5 Cognitive Biases That Are Holding You Back (and How to Fix Them)

Your brain is lying to you, and it’s costing you more than you think.

When you are in The Pressure Zone, making career moves, handling conflict, chasing goals, your mind doesn't default to clarity. It defaults to protection.

But protection often looks like hesitation, self-sabotage, or false confidence. These are cognitive biases, mental shortcuts that feel logical but quietly wreck your decision-making.

The worst part? You don't even realize they are happening!

Here are five of the most common cognitive biases and how to break them before they break you.

1) Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore those that contradict them.

It’s why we prefer news that aligns with our worldview.

Why we downplay the bad reviews after we’ve already clicked ‘buy’.

Why we ignore the dozen red flags in someone we’ve decided to like.

In The Pressure Zone, confirmation bias doesn’t just cloud judgment, it locks us in echo chambers and blinds us to better paths.

Think of the startup founder who believes their product is the next big thing. They fixate on the handful of users that love it, dismiss negative reviews, and surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear.

When it falls apart, they claim they were blindsided. But they weren’t. They were just filtering reality.

Know someone with strong political views who calls anything contradictory ‘fake news’? That’s confirmation bias.

During bull markets, investors tend to only see more signs that the party will continue. Confirmation bias again.

Whether it's tulips, subprime mortgages, or meme coins, confirmation bias builds bubbles. And bubbles always pop.

What are the antidotes to confirmation bias?

• Ask yourself: "What would prove me wrong?"

• Intentionally seek out sources and perspectives you actively disagree with on a regular basis.

• Assign someone in your inner circle to challenge your views.

2) Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sunk cost fallacy is when you stick with something just because you've already invested time, money, or energy.

In The Pressure Zone, this looks like grinding for a job or a relationship that's clearly not working, but you are afraid to walk away because you want to recover your sunk costs.

I have been there plenty of times, both with relationships and with jobs. Most investors are intimately familiar with this, as people tend to hold on to investments that continue to lose, with the hopes that the turnaround will come soon.

The irony? The opportunity cost of insisting on your choice is huge. At the very least, you waste your most precious resource, time, on trying to fix the past instead of building the future. You come up with excuses for why he/she/it will change for the better. It’s also a self-defense mechanism for your ego, not wanting to admit your choices may have been misguided.

So, what can you do about it?

• Ask yourself: "Would I choose this again today if I hadn't already done so?"

• Run a ‘clean slate’ exercise: If you had zero obligations, what would you choose?

• Track your opportunity cost: What’s it costing you to stay?

3) Availability Bias

Are you afraid of shark attacks? Based on years of teaching scuba to new divers, I’m going to guess yes (thanks for the trauma, Jaws). The reality is you are as likely to be killed by a vending machine, and even more likely to be killed by a lightning strike. No, I’m not kidding.

You don’t fear vending machines, because they don’t make the news. But you fear sharks because one viral reel or movie etched that fear deep in your memory. Even though you’re literally safer underwater with a shark than trying to buy a Snickers after leg day.

That’s availability bias in action. You overestimate what’s easy to recall and underestimate what’s actually relevant.

In The Pressure Zone, this can present itself as risk avoidance or overestimating the likelihood of a rare event.

Have you ever been betrayed by someone you trusted? I recently experienced this in my career. Sucks, right? How long did it take you to trust again and ditch the paranoia? Because we can recall vivid events more easily, our brains favor them over accurate possibilities.

When you feel like you may be experiencing this bias, ask yourself: “What does the data say?” Keep a decision journal to reflect on how often your fear was wrong. You can also talk to someone with actual experience on that topic, instead of relying on anecdotes or headlines.

And finally, stay away from the vending machine. Just in case.

4) Dunning-Kruger Effect

Most people have heard of impostor syndrome: smart, experienced, capable people who doubt themselves as they level up.

But there’s a flip side that gets far less attention: the overconfident beginner who thinks they’ve mastered something after barely scratching the surface.

Ironically, both fall into the same trap: the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where low-skill individuals overestimate their ability, while high-skill individuals underestimate theirs.

Want to spot someone on the overconfidence curve? Listen for: “No one knows this better than me.”

Think of the fitness influencer who gets shredded once and starts selling coaching packages. Or the junior employee confidently correcting people with ten times their experience. Or the crypto bro who watches one YouTube video, buys Dogecoin, and suddenly thinks he understands financial markets (No, I’m not bitter. You’re bitter.)

On the other side? The panelist who turns down a speaking gig because “I’m not ready.” The Ivy League grad who still wonders if admissions made a mistake. The high performer who downplays wins as luck.

I’ve been on both sides throughout the years on different topics. Maybe you have, too.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a psychological blind spot that distorts self-awareness and stunts growth. Whether you are on the overconfident side or the impostor side, here are powerful antidotes for both.

First, ask people you trust: “What’s one thing I’ve done well and one thing I could improve?” If you are overconfident, it humbles you. If an impostor, it validates you.

Keep a log of wins, praises, projects completed, or problems solved. Review it weekly to calibrate self-perception. Impostors need proof. Overconfident people need pattern recognition. This will help both sides.

Lastly, teach what you know. It’s only when you try to explain something to a beginner that you realize what you don’t know. Ironically, my understanding of project finance improved the most AFTER I became an adjunct professor at an Ivy League master’s program.

5) Negativity Bias

Ever had one of those days where one tiny thing ruins an otherwise great day?

Maybe you had a great morning workout, crushed your presentation at work, and made progress on your big project… and then one piece of criticism hijacks your entire mood for the day.

That’s negativity bias: your brain’s built-in survival system that gives more emotional weight to bad experiences than good ones.

According to Prospect Theory, developed by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the emotional pain of losing $100 is about twice as strong as the joy of gaining $100.

Same loss, same gain. Very different emotional impact.

I still remember reading the course feedback survey after my first time teaching. There were dozens of kind, thoughtful reviews. But of course, there was that one negative review, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even after years of teaching, it’s the negative reviews I remember the most.

In The Pressure Zone, this is dangerous. It slows momentum, erodes confidence, and fuels impostor syndrome, even when 95% of the evidence says you are doing great.

What do you do about it? For me, it’s keeping a gratitude journal. Every night, since 2018.

I write down three good things from that day. They can be small (a workout, a kind word) or meaningful (time with a friend, progress on a hard problem).

It’s not fluff. It’s a bias correction tool. It reminds your brain: “Good things happened, too. Do not forget them.”

Have You Watched Your Film?

If your life were a film, what would the audience be shouting at the screen right now?

“Go after it!”

“Don’t trust him!”

“Walk away!”

“Why are you still playing small?”

Zoom out. Watch your life like a film. What patterns are obvious from the outside, but invisible from your seat in the scene?

Look at your life from the perspective of the audience. What biases and traps are you falling for?

That’s what cognitive biases do: they blur your judgment in the moments that matter most. They don’t disappear in The Pressure Zone, but they don’t have to direct the story, either.

Start by noticing.

Awareness leads to interruption.

Interruption leads to better decisions.

That’s how you level up.

P.S. I put together a downloadable one-pager with all five biases and their antidotes, designed for high-stakes moments.

Subscribe to The Pressure Zone and get the Bias Buster Checklist free—a printable tool to help you stay clear-headed when it counts most.