The way our brains filter information can make situations seem a lot worse than they are.

Every image of the world you perceive is first turned upside-down by the lenses in your eyes and then flipped again by the visual cortex in your brain.

Your visual cortex acts as a filter – your brain indeed has many filters – but sometimes these filters can do more harm than good.

In short, mental filters affect how we perceive the world and are the reason why everybody experiences life differently.

Picture two friends, a man and a woman, walking through a park. Suddenly a dog runs up to them. The man had a traumatic experience with dogs as a child; he becomes terrified as the dog approaches. The woman grew up around dogs, so she knows the chubby Labrador has just come to say hello.

Filters serve an important purpose, in that they enable us to make sense of a complex world.

Filters break down information to help us understand, allowing us to recognize patterns in everything from news stories to the behavior of friends and family. Our views and values, from politics to personal ethics, are affected by these filters.

Mental filters can also malfunction, however, and distort our perception of reality.

We tend to view the world through a lens colored by our beliefs, ignoring anything that contradicts those beliefs. If you see people as inherently untrustworthy, for example, then you’re going to see more bad than good in people in general.

Psychologists Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté call this the Velcro/Teflon effect. Anything that backs up our beliefs sticks like Velcro, while anything that contradicts them slides off like non-stick Teflon.

We form many of our filters as children by paying attention to those around us. Because of this, it’s a good idea to inspect your beliefs and see whether you need to “update” them.