How validation drives our actions

You might get anxious after submitting a big project at school or work, obsessively refreshing your email and imagining what sort of critique you’ll receive. Or you might dwell endlessly on a mistake you made.
But these reactions are based on emotions, the “deep emotional associations [in] that situation that are being brought up, which are never logical,” Dubner said. He offered a hack: a visualization practice to help you strip the emotion from the situation in which you are seeking validation in order to see it logically.