You get in the car, turn on your favorite tunes, and turn onto the road home. The next thing you know, you are 15 minutes into a 20-minute drive and don’t remember a single light, turn, or fellow traveler on the road. Alien abduction? Perhaps not.
More likely, you were operating in level 1 thinking and your level 2 brain was letting it take the wheel.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman talks about System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 is fast and automatic, and System 2 is slow and deliberate. I like to think of them as levels instead of systems because you can conquer more as you level up.
Level 1 is full of things that either protect us or that we have practiced so much they become automatic. If I ask you to recite your ABCs, you can do it quickly. They are stored, likely in song, in your level 1 brain. However, if I ask you to say them backward, level 2 has to come to the rescue.
Level 2 likes to let level 1 do the work unless nudged into action. Kahneman describes System 2 as lazy. I tend to think that more often these days, level 2 is just otherwise engaged.
Back to the car. Your route home has found its place in level 1 because you have done it so frequently. That in itself is not the problem. The problem is when level 2 is no longer paying attention.
The scary part is that while you can still do the task, you are doing it reactively, not proactively. You may have cut someone off and not realized it or driven right past the store without remembering you needed to stop. It is likely that rather than paying attention to the road, level 2 was otherwise engaged in solving the problems of the day, planning dinner, or any number of other pressing challenges.
We like to think that we can multitask, and we can, but that does not mean we are doing it well.
Level 1 is designed for survival and tends to be very emotional if it comes across anything it perceives as a threat. It has a specific set of tools it uses, those you were born with, like fight or flight, and those you have developed over time, for better or worse. But it does not solve a problem for a specific situation. It generalizes.
An unexpected email from your boss can feel the same as a saber-toothed tiger jumping out in front of you. Your body responds the same way. Your heart rate increases, your palms get sweaty, and your breathing speeds up.
How do you level up?
First, you have to recognize that you are in level 1. That means knowing what the signs are and paying attention to them. What are your thoughts? Do they tend to appear more emotional, reactive, or automatic? Are you getting the same physiological response as if you are facing the tiger? Does whatever you are dealing with feel like it has huge consequences even when it may not?
Then you start the SNAP process.
The first step is to Stop the reaction. This is where you interrupt that reactive loop just enough to get your attention and give level 2 a chance to engage. Perhaps take a breath.
When your thoughts start moving into absolutes and catastrophe feels near, ask, “What evidence do I have?” It helps slow things down and begins to shift your thinking.
At the same time, it does not automatically move you into level 2. Level 1 is very capable of answering that question quickly with information that supports the story it is already telling. It can sound like evidence, but it is often based on assumptions, past experiences, or incomplete information.
Once you have your “evidence,” you have to take one more step and look at it more closely. Are these actual facts, or are they stories your brain is filling in to make sense of the situation? Is this something you can observe directly, or something you are assuming based on what has happened before?
Once you can separate the facts from the story you are telling, that’s where the shift happens. That is what it means to level up your thinking. It is not just pausing and asking a question. It is slowing down long enough to engage level 2 and start thinking deliberately.
This is a simple concept, but it can be challenging to implement, especially in complex environments where pressure and pace are constant. It takes awareness to recognize the pattern, interrupt it, and shift your thinking in the moment. This is exactly the kind of work we focus on in SNAP workshops, where leaders build the discipline to not only understand it, but use it consistently when it matters most.
