The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce noticed something uncomfortable about belief: we don't hold it because it's true, we hold it because it stops the irritation of doubt. The moment a belief settles the discomfort of not-knowing, we stop testing it — and that's precisely when it starts quietly distorting everything we see. Peirce called this the 'fixation of belief,' and it applies with peculiar force to the mental models we build around health and wellbeing. You adopted a framework — maybe around sleep, inflammation, stress, or energy — at a moment when it resolved confusion. It worked, or seemed to. But Peirce's point is that 'it resolved my doubt' and 'it accurately maps reality' are two completely different victories, and we routinely mistake the first for the second. The practical move isn't to abandon your models — it's to treat them as temporarily adopted rather than finally proven: keep the one that's working, but leave the door open by asking what evidence would make you revise it.

What would it take — what specific observation or outcome — to make you genuinely revise the health or wellness framework you're most confident in right now?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief, 1877)