That’s a cool way of thinking about it.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend the other day. I was trying to ascertain whether other people experience mild, easily dismissable intrusive thoughts, as I do. It feels weird to call them intrusive thoughts if they’re easily dismissed — I feel like that phrase better describes thoughts that stick around and cause distress due to not going away. What I experience is fairly frequent thoughts that are like “imagine if you did [awful thing]”, and then I mentally reply “yes, that would indeed be awful, which is why I have no interest in doing that”, and then I’m fine.

I like your framing of it as self check diagnostics. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that feels like an accurate description of what goes on internally for me.