Availability Bias and the Art of Self-Knowledge
AKA yet another reason why I think tea is the answer to everything.
We don’t know as much about ourselves as we think.
My default assumption–that I know what’s going on with myself at all times–is not always right. In fact, often how I think and what I feel is based on what I’ve been thinking and how I’ve been feeling lately. This cognitive bias is known as availability bias, which means my thoughts and feelings are more of a trailing average than an honest interpretation of the facts.
The result is, unless we're willing to dig deep, we’re always skimming from the surface.
How do we fight against availability bias? It’s uncomfortable to entertain the notion that we aren’t as good at knowing ourselves as we believe. Unfortunately, it’s true. However, there’s good news: we can overcome this by making a habit out of rethinking.
To make rethinking a habit, I’ve come up with three life practices to try to address this: journaling, thinking time, and, of course, tea.
I. Journaling
Most mornings, the first thing I do when I wake up is write a page in a journal. The writing isn’t directed in any form or fashion. Rather, it’s a dump of whatever I’m thinking and feeling at the time. I call it “mental garbage”, which is just the stuff that piles up like gunk clogging the pipes of my psychological well-being. When I journal, I’m running water through the pipes until it turns clear.
A while back, after doing these morning pages for a while, I began to wonder what they were doing for me. There was no obvious benefit as far as I could tell so I decided to stop for a bit and see what would happen.
What I learned was perhaps about what you’d expect: without journaling, my psychological pipes got clogged. If you know anything about plumbing, you know what happens when there's nowhere for the waste to go–not in, but out.
After a month or so of not journaling, my thinking became muddled, my emotions tangled, and my general sense of well-being took a nose-dive. Less mental clarity meant I couldn't think or perform as well at my work, which further dragged on my mood and sense of wellness.
I resumed journaling and have done so nearly every day since 2017.
II. Thinking Time
Another practice I’ve picked up in more recent times is called thinking time. I learned it from the book The Road Less Stupid. Technically, it’s a business book full of advice to business leaders on how to avoid making stupid mistakes.
However, business is hardly the only place I make stupid mistakes. My whole life can benefit from the concept of thinking time. It’s simple:
On my calendar, I schedule a 45 minute block 2-3 days per week. When I get to a block of thinking time, I sit with a pad of paper (I like the Mead college ruled notebooks) and a pen and I begin to think about a specific question, idea, or theme. I spend the whole time asking myself questions, recording thoughts, and following mental threads. In the last 5-10 minutes, I re-read my notes and try to summarize the main points in three bullet points.
If there are loose ends or new questions/ideas to ponder, I’ll record those too so I have some prompts for future thinking time sessions.
You can get pretty far along in your thinking with just yourself and a pen and paper. The fun thing about thinking time is that the goal isn’t necessary to have an “answer”. Oftentimes I end a session with a better question than I started or a clearer understanding of why I’m blocked or confused.
That’s a win.
III. Tea
This wouldn’t be The Tea Letter if I didn’t talk about the role tea plays as a life practice.
Lastly, I use tea as a part of my contemplative practice for gaining self-knowledge. Both Chinese and Japanese styles of brewing have something to offer here.
However you would care to split up a human being, it’s clear we have different modes for interacting with reality. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them ration and intuition.
Tea is perfect for tapping into our intuition because it engages our focus without trapping our consciousness.
Let me explain.
Making tea is a mundane and domestic thing to do. However, tea made in the style of gongfu or chanoyu elevates itself to a practice through the presence of our intent. Tea made in this way is busy enough to engage our intellect without trapping our consciousness along with it.
In other words, we disable the rational, thinking mind so the intuitive, deeper sense of engaging with the things is free to roam. In such a state we are free to come to realizations we would not have had otherwise.
In D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and the Art of Tea he says:
“Zen first of all combats the intellect for in spite of its practical usefulness the intellect goes against our effort to delve into the depths of being.”
Using tea as a practice in this way, it helps to “strip off the artificial wrappings” we humans like to construct and come to know ourselves and our experience as it is in truth.
If I’m lucky, my tea practice directly leads to some kind of sudden realization that unlocks some sort of knowledge or awareness. I’m not usually that lucky. More often, my intuitive sense prefers to show up in feelings, shapes and colors, memories, or physical sensations. From there, I rely on my writing practices to begin to untangle what those mean to me.
We may only access this sort of experience within the vehicle of a contemplative practice like tea.
What I’ve Learned
I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve come to know about myself through these attempts to connect with myself. I’ve arrived at a place where, no matter what is going on, I can pause and find out what’s going on within.
That’s useful because, as we’ve seen, many obvious issues we face such as procrastination and anxiety often stem from unresolved emotions.
What I’ve also learned through this process is that my relationship to myself must be cultivated and nurtured the same as any other human relationship. The skills required to do this are learnable and can be trained over time through the methods I’ve described above and many others.
I’ll link a few resources below I’ve used to get started down this path in the hope it may help you do the same.
Until next time, happy drinking.
Resources
Availability bias: the tendency to use information that easily comes to mind (Ness Labs) - The article that reminded me of this phenomenon. The author has a similar but different set of recommendations for tackling availability bias. Worth a read.
The Artist’s Way - The origin of the Morning Pages tradition. Buy if you want but you can get the Morning Pages concept from a Google search, I’m sure.
The Road Less Stupid - The origin of Thinking Time. A business book so consider borrowing from the library instead of buying unless you want the business stuff too.
Zen and the Art of Tea - An esoteric ride through D.T. Suzuki’s interpretation of the relationship between Zen and chanoyu. Available on YouTube for free or Audible to own.