Judgment Isn't the Problem. Unexamined Judgment Is.
By Joy Stephenson-Laws, Holistic Coach, J.D., Founder
(Updated 7/26)
You are standing in line at the grocery store. The man ahead of you is wearing a hat with a political slogan.
Before he speaks, you have decided things about him. What he believes. What he thinks about people like you. Whether he is decent.
Now change the slogan.
Someone else in the same line makes a different judgment just as fast.
Nobody spoke. Nobody learned anything. But both people leave carrying the reaction.
A hat is data. The heat in your chest is data. The fact that you judged him is data too.
Whether the judgment is true is a different question.
That is the part we miss. The judgment arrives so quickly that it feels like something we saw.
It was not.
You saw a hat. You had a reaction. Somewhere inside that reaction, you decided who the man was.
The decision may be right. It may be wrong. But it did not come through your eyes.
The judgment came with the feeling
We often talk as if feeling happens first and judgment comes later. That is too clean.
You see the slogan, feel your chest tighten, and think, “I know what kind of person he is.” Those things may happen so close together that you cannot honestly separate them.
That does not make the judgment bad. It makes the judgment part of your first response.
It may have come from experience or fear. You may have recognized a pattern that hurt you before. You may simply be repeating something you were taught to believe.
You do not have to make the judgment nicer. You just have to name it.
“I saw the hat. I felt the heat. I decided he was contemptible.”
The judgment happened. That is a fact about your response.
It is not yet a fact about him.
Watching is not awareness
Johnson and colleagues surveyed 1,600 Canadians between the ages of 14 and 90. They measured five facets of mindfulness and found several distinct profiles.
One group was high in nonjudgment and acting with awareness, but low in observing. They reported some of the best mental health in the study.
Another group was high in observing and low in nonjudgment. They had the highest anxiety of any group.
They noticed plenty. But they noticed through a judgment they had already made.
Once the first judgment becomes the verdict, everything else starts looking like evidence. The way the man loads his groceries. How he speaks to the cashier. Whether he smiles.
You are no longer finding out who he is. You are proving yourself right.
Social media keeps us in this state for hours. We are shown one person after another, reduced to whatever fragment will provoke a response. The interpretation is usually waiting for us before the image has finished loading.
We call this being informed.
Often, we are just being supplied with evidence for a conclusion we already had.
The Johnson study does not prove that judgment causes anxiety. It was cross-sectional. Everyone completed a questionnaire once. The judgmentally observing group was also the youngest, averaging about 20 years old, and 72 percent were women. Those facts limit what we can claim.
Still, the finding matters. Paying more attention does not help if all the new information is being fed into a verdict you refuse to examine.
Feel. Pause. Act.
Feel. Notice the whole first response, including the judgment.
Pause. Test the judgment against what you actually know.
Act. Take one small step based on what you now know.
Judgment is allowed
I do not want to build a framework that makes people afraid to judge.
We need judgment. It helps us recognize danger and set boundaries.
The Pause is not there to make you neutral. It is there to make your judgment answer to something other than its own certainty.
You can pause, look carefully at what someone believes, and still decide it is wrong or dangerous. You can want no part of it.
You can also listen to the warning in your body. Sometimes the body recognizes a pattern before you can explain it. You do not owe anyone access to you while you work out whether your reaction is fair.
But speed and accuracy are not the same thing. A fast judgment can protect you. It can also carry an old fear into a new situation.
The Pause gives you a chance to find out which one happened.
There is some evidence that mindfulness training can change what happens after the first reaction. In a randomized trial, Taren and colleagues compared three days of intensive mindfulness training with three days of relaxation training. The mindfulness group showed a change in resting connectivity in a brain circuit associated with stress processing. The relaxation group did not.
That is interesting. It is not proof that three days of mindfulness rewires the brain in some permanent or simple way. Amygdala fMRI has real reliability problems, as Varkevisser and colleagues argued in a 2024 review.
The neuroscience is suggestive. The practical point does not need to be inflated.
The first reaction can be immediate. Your final judgment does not have to be.
Test it
The next time certainty arrives fast, start with what a camera could confirm.
“A man is wearing a hat.”
Then name what happened inside you.
“My chest tightened, and I decided he was dangerous.”
Do not argue with the judgment yet. Just stop confusing the fact that you had it with proof that it is correct.
Then test it.
You may end up exactly where you started. That is fine. The goal was never to make you more agreeable.
The goal was to make you more accurate.
We are allowed to judge. We have to judge.
But the first judgment does not get the final word simply because it arrived first.
A hat is data.
Your reaction is data.
The judgment that arrived tells you something about what happened inside you.
Whether it tells you the truth about the person in front of you is still a hypothesis.
Test it.
If it holds, keep it.
Then act.
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Sources
• Johnson NJ, Smith RJ, Kil H. “Not all mindfulness is equal: certain facets of mindfulness have important implications for well-being and mental health across the lifespan.” Frontiers in Psychology. 2024;15:1347487. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1347487
• Lai VT, Hagoort P, Casasanto D. “Affective primacy vs. cognitive primacy: dissolving the debate.” Frontiers in Psychology. 2012;3:243. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00243
• Taren AA, Gianaros PJ, Greco CM, et al. “Mindfulness meditation training alters stress-related amygdala resting state functional connectivity: a randomized controlled trial.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 2015;10(12):1758-1768. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26048176/
• Varkevisser T, Geuze E, van Honk J. “Amygdala fMRI: a critical appraisal of the extant literature.” Neuroscience Insights. 2024;19. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11325331/
