Occam’s Razor, Occam’s Broom, and the Shape of Anxiety

You may have heard of Occam's razor. How about Occam's broom? Bear with me as I attempt to link how these concepts apply to anxiety, confirmation bias, and psychotherapy.

Occam's razor is a principle most of us have encountered, even if we cannot place the name. It states, roughly, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one; do not invent more causes than you need to account for what you observe. If the cat knocked your glass off the table, you do not need to imagine an intruder. The principle is a rule for clear thinking, and it has shaped science, medicine, and philosophy for centuries.

Occam's broom is less famous. The term was coined by the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, and later given wider currency by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who used it to skewer the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists and propagandists.¹ It names the opposite tendency: the habit of sweeping inconvenient facts out of sight so that a tidy account can survive. Where the razor cuts away unnecessary complexity, the broom clears away inconvenient evidence. The razor disciplines honest thinking; the broom describes motivated dishonesty, or at least motivated blindness. You keep the theory, you remove the facts that challenge it.

Both matter in everyday life. But in the context of anxiety, the broom is doing a great deal of work, mostly without our knowledge.

How Anxiety Sweeps the Floor

Anxiety is not simply a feeling. It is, among other things, a perceptual stance; a way of noticing the world that is shaped heavily by threat. When anxiety is present, attention narrows toward potential danger, and ambiguous information gets interpreted in the most threatening direction available. The neutral expression on a colleague's face becomes a sign of disapproval, the slight tightness in your chest becomes evidence of something serious, and the silence after a text message becomes confirmation that you have said the wrong thing.

This is the broom at work. Your anxious mind does not experience itself as selecting a negative version of events; it experiences itself as simply seeing what is there. The filtering happens before the information reaches conscious awareness, so nothing presents itself as a claim to be examined; everything presents itself as fact. You cannot apply the razor to a theory that has not announced itself as a theory.

This matters because it means insight alone rarely shifts anxiety. You can understand intellectually that you are catastrophising, and the next anxious thought still arrives pre-formed, carrying the full weight of certainty. The knowing does not change the seeing.

Where Confirmation Bias Comes In

If the broom is how anxious perception gets established, confirmation bias is how it stays in place. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, remember, and credit information that supports what we already believe, while discounting information that does not.

In anxiety, this runs in a particularly efficient direction. When the feared outcome does not occur, the credit doesn't go to the absence of actual threat; it goes to the precaution taken. You cancelled the social event and felt relief, and the relief confirms that the event was indeed dangerous. You checked the lock three times and nothing bad happened, and the safety behaviour gets the credit rather than the reality. Disconfirming evidence is not just ignored; it is converted, becoming more evidence for the original belief.

The result is a belief system that is, in practice, unfalsifiable, because every outcome confirms it.

The floor stays swept, and you never notice the sweeping.

Two Readings of the Same Thought

The same piece of information can be handled in two very different ways. The broom takes it as fact and sweeps aside whatever does not fit; the razor treats it as a claim and lets the evidence weigh in. The difference is easiest to see side by side. Open a step on each side below to compare.

Open a step on each side to compare.

Occam's broom

Sweeps positives under the rug.

1 Data arrives as fact, not claim +

The fear lands as something that is simply true, not as a guess that could be checked.

Example "They think my haircut is terrible" feels like a plain fact, not something we actually have no evidence for.

2 Recoded as confirmation +

Anything that should count against the fear is quietly turned into more proof for it.

Example A friend says they like it; the mind decides they are only being polite, so the compliment becomes proof it looks bad.

3 Unfalsifiable belief +

Because nothing is ever allowed to count against it, the fear can never be shown to be wrong.

Example Smiles mean pity, silence means judgement, compliments mean politeness; whatever happens, the haircut is terrible.

Occam's razor

Fear is assessed using evidence.

1 Data received as checkable info +

The thought is seen as a biased guess about the world; it might be right, it might be wrong.

Example "They think my haircut is terrible" becomes a question: what would actually tell me whether that is true?

2 Evidence allowed to count +

What fits and what does not are both allowed onto the scale; good outcomes are believed, not explained away.

Example A friend says they like it; that is taken at face value and allowed to weigh against the fear.

3 Tolerable perception +

Because evidence is allowed to land, the belief can shift; the fear is weighed rather than obeyed.

Example After a few ordinary reactions, "everyone thinks it's terrible" softens to "one person liked it, nobody else noticed, I am probably fine".

What This Means in the Therapy Space

One of the central tasks in working with anxiety is making the broom visible; helping a person see that what feels like direct perception is, in fact, a constructed account that has been doing a lot of selective editing.

A technique that can help with this is externalisation, drawn from narrative therapy. Rather than treating anxiety as something a person is or has, we treat it as something separate from the person, an entity with its own habits, preferences, and methods of influence. We might ask:

What does Anxiety want you to believe? What does it tell you to avoid? What does it sweep out of view to keep its story convincing?

This is not meant as a literal claim about anxiety being a separate being. It is a linguistic move that creates distance; enough distance that the person can observe the pattern rather than be entirely inside it. Fear says the situation is dangerous is something that can be challenged. The situation is dangerous is not; it presents as simple, obvious fact. The externalisation makes the broom visible by naming it as a broom.

It's worth noting that Fear has actually been trying to protect you; anxiety, particularly in the context of complex trauma, is often an adaptive response that made complete sense in an earlier environment. It likely kept you safe. The therapeutic aim is not to defeat it but to develop a different relationship with it, to update it, and to let you see that what it sweeps away is important to look at.

The Clean Thread Through

Occam's razor asks us to accept the simplest explanation. Anxiety mimics that simplicity, delivering a version of events stripped of anything that would complicate the threat story. Occam's broom names what it is actually doing: removing the evidence that would allow us to revise the account.

You cannot overturn what you cannot see. The work of therapy, in no small part, is picking up what anxiety has swept under the rug; not to dismiss the fear, but to empower the individual to lift the rug to find what else there is to see.

Reference

1. Dennett DC. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. New York: W. W. Norton; 2013. (Discusses "Occam's broom," a term attributed to Sydney Brenner.)

Is anxiety doing your seeing for you?

If the account anxiety hands you has started to feel like simple fact, therapy is one way to pick up what has been swept aside. I'd be glad to talk.

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