But does that mean that it was the wrong choice to try? Could you have known better than to try? And would it have made a difference if you hadn't tried?
In most cases the alternative to trying to analyse signal to understand whether or not a girl likes you is to ask her out.
Furthermore if you are in your head analysing body language signals that's likely not enjoyable for the girl with whom you are interacting. She feels like an object that get's analysed instead of an agent whose actions effect you directly.
It can also be read as simple fear by the girl, when you are tense because you are focused on determining whether or not she likes you and how much.
The person from whom I learned NLP, Chris Mulzer wrote an article about body language: https://www.kikidan.com/news/koerpersprache-deuten-bei-mann-frau.html It's a quite funny article if you manage to read it on a deeper level. Among other he tells men that they are supposed to treat it as sign of interest when a girl touches their hair.
Of course it's no sure sign of attraction and Chris knows this, but telling guys to treat it as a sign of interest is still good because the first main lesson of the article is to assume by default that woman are interested.
This is all nice and well and I mostly agree. But... it doesn't answer the question. The question is can (and should) an analystical person just switch off analysis - esp. during youth.
If you have a crush on someone you usually want to find out if they have one on you too. In my opinion outright asking them is often not a good solution, because if they don't have a crush on you yet it decreases the chance of this ever happening if they know you have one. This believe is based on what I read about love psychology. Hovever I don't really want to discuss the option of outright asking them in this thread, therefore I have not elaborated further how I got to this believe.
The alternative to asking them is trying to interpret signals that they might give you. However to know how many signals you need before you should believe that they are in love with you, you would need the prior. I have not been able to find anything about the prior of someone being in love with you. Therefore my Idea is to do a survey in order to find out how likely it is that a person you know has a crush on you. The plan is to ask the person taking the survey how many people they know well enough to possibly have a crush on them and how many people they actually have a crush on.
I have created a Survey for this and would be really happy if you would participate.
The next stepp would be to discuss how certain signals a person can give you raise the probability of them having a crush on you. That part is quite difficult. I think probably the best way would be to check how your friends react to certain situations and what body language they show you and then, if you find out someone has a crush on you, to look up what he did differently from people who are merely your friends. I am currently not in a good position to do this experiment but if someone wants to try or has results about this to share please do so. However I think this part is less important than finding the prior, because most people have at least a general idea about what certain signals mean from personal experience while at least I have no idea at all what the prior might be.