[jjmason]

I feel as though most of the psychological issues and poor decision making I experienced when I was younger were because I thought of myself as a fundamentally rational person, and refused to examine the irrational things my brain was doing.

This made it more or less impossible for me to address harmful emotions (because emotions are irrational) or problematic behaviours (because I don't make irrational decisions), which led to some bad times, to say the least.

Our brains are basically not wired to be objective or rational. While the human brain has developed the ability to think rationally, there is a considerable amount of the kind of "gut level" machinery that kept us alive before we developed this ability lying around.

Without careful introspection and a willingness to admit that many of our thoughts and behaviours are, without careful examination, going to be deeply irrational no matter how much we believe in rationalism, we tend to act on our irrationality to our own detriment, and often to the detriment of others as well (remember when Colbert trolled Bush by saying they were both "guys who think with [their] guts"?)