Decompile Your Mind

Decompile Your Mind: An Engineer's Guide to Thoughts and Emotions is a mental-wellness book tailored especially for engineers (and anyone who identifies as a logical thinker). Drawing on their clinical expertise and combined 10 years of working with engineering students, authors and licensed therapists Audrey Gilfillan and Alison West translate psychological concepts into a framework that resonates with the analytical mind. You won't find abstract or vague ideas in this book. Instead, Gilfillan and West use visual models, charts, metaphors, engineering-specific examples, and structured reasoning to help readers build skills to manage everyday challenges. Ultimately, readers learn to manage distressing thoughts and emotions in a way that makes sense to them.

The title uses a software engineering metaphor: just as engineers decompile code to see its structure and logic, readers learn to reverse-engineer their thought patterns and emotional responses in order to understand what's really going on beneath the surface. In the first two sections, the "Emotion Decompiler" and "Thought Decompiler" models provide a streamlined approach to this process--giving readers the clarity and confidence to step outside of their automatic responses and instead cope with overthinking and distressing emotions in a systematic, values-oriented way. The third and final section of the book covers themes that are relevant in engineering spaces: perfectionism, uncertainty, connection, and the imposter phenomenon. Readers are provided an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills gained in the previous sections to their own experiences with each of these topics. Whether you've been to therapy before or you're new to learning about mental health, Decompile Your Mind's comprehensive, accessible approach is valuable for all levels of familiarity.