"You imagine you’d act/speak a certain way, but then when its action time, and you so much as slip up once and then its all downhill from there, your focus shifts from the actual thing to “why could i not? why do i have to fuck up when i could be so much smarter rehearsing it in my head” and yeah, its all over. I think this pattern shows up everywhere in life.

For example I play chess, and when I am not really thinking about winning, or basically when I am not overthinking, i will play well, then if I lose once or even if I won a bunch of games but then I suddenly have this conscious thought of winning games, I somehow get into such a complex pressure loop in my own head that I will be out of form for a while, and I need to properly reset my head by taking a good amount of time off"

This is a part of a conversation that I had today with a friend, and this, seemingly straightforward or atleast, easy to follow/relate stuff baffled me because I realised it is a cognitohazard. I learned about cognitohazards a while back and the concept blew my mind; it is basically a piece of information that harms you because you are aware of it's existence, the fact that you know a piece of information is what causes the harm. 

Up until now, I was unable to find any real/practical example of a Cognitohazard, the most famous one would have to be Roko's Basilisk. But as I had this conversation with this friend, it hit me, I had discovered a congnitohazard which is self awareness. It is so powerful because the more you know the worse it gets, sure there are ways to channel it, but just raw self awareness especially combined with low confidence seems like a hazard alright