Think of a therapist, and you might picture a pipe-smoking Freudian, interrogating you about repressed feelings. These days, you’re more likely to meet a more modern form of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy (or CBT for short). CBT focuses on correcting distorted thoughts and maladaptive behaviors: basically, helping you reason through your problems. It’s supposed to be one of the types of therapy that has the most actual scientific evidence behind it.

What impresses me about CBT isn’t just the scientific evidence for it, but the way it tries to teach something like a scientific worldview. If you’re depressed or anxious, a common problem is obsessive thoughts about what others think of you. Maybe you worry that everyone is just putting up with you out of pity, or that you’re hopelessly behind your peers. For many scientists, these are familiar worries.

The standard CBT advice for these worries is as obvious as it is scary: if you worry what others think of you, ask!

This is, at its heart, a very scientific thing to do. If you’re curious about something, and you can test it, just test it! Of course, there are risks to doing this, both in your personal life and in your science, but typical CBT advice applies surprisingly well to both.

If you constantly ask your friends what they think about you, you end up annoying them. Similarly, if you perform the same experiment over and over, you can keep going until you get the result you want. In both cases, the solution is to commit to trusting your initial results: just like scientists pre-registering a study, if you ask your friends what they think you need to trust them and not second-guess what they say. If they say they’re happy with you, trust that. If they criticize, take their criticism seriously and see if you can improve.

Even then, you may be tempted to come up with reasons why you can’t trust what your friends say. You’ll come up with reasons why they might be forced to be polite, while they secretly still hate you. Similarly, as a scientist you can always come up with theories that get around the evidence: no matter what you observe, a complicated enough chain of logic can make it consistent with anything you want. In both cases, the solution is a dose of Occam’s Razor: don’t fixate on an extremely complicated explanation when a simpler one already fits. If your friends say they like you, they probably do.