[barking_biscuit]

The most obvious and classic example is "getting in your head" when you catastrophize about things and just sit there ruminating on them. None of it is actually really happening to you, but you react to your own thoughts with more thoughts and this can take you really far off course.

The other is the effect that "the element of surprise" has on your adversary where they have very little information as to what is actually going on and hence have to make a lot of internal assumptions about what might be going on.

My takeaway is basically if you can get an adversary to "think about things" and make long chains of inference without doing 'reality testing', the longer the chains of inference become, the lower the probability that they are correct. This is advantageous to you.