1000 times a day we must choose between thinking…

Page 28. 1000 times a day we must choose between thinking and not thinking.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit · How to Raise Your Self-Esteem

In the book

Cross-check your beliefs against evidence. Take an important belief and treat it as a hypothesis: try to falsify it, and ask whether you are truly sure. When you catch yourself wanting something to be true, deliberately flip the question from "can I believe this?" to "must I believe this?" And ask the plainest precaution of all: am I taking real steps to avoid fooling myself? - Choose to think, on purpose. A thousand times a day you choose between thinking and not thinking — you are genuinely free to think, to not bother, or to actively avoid it, so choose the harder option more often. But also learn useful thinking: distinguish what is actually worth your thought from what is not, and refuse to spend the instrument on noise. — The Mind in the Cockpit

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