My ego took a massive hit this week.
I consider myself selectively gearheaded, but earlier this week while driving my dads thirty year old green diesel van, things went completely sideways.
I pulled into the gas station. After struggling to remember which side the tank was on and fumbling to unlock the lid with a physical key, I actively double checked the required fuel.
Despite all that conscious effort, I confidently reached out and grabbed the green handle instead of the black one. I pumped regular gasoline straight into a diesel engine. Completely oblivious, I drove off. Three kilometers later, reality suddenly hit me. What on earth did I just put in the tank?
I quickly pulled over to call for help, only to realize I had also forgotten my phone at home. Luckily, my dad has had the exact same number since mobile phones were invented. I borrowed my teenagers phone, confessed my sins, and formulated a rescue plan.
So there I was. Stranded in the middle of nowhere with two kids and a poisoned van, sitting by the side of the road making dandelion crowns for target practice while waiting to be rescued.
My immediate reaction was pure embarrassment. How could someone who actually thinks she knows something about cars make such a fundamentally stupid mistake?
The Muscle Memory Hijack
In my last post, we talked about the Practitioner Paradox, which explains why seasoned experts fail basic theoretical tests. This week, even if it sounds like excuse I will try to explain to myself why I did such a non-characteristic move (at least in my opinion).
To understand why I poisoned the “Green Devil” you have to look at the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. In his groundbreaking research on human judgment, Kahneman separates our thinking into two distinct operating systems.
System One is fast, automatic, and runs entirely on intuition and muscle memory. System Two is slow, deliberate, analytical, and requires a massive amount of active cognitive energy.
My personal, daily driver is an automatic hybrid car. My dads van is a manual diesel.
Even if it might now sound excuse, I’ll fill you in with a background story. For two days, my cognitive battery had been completely drained by physical labor, micro decisions, and parenting chaos.
By day three, my executive function was running on absolute fumes. When I got into the van, my brain had to use its last remaining drop of System Two energy just to manage the clutch and the manual gears.
The Anatomy of an Action Slip
The entire sequence at the gas station was a textbook cognitive failure. Forgetting which side the tank was on and struggling with the key lock were the early warning signs that my brain was shutting down entirely. I tried to force my brain to engage. I actively double checked the fuel type. But the moment I reached for the pump, my central nervous system defaulted to energy saving mode.
Cognitive psychologist James Reason spent decades researching human error and coined the exact term for what happened to me: an action slip. Reasons research proves that when your brain is depleted, it simply cannot sustain System Two thinking. Instead, it aggressively defaults to your most deeply ingrained physical habits.
My most deeply ingrained habit is grabbing the gasoline handle for my own car. My exhausted brain completely overrode my conscious automotive knowledge and simply executed my daily default script.
I claim that I did not pump gasoline because I forgot how engines work. I pumped gasoline because my brain literally did not have the battery power to stop my own muscle memory.
Working Memory Shedding
Forgetting my phone before I even left the house was the ultimate biological proof of this situation. Working memory is the mental scratchpad you use to keep track of temporary information, like where you set your keys or your phone.
British psychologist Alan Baddeley pioneered the working memory model, demonstrating that this mental scratchpad has a strictly limited capacity and requires constant active energy to maintain.
When you are operating on a severe deficit, your brain views working memory as an unnecessary luxury. It starts silently closing background applications to keep you functioning on a basic survival level.
Leaving my phone behind was not clumsiness (yes, yes, you can disagree) It was my brain actively shedding a task it no longer had the bandwidth to process.
Remembering my dads ancient phone number, however, was pure, deep long term memory saving the day when my short term memory had entirely evaporated.
Give Your Engine a Break
When we make uncharacteristic, silly mistakes in our daily lives or our careers, our first instinct is to panic. We think we are losing our edge. We wonder if we are failing at our jobs. The reality is usually much simpler.
Your biological engine is redlining. If someone who is selectively gearheaded can put gasoline into a diesel van because their brain is tired, a senior executive can absolutely drop the ball on a basic email or miss a glaring error on a spreadsheet after a grueling week.
Your body will always tell you when your cognitive load is maxed out. Sometimes it tells you with a headache, and sometimes it tells you by leaving you stranded on the side of the road making dandelion crowns.
Learn to recognize your own check engine light before you put the wrong fuel in your tank.
And if you are leading a team and your top performers suddenly start making bizarre, uncharacteristic errors, do not immediately put them on a performance improvement plan. Look at their workload. They might not need a lecture on attention to detail. They probably just need a break before they accidentally put the corporate equivalent of gasoline into a diesel engine.
How ever I would formulate this it will still take looong time for my ego to get over what happened. And I’m fairly sure some of my friends and most certainly my family will make sure I remember…
