Comment by pointyfence

I talked about this in another comment here, but the danger in unhealthy introspection is getting lost in your own mind in an Escher stair fashion where the immediate scope of your thinking appears to make sense. But in reality you've constructed a faulty, hard to escape representation.

It takes some time, but it helps to take a somewhat adversarial approach and try to falsify your introspection. That's why writing is important. It forces you to lay out the structure for later review. When you just think about something, how that thinking "felt" makes up a lot more of your judgement than the actual coherence or validity.

You need to be able to step outside yourself which is easier said than done, but that's a good skill for a variety of reasons. Writing is an important way of doing it. It's like a snapshot of you in a moment of time that you can review later when you are a slightly different person. Sharing your introspection with others who you trust but don't think like you can also help: good friends, therapists, mentors. LLMs can be great for this sort of thing if you approach it with healthy skepticism and avoid leading it to your answer of choice (but if people can't, who knows where they'll end up).

Setting time boundaries help a lot. Also, resetting your mind by doing something that doesn't bend much to navel gazing helps. Your garden doesn't give a shit about your thoughts. I took judo on a trial run once. Your mind clears very fast when somebody is trying to re-introduce you to the ground.

I think that today, people's ability to do this has greatly diminished. Technology has made it much easier for people to get trapped in those staircases just because it makes them feel good in the short-term. With networks, it's even worse because now they are comforted by the shared experience. Those staircases become the identity and reality rather than something to escape from.