Realize When You're Stupid

[This post is the second post in my thirty day writing challenge. Tune in for more if you enjoy it!] If you reliably knew that you would make a bad decision during a certain time, would you let yourself make decisions during that time? Probably not, right? So why do you let yourself grocery shop when hungry, speak negatively when you have low blood sugar, and make key decisions when anxious? A core epistemic skill that I’ve tried to cultivate over the years is the idea of knowing when I’m stupid, and not letting myself make decisions during these times. Like all core epistemic skills, I’ve cultivated this in response to getting repeatedly smacked across the face over and over again. I. Cindy is an anxious woman. Her resting heart rate is a bit high, she gets wigged out easily, and she tends to run an endless stream of disaster loops through her head at all hours of the day. Like all anxious people, her anxiety rises and falls. Maybe it rises when her blood sugar is low, when she’s under-slept, or when other things in her life are particularly stressful. Probably all three. She, like all people, has a number of decisions to make throughout the day. Some of these decisions are big and some of them are small. Cindy reliably finds that when she’s flooded with anxiety, she repeatedly runs into certain failure modes. For example, maybe she makes elaborate plans to fix every single problem in her entire life, half-commits to it for, like, one day, and then decides that: no, what was she thinking? That plan is terrible! It’s time for another ground-breaking, earth-shaking plan that will fix every single problem in her entire life. She then half-commits to this plan, and then one day later comes to a terrible realization.... Cindy notices that this kind of planning loop stops her from making any actual progress. It’s like she’s in a car and wants to go in a certain direction, but instead she goes into a hard right turn, and then a hard left turn, and then a hard right turn,