Present Tense

A water rower sits in my bedroom. For three months that gentle whoosh has become my favourite part of the morning. Pull, release, breathe. My body knows the rhythm. The impossible resistance of week one barely registers now. My meals have shifted too. More vegetables. Less sugar. Small changes that became routine.

Then a particular Tuesday arrived heavy. Work drained me. I reached for cake at the end of the day. Wednesday I woke exhausted and skipped the rowing session. Thursday the alarm went off and I snoozed four times. By Friday I stood in front of the mirror and saw someone who had given up.

Three months collapsed into four days.

The progress felt fictional. The effort, wasted. I could not recall the mornings I showed up or the meals I organized with care. All I could see was the cake and the person who quit.

Have you felt a handful of bad days overshadow months of consistency?

Recency bias is our tendency to weigh recent events more heavily than earlier ones when forming judgments or making predictions. The last thing that happened feels like the most important thing that happened.

A single bad meeting erases months of strong performance reviews. One week of market decline convinces investors the entire trend has reversed. A recent argument makes you question a friend’s loyalty. The pattern is consistent: proximity in time creates disproportionate weight in memory.

This tendency is tied to how memory encodes significance. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that we do not average experiences, we weight them. The peak moment and the ending dominate our recall. Everything in between fades into background noise.

Recency bias emerges because recent information is more accessible. This is closely related to the availability heuristic. What comes to mind easily feels more true, more relevant, more predictive. Your brain treats retrieval speed as a proxy for importance.

From an evolutionary perspective, the mechanism makes sense. In a world where conditions changed slowly, recent events were often the best predictor of immediate threats. If predators appeared near the river yesterday, they will likely be there today. Survival favoured those who prioritized the recent over the historical average.

But we no longer live in that world. Markets fluctuate. Relationships have natural rhythms. Performance ebbs and flows. Yet our brains still treat last week as prophecy.

The bias intensifies under uncertainty. When you cannot predict what comes next, you anchor to what just happened. Financial analysts consistently overweighted recent earnings reports when forecasting future performance, even when long-term data contradicted their predictions. The recent quarter felt more real than five years of evidence.

Sports fans experience this acutely. A team wins three games in a row and suddenly looks unstoppable. They lose the next two and the season feels lost. Each new result rewrites the entire narrative. We forget that randomness produces streaks. We mistake recency for momentum.

The cost is perspective. We lose the ability to distinguish signal from noise, pattern from fluctuation, meaningful change from temporary variation. One difficult conversation does not erase years of connection. One strong month does not reverse a declining trend. But recency bias whispers otherwise.

What if the last thing that happened is simply the last thing that happened?

A recent moment will always feel urgent, vivid, undeniable. In that sense, recency bias is inevitable. The shift is not fighting it but refusing to let it stand alone.

This week, when something recent threatens to rewrite your entire narrative, pause. Ask yourself: what was true last month? Last quarter? Last year?

If a friend disappointed you yesterday, recall the years they showed up. If a project stalled this week, remember the months it moved forward. If you missed four workouts, remember the three months you showed up.

This is not optimism. It is accuracy.

Create a simple practice: when recency screams for attention, deliberately retrieve three earlier data points that contradict it. The act of retrieval weakens the distortion. Memory becomes less about what happened last and more about what happened overall.

You might discover the recent event was not an anomaly but part of a pattern you were ignoring. Or you might find it was exactly what it seemed: one moment in a much larger story.

The goal is to see the present in proportion. Recent does not mean representative. Vivid does not mean predictive. Four bad days do not erase three months at the rowing machine.

What recent event has been rewriting your story? What earlier evidence might restore perspective?

I would love to hear what you discover when you zoom out.

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^{This publication is a space for exploration and reflection. Nothing in this email is medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. These ideas are general insights on human behaviour, not treatment or diagnosis. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional.}