Don't Believe Everything You Think
Why you can't trust every feeling you have.
There is a moment, right before the train hits her.
Anna’s eyes open.
Not dramatically. But just enough to suggest that something has shifted.
And then it is over.
I recently binge watched The Beautiful Lie, a drama series starring Sarah Snook, and I have not been able to shake that final scene. Not because it is tragic, although it is. Not because it is dramatic, although it certainly is.
It is because it feels uncomfortably real.
Not in the sense of infidelity or scandal. Those stories are everywhere. This is something deeper. This is a story about the mind, and what happens when we believe it too completely.
This was never just a story about cheating.
At first glance, the narrative feels familiar. Anna is a successful woman with a respectable life who meets Skeet at the airport. Skeet awakens something in her that had gone dormant. Passion. Intensity. Aliveness.
She chooses that feeling and leaves everything behind for it.
That choice is not new, both in Hollywood and in real life. What is different is what happens after.
The Beautiful Lie is not a story about choosing love over obligation. It is a story about what happens when a feeling becomes your entire reality.
Anna did not just fall in love quickly. She reorganized her identity around that experience. Her sense of self, her sense of meaning, and her sense of belonging all became tied to one emotional thread.
And when that thread began to fray, everything else unraveled with it.
“If it feels real, it must be true”
We rarely question intense emotions. In fact, we tend to treat them as evidence.
If something feels powerful, we assume it is meaningful.
If something feels urgent, we assume it is important.
If something feels undeniable, we assume it is true.
Neuroscience does not support this, though.
What Anna experiences is remarkably consistent with what we now understand as limerence: a state of intense romantic infatuation driven by dopamine, novelty, and reward anticipation. Studies in neuroscience show that early-stage romantic attraction activates the same dopamine pathways involved in addiction.
In simpler terms, her brain was not just “in love.”
It was chemically reinforced to prioritize her lover above everything else.
This creates a powerful distortion:
The relationship feels fated rather than biochemical
The urgency feels existential rather than emotional
The attachment feels permanent despite instability
When you are inside that state, it does not feel like a choice.
It feels like the truth.
The opening
What struck me most was not the affair itself, but the subtle opening that preceded it.
There is a moment early on in the series where Anna simply wanted her husband to step into the shower with her, fully clothed, for a moment of spontaneity and play, which she craves.
He does not.
That moment is small. Yet psychologically, it matters.
Because the mind does not require catastrophe to shift direction. It only requires contrast.
A slight sense of boredom.
A deep longing for more aliveness.
A feeling that something is missing, even if everything looks “good” on paper.
That is often enough.
The brain is wired to seek novelty and reward. When something, or someone, offers a sudden spike in emotional intensity, it can feel like an awakening.
This is true even when nothing is wrong with the current reality, but because the new stimulus is louder.
There is no denying the double standard.
A man in this situation loses reputation. A woman in the same situation loses identity.
She is ostracized, judged, and cut off in ways that accelerate her internal collapse. Social isolation is one of the strongest predictors of mental health deterioration, and she experiences it rapidly and completely.
When Anna’s sense of worth, safety, and belonging became dependent on one relationship, she was no longer anchored. She was floating.
And floating feels exhilarating at first, until it doesn’t.
Why love wasn’t enough
Yes, Skeet loved her. Yes, the connection was real for both of them.
But love alone does not regulate a nervous system that is already dysregulated.
Over time, the relationship shifts:
From passion to anxiety
From connection to dependency
From certainty to fear
This is not because the original love disappeared, but because the unstable psychological container could no longer hold it.
Without internal stability, even the most intense connection becomes volatile.
The illusion
Spoiler warning: Anna takes her own life, which she eludes to in the beginning.
What makes the ending so haunting is not the act itself. I wanted to scream at the screen: “think of your two kids!”
It is the fact that at the very last moment, she finally sees clearly.
There was sudden shift in her perception right before impact. Just a flicker.
It begs the question: what if the narrative she had been living inside was not reality?
What if the urgency and the despair was constructed by a mind trying to make sense of overwhelming emotion?
There is a phenomenon in psychology where individuals who survive suicide attempts report an immediate change in perspective once the act is set in motion. The Golden Gate Bridge survivor Kevin Hines famously described realizing mid-fall that every problem in his life was solvable, except the one he had just created.
That is what this moment represents.
Clarity.
And it arrives one second too late.
The real lesson: don’t believe everything you think
This is not a moral story about infidelity. It is not a warning against passion.
It is a reminder of something far more unsettling:
Your mind can create a narrative that feels completely true and still be wrong.
Anna did not destroy her life because she was reckless. She did it because she was convinced.
Convinced that this love was everything.
Convinced that her suffering was permanent.
Convinced that there was no way forward.
All of those beliefs felt real. None of them were.
I know, because I’ve had periods in my own life where I believed the same.
What this means for you
Most people will never face consequences this extreme.
But the mechanism is the same in everyday life.
Leaving a career impulsively because it suddenly feels unbearable
Staying in a relationship because it feels safe, even when it is not aligned
Chasing a version of life that feels exciting, without questioning sustainability
We are constantly making decisions based on internal states that shift far more than we realize.
The question is not whether you should follow your heart.
The question is:
Is your heart regulated, grounded, and clear or is it reacting to a temporary surge of emotion?
Because those are not the same thing.
That final moment when her eyes open before impact stayed with me because it exposed something we rarely want to confront.
Clarity does not always come when we need it.
Sometimes it comes after the decision has already been made.
And sometimes, the most important skill when it comes to decision making may not be courage, or even passion.
It may be doing The Work by Byron Katie, and asking:
Is it true?
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
How do I react, what happens, when I believe that thought?
Who would I be without that thought?
If this resonated, I write weekly about the intersection of mind, body, and health and behavior.
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Wherever you are in your journey, trust that you are allowed to meet life at your own pace.
—Dr. Natacha
The post I needed to read this morning. As I was reading, so many feelings and memories from my younger years came back to me. I have experienced different versions of the things you described: moments when emotions felt like truth, when thoughts felt louder than wisdom, and when the mind created a story that felt so real in the moment.
What I appreciate most about this is the reminder that not every feeling is a fact, and not every thought deserves to lead our decisions. Sometimes what feels urgent, intense, or undeniable is not clarity. Sometimes it is pain, longing, fear, grief, or an unregulated heart trying to make sense of something deeper.
I could not agree more with your central message, my dear. We have to learn how to pause, question our thoughts, and ask whether what we are believing is actually true. This was powerful, reflective, and so necessary. Thank you for writing it.
Now, I need to go watch that show...:-)