Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler
Developer Tea

Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler

B1IntermediateJuly 22, 202618 min

There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do it constantly — usually without noticing, and sometimes to our detriment. In today's episode, I make the case that you can take this same shortcut your brain already runs automatically and start using it intentionally to break decision paralysis and get moving. The Substitution Heuristic: Understand the mental move at the heart of this episode — when "How are you?" becomes "Is there anything I urgently need...

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what we believe about something.

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of times those things will come out in a similar pattern for our brains because we're

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The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.

0:00

There's a cognitive trick that our brains play on us when we have a hard decision to make or when we're asked a difficult question. Interestingly, the pathways here are probably pretty similar. If we're asked a difficult question, we're essentially having to make a decision about

0:35

what we believe about something. So if we're asked a difficult question or if we're making a difficult decision, a lot of times those things will come out in a similar pattern for our brains because we're essentially taking a position.

0:52

right and so uh this this trick that our brain plays in in both of these scenarios is uh usually done accidentally and in today's episode i want to talk about doing it uh in an intentional way in a way to uh to take advantage of this essentially efficiency trick that our brain uh does automatically and sometimes to our detriment

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