What is alarm fatigue?

Alarm fatigue is a concept in personal epistemology: Too sensitive and the agent fires too often — too insensitive and it never fires.

Example: You set a rule: 'Every time I feel frustrated, stop and journal.' Within a day you're journaling twenty times — after a slow elevator, a mistyped password, a lukewarm coffee. You abandon the practice within a week. The trigger wasn't wrong. Its sensitivity was miscalibrated. You needed 'frustrated for more than five minutes about something that affects my work' — a threshold that filters signal from noise.

This concept is part of Phase 22 (Trigger Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for trigger design.