Why it spikes under stress, not calm
The tolerance for 'it's complicated' shrinks dramatically when you're anxious, tired, or overwhelmed, because holding nuance takes more mental effort than picking a side — which is why the same situation can look genuinely gray on a calm day and feel starkly binary on a hard one.
The specific relief it offers, even when it's wrong
Deciding someone is 'all good' or 'all bad' ends the uncomfortable work of holding contradictory information about them at once — the relief is real, even when the conclusion doesn't hold up, which is part of why the pattern is so hard to catch from the inside.
How it shows up in self-judgment specifically
Black-and-white thinking applied to yourself tends to sound like 'I failed completely' after one mistake, or 'I'm a bad person' after one bad moment — collapsing a single data point into a total verdict, rather than treating it as one piece of a much larger picture.
What actually softens it
Deliberately naming the middle ground out loud — 'this part went badly, but not everything did' — interrupts the automatic jump to the extreme, and tends to work better as a repeated practice than as a one-time correction.
This describes a common thinking pattern, not a permanent trait — it often intensifies with anxiety, depression, or certain personality patterns, and a therapist trained in cognitive approaches (like CBT) can help build the tolerance for nuance that stress tends to erode.
Knowing the pattern exists in general is useful. Catching the specific moment you collapsed something nuanced into an all-or-nothing verdict is the harder, more useful thing to look at. Catch that collapse, in OLENRI