I only wear a helmet on trails and long road rides. On trails, the false feeling of confidence I get from knowing I have a helmet gives results in faster times

I only wear a helmet on trails and long road rides. On trails, the false feeling of confidence I get from knowing I have a helmet gives results in faster times on my various trail circuits. Once I forgot my helmet and decided to ride anyhow and my times were bad because I was too chicken-shit to go balls out, always tapping the brakes. The psychologic effect is massive. I'm a rock climber as well. Climbers will regale you with harrowing tales of all the times they thought they were gonna die, but when you look at the accident reports, more often than not it wasn't the "scary" parts of the climb where they got hurt. It's the things like rapelling where lapses in situational awareness lead to absent minded mistakes. When you fear for your life you are not absent minded. And so Alex Honnold is still alive, even though by all "reasonable" statistical judgement he should be dead a hundred times over.