Seeing Sideways: Is Your Brain Gaslighting You? (The Availability Heuristic Explained)

“What grabs your attention is not always what deserves it.”

Why do we fear shark attacks more than slipping in the bathtub? In this episode of Seeing Sideways, I explore The Availability Heuristic—a cognitive bias that tricks us into overestimating the importance of what’s most vivid, recent, or emotionally charged—and offers practical tools to reclaim clarity and balanced thinking.

Are your fears and decisions based on facts—or just what’s easiest to recall?

Key Takeaway Insights and Tools (with Timestamps):

• The Brain Confuses Vivid with True
  The availability heuristic makes rare, dramatic events feel more likely simply because they’re easier to recall—like fearing plane crashes over car accidents.
  [01:03]
• Emotional Urgency Isn't the Same as Relevance
  What grabs your attention doesn’t always deserve it. Ask yourself: “Would this still matter if I hadn’t just seen it?”
  [05:24]
• Zoom Out to See Patterns, Not Just Stories
  One viral video or negative review isn’t the full picture. Anchor your thinking in broader data and long-term trends.
  [05:55]
• Introduce Delay Before Reacting
  Strong emotional reactions distort decision-making. Build a habit of waiting 24 hours before acting on emotionally charged information. [06:37]
• Diversify Your Inputs
  Relying on one feed or viewpoint skews your perspective. Seek out varied, quieter sources to gain a more accurate picture of reality.
  [07:14]

If this episode gave you a fresh way to reflect on your decisions, share it with someone who could use more clarity in a noisy world—and follow It’s an Inside Job for weekly tools to help you lead from the inside out.

Jason Birkevold Liem is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Seeing Sideways. He specializes in helping professionals build emotional resilience, lead with intention, and reframe unhelpful thinking patterns. Through his podcast It’s an Inside Job, Jason explores the psychology and tools behind leading oneself and others through complexity and change.

Chapters

• 0:10 Introduction to Cognitive Biases
• 1:02 The Availability Heuristic
• 4:05 The Cost of Misjudgment
• 6:37 Strategies for Clarity
• 8:10 Conclusion and Homework

Transcript

0:07

Ever catch yourself focusing on what's wrong instead of what's possible? Or judging someone too quickly only to realize you were off? That's not a flaw. It's your brain doing what it was wired to do, taking shortcuts. In this special series, we're walking through my book, Seeing Sideways, one chapter at a time. Each episode explores a powerful cognitive bias that quietly shapes how we think, choose, and connect. These mental shortcuts helped our ancestors to survive. But today, they can cloud judgment, limit perspective, and chip away at well-being. So this isn't about fixing your brain. It's about understanding it so you can lead yourself with clarity, respond with intention, and build resilience from the inside out. Well, welcome back. In the last episode where we talked about confirmation bias, I left you dangling with a question. And that question was, why we fear shark attacks more than slipping in bathtubs? Well, today we are going to tackle the next cognitive bias that affects our perceptions, and that's the availability heuristic. And that's when what's easiest to recall feels like it's the most true. As we've already established, your brain loves shortcuts. One of its favorites is the availability heuristic that we just mentioned. This is the tendency to judge how likely something is based on how easily examples come to mind. It must be common or important if you can think of it quickly, but that's not always true. The brain confuses vivid with likely and memorable with frequent. In other words, what sticks in your mind can distort what's real. It's the reason why we worry more about plane crashes than car accidents or shark attacks than slipping in the bathtub. Despite the odds being wildly different, the media and our memory tend to amplify the dramatic, the rare, and the emotional. And because those events are easier to recall, well, we give them more weight in our decisions and fears. Let's say you're planning a trip and hesitate about flying because of a recent news story about a plane crash. Now, logically, you know flying is safer than driving, but the image of the wreckage sticks. You may hear that a friend had a bad experience with a new software tool, and even though hundreds of people love it, that single story becomes your anger. The availability heuristic shows up in everyday ways. You overestimate how many people are talking about you after a minor social misstep. You think crime is rising because of a few viral videos. You assume everyone is quitting their jobs because you've seen a few LinkedIn posts. When something is recent or dramatic or emotionally charged, well, it hijacks your mental spotlight. The twist. Now from an evolutionary lens, this shortcut makes complete sense. If one member of your tribe was attacked by a predator, well, remembering that event vividly could save your life. Vivid emotional memories were the brain's way of flagging potential danger or opportunity. It is better to avoid the suspicious bush where a snake once spotted than to conduct a rational risk assessment each time you pass it. This mechanism, well, it kept us alive in small local environments. But our threat detection system is overwhelmed in today's world of global news, social media, and 24-7 alerts. The brain still assumes that what's vivid is what's nearby, and what's nearby is dangerous or life-threatening. But the world has changed significantly. Our mental radar hasn't, though. The cost. The availability heuristics skews your sense of reality. It makes rare risks feel common and everyday risks feel invisible. You may overreact to attention-grabbing outliers while underreacting to slow-burning problems. This can lead to poor financial decisions, health anxieties, business overcorrections, or even global scare fear cycles. It also narrows your perspective you might start generalizing based on a few memorable events assuming an entire city is unsafe or a profession is toxic or a community is broken based on a handful of stories and over time well these mental habits shape your world view and not always in the ways that serve you the contrarian move, The availability heuristic doesn't distort what we know. It distorts what we think we know. It doesn't offer truth but emotional urgency disguised as relevance. It convinces us that what we've just seen or felt is most likely most dangerous or most true. Now to counter this, we don't need to stop feeling. We need to learn how to filter what sticks from what truly matters. Distinguish between memorable and meaningful. What grabs your attention is not always what deserves it. The more vivid or recent something is, while the more weight your brain gives it, even if it's an outlier. When that happens, pause and ask, would I still care about this if I hadn't just seen it? Or is this an exception or a sign of a trend? This habit of asking isn't about doubt, but restoring proportion. When you stop confusing what's sticky with what's significant. Well, your thinking becomes clearer and your decisions become less reactive. Zoom out. Anchor your perception in patterns, not one-offs. Stories land fast. Stats land quickly. But the patterns, not the one-off moments, they give you the most reliable picture of reality. If one bad review or viral post or loud story changes your perception, Zoom out. Ask, what's the trend? Or, what does the broader data say? Doing this isn't about dismissing emotion, but about balancing it with perspective. When you do, well then you replace fear with context, and you replace narrative with nuance. Introduce delay. Let the emotion settle before you decide. The availability heuristic makes snap reactions feel like necessary ones. So if you see something upsetting and immediately want to act, cancel the trip or change the policy or buy the product, instead create a delay. Try a simple rule. If it feels urgent and emotional, then wait 24 hours. That space weakens the emotional charge and it strengthens your discernment. What felt like a must do often becomes a don't need to after a good night's sleep. Diversify your inputs. Balance what grabs you with what grounds you. If your worldview is shaped by one feed, one friend, or one algorithm, well, your mind becomes easy to steer. Train yourself to gather information from various voices, especially those that feel quieter, slower, or less emotionally charged. Instead of asking, what's the loudest thing I've seen? Ask, what am I missing? That habit builds mental resilience. You're not trying to cancel out stories. You're trying to contextualize them. Clarity is resilience. The world throws noise at your mind. Resilient people don't just absorb it. They filter it. They don't confuse intensity with insight. They don't make urgency a stand-in for truth. They pause. They cross-check. They zoom out. Clarity isn't about ignoring emotion far from it it's about ensuring emotion has a seat at the table but not the head of it so as we come to the tail end of this episode i'd like to give you some homework i want you to think about a recent worry or decision driven by something vivid it may be in a headline a video a personal story and then i want you to ask this question was i responding to its emotional volume or its actual relevance? What would I have done differently if I had paused to find quieter, more consistent data? And so the next time something grabs your attention, pause and ask, am I being informed or emotionally hijacked? And so in next week's episode, we are going to answer this question. Why do smart, highly educated, experienced, knowledgeable people, sometimes double down on bad decisions. We are going to explore the anchoring bias and how it shapes our perception. Thanks for listening to this episode of Seeing Sideways. These biases aren't flaws. They're part of how our brains make sense of a complex world. But with awareness, we can move from reaction to reflection, from assumption to intention. So if today's episode offered you a new perspective, please share it with someone who might benefit. Because the real work of thinking clearly, choosing wisely, and leading with purpose, well, it's all an inside job. See you next time. Music.