a single beam that can focus on only one meaning-heavy task at a time
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How Your Mind Works the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
A sudden thought pops up saying 'everyone in the room is judging you.' What does this mean?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How Your Mind Works takes you
- 1
Steering Your Daily Thoughts
- Untangling Yourself from Automatic Thoughts
- Directing and Protecting Your Attention
- 2
Decoding Your Mental Patterns
- Spotting Your Brain's Built-In Shortcuts
- Separating Raw Feelings from Mental Stories
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How Your Mind Works is taught in the Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start How Your Mind Works today.
Download Tomo, search How Your Mind Works, and play your first lesson in under a minute.