listen to the voices inside

learning to stop second-guessing myself into paralysis...

you know that feeling when you walk into a room and something just feels... off? can't put your finger on it, but your body knows. that's the thing i'm learning to trust more these days.

spent years reading about cognitive biases, thinking i could outsmart my own brain. confirmation bias, anchoring bias, availability heuristic... had them all memorized like some kind of psychology student cramming for finals. thought if i could just catalog every way my mind might trick me, i'd become this perfectly rational decision-maker.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

     ⸻ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

turns out that was kind of missing the point entirely.

the unconscious knows things

there's this wild phenomenon called blindsight... people who are technically blind can still navigate around objects they can't consciously see. their unconscious mind is processing way more information than they realize. makes you wonder what else we're picking up on without knowing it.

my intuition isn't some mystical thing. it's my brain running calculations in the background, processing patterns i'm not even aware of. when something feels right or wrong, that's millions of years of evolution talking.

the bias obsession trap

here's what i noticed... knowing about biases didn't actually make me better at avoiding them. still bought the $9.99 item over the $10 one. still got influenced by advertising even when i could see exactly what they were doing (as i design them for clients).

being hyper-aware of every possible way my thinking could be flawed just made me... paralyzed. second-guessing every instinct, every gut feeling, every natural response. it was like trying to walk while consciously controlling every muscle movement.

awareness is helpful up to a point, but then it becomes this exhausting mental prison where you're constantly policing your own thoughts.

learning to trust the process

if i rely on my intuition, yeah, i'll be wrong sometimes. but that's literally how learning works. each mistake teaches my unconscious mind something new. the pattern recognition gets better.

what i've realized is that i can rationalize basically any decision after the fact. give me any choice and i'll come up with compelling reasons why it was the right one. reasoning is a tool, not a identity.

the most important decisions in my life... who to trust, what feels meaningful, when something isn't quite right... those weren't made with spreadsheets and pro/con lists. they came from somewhere deeper.

finding the balance

my intuition isn't perfect, but it's mine. it's connected to everything i've experienced, every pattern i've absorbed, every subtle signal i've learned to read. dismissing all of that because some psychology experiments showed people make predictable errors feels... wasteful.

rationality is a powerful tool. but it doesn't have to be my entire identity.

these days i try to listen to that quiet voice first, then use reasoning to test it, refine it, understand it better. not to override it completely.

trusting yourself is a skill that atrophies when you don't use it. and tbh? the world needs people who can sense when something's off, even if they can't immediately explain why.

⏤

thinking fast and slow is probably a good book in isolation. but the whole "catalog every bias" culture that grew around it feels like it's missing something crucial. we're so focused on the trees (individual cognitive tricks) that we're ignoring the forest (the incredible sophistication of our evolved decision-making systems).