Most people diagnose their LSAT timing struggles as a speed problem — “I need to read faster” or “I need to work through questions quicker.” For a large share of test-takers, the actual bottleneck is confidence, not raw speed.
Re-reading the same stimulus three times because you don't trust your first pass. Second-guessing an answer you already reasoned through correctly. Lingering on a question after you've found a defensible answer, searching for total certainty that the LSAT rarely offers. None of these are speed problems — they're confidence problems wearing a timing disguise.
If you believe your timing problem is about speed, the natural response is to rush — read faster, move on faster. But rushing someone whose real issue is confidence just produces more careless errors, without addressing why they were slow in the first place.
When you go back and review a timed section, ask: for the questions I spent the longest on, did I ultimately pick my FIRST instinct, or did I change my answer? If you're consistently returning to your original instinct after burning extra time, that's strong evidence the extra time was spent on doubt, not on genuinely re-deriving a better answer.
The fix isn't “trust yourself blindly” — it's building enough accurate pattern recognition, through the kind of deliberate review covered in blind review, that your first instinct becomes reliably correct more often. As accuracy on first-pass instincts improves, the SPEED problem often resolves on its own, without ever directly training for speed.
Track, across a few timed sections, how often your final answer matches your first instinct on questions where you spent unusually long. If the match rate is high, your timing issue is very likely confidence-driven — and the fix is different from simply “going faster.”