You might enjoy this quote from Arthur Schopenhauer:

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

I know this is a hard pill to swallow for most people, but our conscious thoughts are not necessarily “ourselves”, even though they often get framed as such. We are the whole, the uncountable unconscious small machinations, as well as the big thoughts.

As somebody else mentioned: Reacting first and thinking about it later was most often advantageous for our ancestors. “Flee from the lion first and think about that was necessary later.”

But that does not mean that the process of arriving at the point of “Flee from the lion” isn’t individual and very much “ours”. It’s just the fastest part of our brain taking the lead and everything else following.

Oh, yeah. It’s because In our historical environment it was actually super important to be able to do that. Even now its super handy sometimes. There was one time my foot had been fully down on the break for several seconds before I consciously realized I had seen the eyes of a deer in the bushes next to the road.

It’s actually a super important concept I teach in violence deescalation classes. Our human brain has a natural capacity for risk assessment you just need to learn to evaluate it properly. My two examples are:

• patient w/ dementia is asking a repetitive question. This makes me uneasy and I’m struggling to pin down why. After a bit I realize that if I was still working with criminally insane men, repetitive questioning means he’s not liking the answer he’s getting and trouble is coming. A dementia patient genuinely doesn’t remember asking. False alarm (but never call your brain stupid, always tell it thank you and make it a hot cup of tea or whatever your equivalent is).

• patient w/ severe Psychosis has a hair trigger. One day they slammed their body into the heavy hardwood exit door hard enough to crack it away from the maglock. About a week later I’m walking past them standing in the hall and my brain just started screaming at me that I needed to do something right that second so I went and pulled an ativan and offered it, which they were suspicious of but took. I was going to document that the patient looked tense, which was enough with how rapid their escalation pattern was, but when I sat down to document I also realized, they were staring at the door. If I’d waited a few minutes later they probably would have been doing something very dangerous and I would’ve had to do an injection and a physical hold which is so much more stressful and less safe for both them and us.

TLDR; there’s also a book called “The Gift of Fear.” Anxiety is not your enemy, but you do need to learn to ask it,“Why?” and you need to learn how to address your brain’s concerns in a way that’s safe and intelligent. And on a public scale there’s a LOT of people who will try to take advantage of your anxiety and you need to evaluate their motives very carefully.

The most important revelation I ever had about existing and being human was the understanding that our brains are not machines of logic and reason, despite being capable of performing logical reasoning.

The brain is, by default, a story telling machine. It just takes your memories and experiences and uses those things to explain whatever you’re feeling at the moment. Those explanations don’t necessarily have to make sense or be connected to reality, it just has this massive priority to weave a coherent story to explain how you got here, feeling this thing, doing whatever it is you’re doing.

In the early world of survival, this helped us. Seeing paw prints by your watering hole made you feel uneasy, your brain tied that to the time a saber-tooth cat killed your uncle. Emotional connection to a sense, an association, a story for why you should feel afraid.

In the modern world, the brain tries to do the same goddamn thing when someone you like ignores you or when you feel embarrassed in a social setting. Small things that spark the same survival response to weave a story together around it. Or you feel a sad spell from a chemical imbalance and instead of waiting for it to pass, your brain decides it’s because of your entire life, the people around you, and your lack of success.

From that understanding, you can beat rumination, you can challenge yourself, you can overcome addiction and do a lot of amazing things with your life, but it all comes back to understanding that your brain doesn’t work “out of the box” and if you want to make better decisions and feel better, you have to manually TRAIN IT to make you feel better and make better choices. You have to learn to control not your emotions, but your reactions to those emotions, to think through your thinking, to follow your chains of thought to a source. This is what a good therapist will do for you, set you on a course to retrain your brain.

A lot of people resist this because it feels “fake” and that you’re “fooling yourself,” so they resist change and training their own brains.

You are not your brain. Your brain however is very, very complex, with a multitude of voices inside of it each trying to get attention, you’re only aware of the top-most surface level that uses language to think, but the very best thing you can do for yourself is get in the habit of thinking about how you think.

Humans are very good at justifying their actions after the fact. There’s a lot of research about this, especially when our right brain does things our left brain doesn’t know about.

That “lizard brain” is a thing. Also, don’t discount the influence several trillion bacteria in your microbiome have on your decision making.

I hate when my family asks what I’m doing. I rarely know what I’m doing beyond a vague sense of what near future me wants.

If I’m cooking dinner, I’ll gather everything that’s edible, find whatever herbs/spice that I think might go with what I currently have and hope in the next hour or two something edible and/or tasty appears.

My sister gets angry at me whenever I answer “I don’t know” to a question about what I’m doing. I don’t understand why I need to have a reason for everything I do while simply trying to exist. Exhausting. Stop making your anxiety my problem…

Not sure to what depth of decisions you’re talking about, but it sounds like low-impact stuff if they’re instant. The vast majority of decisions made throughout the day have no real impact on your life in any measurable way.

I like a dumpling restaurant near me. I pick anything in my top 5. Why not #1? Because I don’t know which is the best dumpling. I can spend an hour trying to perfectly gauge my mood against their offerings, or I can settle for, potentially, 5th best in one minute. That’s #5 out of 40. If you ask me why I chose that particular type, I’ll say I don’t know, and then formulate my inner thoughts into a coherent sentence. It’s not lying, it’s just translating feelings into words. Feelings that represent a decision that will likely not affect my life. The important decision was to eat, not find the #1 dumpling. Plus, yes, it’s nice to give yourself reassurance that you made a good decision. Again, it’s not lying to yourself to make yourself believe it, it’s reminding yourself that you made a fine decision. It’s decided, so you may as well seek the benefits. If it’s the wrong decision, you can’t undo it, but you can make new decisions to change course.

How often do you make wrong decisions as opposed to simply less-than-the-best? Probably pretty rarely. Sure, there could be larger school or career choices, but you have no way of knowing how life would have played out on the other path. Maybe you’d make more money, or maybe you’re only seeing the highlights reel from someone else. Maybe your current path is hitting a dead end, but maybe the other path included the worst manager of your life. Maybe you got stuck in surprise traffic, but maybe you avoided being part of another accident. Life moves forward and you’re still walking.

If you find yourself dwelling on every decision, taking too long to decide, second guessing it after committing, and then feeling regret that there was a better option despite fulfilling your actual need, those aren’t pensive thoughts. That’s probably anxiety.

I made the genious decision to run away from home… when I was 6 years old…

idk what the fuck I was doing…

probably 6 year old me was like: “Me scared, big brother scary, home is scary, me want my mommy”

So I just went to her workplace… mom was so shocked that I knew which bus routes to take from the few times she took me to work…

I’m still traumatized from that day…

But yea I don’t remember what I was thinking, I could only guess from the circumstances…

it was so spontaneous

I saw the door, and I decided to run…

Can’t believe its now like almost 2 decades gone by

but that’s still deeply engraved in my hippocampus

felt like it happened a month ago, I remember it as if it happened moments ago, I can feel those emotions, the atmosphere…

I don’t think that’s true for all decisions, but snap decisions, for sure.

You’d probably be interested in relational frame theory.

It explains why people may be unconscious of their motivations. But it doesn’t rely on explaining the human experience in terms of brains and neurons. Instead, it explains the human experience in terms of thoughts and cognitive rules.

It’s a bit like the difference between a chemist and a historian. You could explain 9/11 in terms of chemical reactions, or in terms of the political pressures.

To be clear, both are useful.

But for some reason, psychological chemists often overshadow psychological historians. Or, more appropriately, biopsychology often overshadows functional-contextual psychology.

Could it not be more of a thing that you are consciously acting in the moment but can’t mentally and physically reflect on that until it’s a memory?