As impressive as the human brain’s reasoning capacities are, we can be pretty unreasonable creatures. There are around 180 recognized cognitive biases -- common errors in reasoning, evaluating, or recall. Among the most common and egregious, perhaps, is what’s known as present bias. Basically, humans are very bad at doing any favors for their future selves.

For example, a study examining present bias gave people the option of receiving $150 dollars today, or $180 in one month. Most chose the $150 today. Practically, this means turning down a 20% gain over the span of 30 days -- show me a mutual fund or savings account that can do that.

While experiments with hypothetical payouts are enough to make us scratch our heads and go, “hmm, how strange” this common cognitive bias has effects on far more grave decisions, such as those that shape our health and wellbeing. Humans are far too good at, day after day, convincing themselves that exercising, taking care of that achy shoulder, eating better, sleeping more, alleviating stress, etc. is a problem for future you, not present you. And, as the story goes, future you gets farther and farther away until it all comes crashing down, and suddenly present you is future you, and now you’re saddled with decades of poor choices.

These cognitive biases exist in all of us, it seems, to some degree, and there’s no magic pill to fix it. But awareness shines light on the problem, and armed with this awareness, we can step back and watch our brain work -- watch it make its mistakes, watch it defer better choices for tomorrow in favor of illusory comfort today -- and then we can step in and course correct.

Know that you are flawed. Your thinking, processing, reasoning is all disastrously full of errors, and that’s perfectly normal and okay -- you just need to see it for what it is and do something about it.

- PS

8/6/18

• 2 rounds for time:

• 25 pull-ups

• Rest 1 min

• 50 push-ups

• Rest 1 min

• 75 squats

• Rest 1 min

Then...

• 3 rounds for quality

• 15 hollow rocks

• 60s ring plank