Just a caution regarding a key assumption in this article - the assumption is that metacognition/reflection is “good”.
However, some people experience too much metacognition/reflection and that is actually correlated with depression/anxiety. These people also tend to be highly intelligent, and I suspect a higher proportion of HN readers will fall into this category.
Turns out just running on autopilot most of the time is the healthier human experience.
Agree. My personal take on this is a boring one: Like all things, it's a balance.
I'm introspective by nature (I'm sure many of us on this site are) and metacognition can be a very comfortable trap. It's a space where you can convince yourself that you can solve your life problems by spending enough time and effort thinking about them, the same way many of us approach engineering problems or other aspects of life. This is even worse in the era of AI, where you can have a helpful assistant to talk through your problems with and encourage analysis even further.
Turns out that's not true. You can spend as much time as you want thinking about your life, circumstances, emotions, experiences, etc. Eventually, you'll have to actually do something and go have some contact with reality.
It's helpful to examine your life and engage with your problems, but taking it too far is just another way of escapism. At least it was for me, YMMV.
I’ve been wondering the same thing about meditation: it is “known” that is is good for you in the long-term, but I wonder if spending time focused on a point in your mind is a very good idea for people that spend a lot of time stuck in their own minds and thoughts. In periods of solitude, I’ve found meditation to increase feelings of depersonalisation and solipsism, that I can easily imagine could precipitate into psychosis for some people. I don’t do much of it any more, and for people like me, I believe physical exercise to be a much better counterweight to too much thinking.
We push these one-size-fits-all suggestions, but we are never told who have they modeled from; not everybody is the same, and our minds are even more diverse than our biology.
Also, re: running on autopilot: the goal of mindfulness is to be aware of every waking moment, yet our biology is very much tuned to running on autopilot because it is so much more efficient and frees CPU time for higher processing—you don’t want to be focusing on every muscle when you walk now, do you? Is it such a great idea to overrule our energy conservation protocols our brains depend upon?
(Sorry for the off-topic, your comment was too interesting)
Interesting perspective on meditation. I was fortunate enough to have had good teachers through the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and the Insight Meditation Society. As you would expect, my experience differs from what you described.
In my opinion, breath-focused meditation is not thinking. It is being aware of the physical sensations of breathing and being aware of emotions and thoughts that arrive, but not engaging with them. Breath awareness and letting thoughts and emotions come into your mind is the easy part. Not engaging with them is the tricky part.
You are right to point out that suggestions like meditation are not one-size-fits-all. Some people aren't ready to commit to the changes meditation brings about, just as others are not ready to undertake weight loss or personal improvement. No blame. When you're ready, the practice will be there.
RE: Running on autopilot. Yes, there are parts of the body that need to function on autopilot, such as breathing and heartbeat. I appreciate that my stomach and intestines run on autopilot. At the same time, I think running on autopilot is dangerous because that is what gets hijacked by social media and misled by advertising. It's why you miss a turn and drive the way you always drove and why you write down the wrong date when the year changes. I consider running an automatic as a possible reason why using AI "makes people stupider."
Meditation (walking, breath, flame) taps into a semi-universal part of the brain, below the level of consciousness, and provides a mechanism for reducing brain chaos, also known as the monkey mind. In my experience, developing the skill of reducing monkey mind-generated chaos becomes a semi-automatic process reinforced through daily meditation practice.
Most mindfulness practices focus on being aware of your body and mind at a low level all the time. It's not an active engagement; it's simply being aware. The monkey mind burns a lot of cycles, and I would rather spend those cycles being aware of the monkey mind triggers and not engaging with them.
There's some healthy self-reflection, and then there's spiraling and overthinking / overanalysing.
I wouldn't say "stop thinking / run on autopilot" per se, but more that it's healthier to set a limit. Finish a sentence, get it out of your head, and move on. Rest and sleep help with processing the thoughts that you can use journaling for to get in order.
So much waffle. It's written like an online recipe, where we get the author's life story before they actually get down to business. If you're writing an article titled "The Socratic Journal Method" consider discussing the Socratic Journal Method as your first point. In 2025 is it really necessary to tell people they can journal on paper or on a computer?
Somewhat related: sentence completions / fill-in-the-blank templates are shockingly effective at eliciting your inner thoughts which even you didn't know you were feeling. The idea is from Nathaniel Branden's work.
"What I regret right now is ____"
"What I should now is ____"
"I am become aware that ____"
You don't need to journal these on paper. Don't do these in public. You might find yourself overwhelmed by what comes out.
I used audio journaling before Whisper came out, and I did have a pipeline that would run a transcription through Google Cloud and save the transcript to Evernote. I didn’t actually review the transcripts most of the time, but the very fact of developing my thoughts—without being constrained by typing speed—was very helpful.
What I also liked about this system was that it gave me independence of place: I didn’t have to sit down at a computer. Instead, I could be thinking aloud while driving a car, or while taking a walk in the countryside. Usually, after finishing such a conversation with myself, I would automatically feel much more clarity about the upcoming day, or about whatever issue that had been on my mind.
If I were to add AI to this process, I would perhaps only have the AI extract some bullet point summaries for the topics that were covered, and anything that could be considered a potential to-do item—so that as output you would get these high-level summaries, along with the raw transcript.
If you wanted to, you could also color-code for each summary item the parts of the raw transcript in which these are covered. So, if you ever do look at the summary-slash-transcript, you can always quickly look up what your thoughts were on the subject—though I would guess this would not happen often.
And the most value from that would probably be that your future self, say 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, will be able to dive into what went through your head at this point in time. For the immediate present, the most value probably just comes from taking the mess that is in your head of unfinished thoughts and serializing it into coherent speech—until you feel everything that’s on your mind has been said.
I have wanted to record parts of my stream of consciousness so I can put more time into it later - but that will require me to block out time to do that. I hope I'll have it some day.
Left unsaid is why this practice can be so meaningful. I think it's just that: these are the questions you wish someone else would ask you. When we're stressed, angry, grieving, lost, I think we all yearn to have someone care about us enough to ask these questions, to let us open up, to not be alone.
And while I think it's great when that can actually be another person, whether it's a friend, or partner, or therapist, it is still surprisingly calming, healing, even, when we pose the question to ourselves, and then really wait to hear the answer.
This is an interesting perspective and I like this. I'm going to see how this method goes. I journal and tend to write a lot. This is after years of repeated tries, failures, and re-tries.
I agree with the simple physical pen/paper combo.[1] For the digital part, I suggest sticking to plain-text.[2] Personally, I’ve a feeling video or audio, unless transcribed and texted, will likely become cumbersome and will remain in oblivion.
I’ve been journaling for 15 years. Top tip: remove any need at all to do it “right”. Have a time in the day to do it, and be comfortable with writing just one word, or two sentences, or an essay, just whatever comes out. The best kind of journaling is the one you actually do, and even five-word entries written ten years ago will transport me back to what I was feeling and thinking. Every failed attempt I’ve seen or heard of has people feeling they have to write an essay.
Just a caution regarding a key assumption in this article - the assumption is that metacognition/reflection is “good”.
However, some people experience too much metacognition/reflection and that is actually correlated with depression/anxiety. These people also tend to be highly intelligent, and I suspect a higher proportion of HN readers will fall into this category.
Turns out just running on autopilot most of the time is the healthier human experience.
Agree. My personal take on this is a boring one: Like all things, it's a balance.
I'm introspective by nature (I'm sure many of us on this site are) and metacognition can be a very comfortable trap. It's a space where you can convince yourself that you can solve your life problems by spending enough time and effort thinking about them, the same way many of us approach engineering problems or other aspects of life. This is even worse in the era of AI, where you can have a helpful assistant to talk through your problems with and encourage analysis even further.
Turns out that's not true. You can spend as much time as you want thinking about your life, circumstances, emotions, experiences, etc. Eventually, you'll have to actually do something and go have some contact with reality.
It's helpful to examine your life and engage with your problems, but taking it too far is just another way of escapism. At least it was for me, YMMV.
I’ve been wondering the same thing about meditation: it is “known” that is is good for you in the long-term, but I wonder if spending time focused on a point in your mind is a very good idea for people that spend a lot of time stuck in their own minds and thoughts. In periods of solitude, I’ve found meditation to increase feelings of depersonalisation and solipsism, that I can easily imagine could precipitate into psychosis for some people. I don’t do much of it any more, and for people like me, I believe physical exercise to be a much better counterweight to too much thinking.
We push these one-size-fits-all suggestions, but we are never told who have they modeled from; not everybody is the same, and our minds are even more diverse than our biology.
Also, re: running on autopilot: the goal of mindfulness is to be aware of every waking moment, yet our biology is very much tuned to running on autopilot because it is so much more efficient and frees CPU time for higher processing—you don’t want to be focusing on every muscle when you walk now, do you? Is it such a great idea to overrule our energy conservation protocols our brains depend upon?
(Sorry for the off-topic, your comment was too interesting)
Interesting perspective on meditation. I was fortunate enough to have had good teachers through the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and the Insight Meditation Society. As you would expect, my experience differs from what you described.
In my opinion, breath-focused meditation is not thinking. It is being aware of the physical sensations of breathing and being aware of emotions and thoughts that arrive, but not engaging with them. Breath awareness and letting thoughts and emotions come into your mind is the easy part. Not engaging with them is the tricky part.
You are right to point out that suggestions like meditation are not one-size-fits-all. Some people aren't ready to commit to the changes meditation brings about, just as others are not ready to undertake weight loss or personal improvement. No blame. When you're ready, the practice will be there.
RE: Running on autopilot. Yes, there are parts of the body that need to function on autopilot, such as breathing and heartbeat. I appreciate that my stomach and intestines run on autopilot. At the same time, I think running on autopilot is dangerous because that is what gets hijacked by social media and misled by advertising. It's why you miss a turn and drive the way you always drove and why you write down the wrong date when the year changes. I consider running an automatic as a possible reason why using AI "makes people stupider."
Meditation (walking, breath, flame) taps into a semi-universal part of the brain, below the level of consciousness, and provides a mechanism for reducing brain chaos, also known as the monkey mind. In my experience, developing the skill of reducing monkey mind-generated chaos becomes a semi-automatic process reinforced through daily meditation practice.
Most mindfulness practices focus on being aware of your body and mind at a low level all the time. It's not an active engagement; it's simply being aware. The monkey mind burns a lot of cycles, and I would rather spend those cycles being aware of the monkey mind triggers and not engaging with them.
There's some healthy self-reflection, and then there's spiraling and overthinking / overanalysing.
I wouldn't say "stop thinking / run on autopilot" per se, but more that it's healthier to set a limit. Finish a sentence, get it out of your head, and move on. Rest and sleep help with processing the thoughts that you can use journaling for to get in order.
I see you are engaging in meta-metacognition.
I won't take some time to reflect on that.
And now of course we also run all life problems by ChatGPT.
Totally off topic, but opening this page and seeing the typography makes me want to read it. Yay clarity!
(Edit: the many many paragraphs of fluff before unveiling the actual method did counter this effect somewhat)
So much waffle. It's written like an online recipe, where we get the author's life story before they actually get down to business. If you're writing an article titled "The Socratic Journal Method" consider discussing the Socratic Journal Method as your first point. In 2025 is it really necessary to tell people they can journal on paper or on a computer?
One of the curse of reading in 2025 is your mind starts to pattern match if this is AI written. Parts of this has tell tale signs of ChatGPT. Like:
> 2. Digital Typing. The Modern Powerhouse
Not to say it is but it kinda means the article is pretty light on "new" information
Somewhat related: sentence completions / fill-in-the-blank templates are shockingly effective at eliciting your inner thoughts which even you didn't know you were feeling. The idea is from Nathaniel Branden's work.
"What I regret right now is ____"
"What I should now is ____"
"I am become aware that ____"
You don't need to journal these on paper. Don't do these in public. You might find yourself overwhelmed by what comes out.
Perhaps we should be inserting "...wait! But" at artificial locations to encourage deeper thought.
[dead]
Free flow of thought has always worked well for me. Over the years I also developed my own system -- https://fire-framework.info/
I have mixed thoughts about audio journaling.
At first I was in love - I made an app around Whisper transcription model the weekend it came out. (Still working on it - https://whispermemos.com)
But when I try to read those recordings, they seem long and uninteresting.
I think the slowness of writing forces us to transform the thoughts/ideas into a format that has more substance.
So typing creates better distilled version of the text, and writing with one even more.
Recording audio just makes a raw stream of consciousness.
The process isn’t as therapeutic. It’s like stuffing food in your face instead of slowly chewing.
What are your thoughts on this?
Interesting. WhisperMemos user here.
I used audio journaling before Whisper came out, and I did have a pipeline that would run a transcription through Google Cloud and save the transcript to Evernote. I didn’t actually review the transcripts most of the time, but the very fact of developing my thoughts—without being constrained by typing speed—was very helpful.
What I also liked about this system was that it gave me independence of place: I didn’t have to sit down at a computer. Instead, I could be thinking aloud while driving a car, or while taking a walk in the countryside. Usually, after finishing such a conversation with myself, I would automatically feel much more clarity about the upcoming day, or about whatever issue that had been on my mind.
If I were to add AI to this process, I would perhaps only have the AI extract some bullet point summaries for the topics that were covered, and anything that could be considered a potential to-do item—so that as output you would get these high-level summaries, along with the raw transcript.
If you wanted to, you could also color-code for each summary item the parts of the raw transcript in which these are covered. So, if you ever do look at the summary-slash-transcript, you can always quickly look up what your thoughts were on the subject—though I would guess this would not happen often.
And the most value from that would probably be that your future self, say 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, will be able to dive into what went through your head at this point in time. For the immediate present, the most value probably just comes from taking the mess that is in your head of unfinished thoughts and serializing it into coherent speech—until you feel everything that’s on your mind has been said.
I have wanted to record parts of my stream of consciousness so I can put more time into it later - but that will require me to block out time to do that. I hope I'll have it some day.
Left unsaid is why this practice can be so meaningful. I think it's just that: these are the questions you wish someone else would ask you. When we're stressed, angry, grieving, lost, I think we all yearn to have someone care about us enough to ask these questions, to let us open up, to not be alone.
And while I think it's great when that can actually be another person, whether it's a friend, or partner, or therapist, it is still surprisingly calming, healing, even, when we pose the question to ourselves, and then really wait to hear the answer.
This is an interesting perspective and I like this. I'm going to see how this method goes. I journal and tend to write a lot. This is after years of repeated tries, failures, and re-tries.
I agree with the simple physical pen/paper combo.[1] For the digital part, I suggest sticking to plain-text.[2] Personally, I’ve a feeling video or audio, unless transcribed and texted, will likely become cumbersome and will remain in oblivion.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
2. “Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.” - Derek Sivers
are there any other learnings you might share? I just cant make myself stick to it,,
Slightly off topic: I have little tolerance for “not just X but also Y” phrasing because of ChatGPT.
I counted 3 almost back to back and stopped reading.
I don’t think people realize how much ChatGPT “leaks” its own commentary into their writing.
I’ve been journaling for 15 years. Top tip: remove any need at all to do it “right”. Have a time in the day to do it, and be comfortable with writing just one word, or two sentences, or an essay, just whatever comes out. The best kind of journaling is the one you actually do, and even five-word entries written ten years ago will transport me back to what I was feeling and thinking. Every failed attempt I’ve seen or heard of has people feeling they have to write an essay.