In my life I have scored on many, many things. And also I didn’t score on many and many things. And the decisive role in the end was played by the fact that I still scored.
I hear quite often from people that the path to self-confidence and success lies in the simple human ability to “score.” And it’s true, we often admire the strongest, most respected people we know, only for their ability to “get things done.” For example: “Oh, look, Susie is working on her day off again, she just gave up on everything.”
Or: “Did you hear that Tom called the company president an asshole and still got a promotion? Holy shit, this dude just ignored all the rules."
Or: “Jason just got up and left his date with Cindy after 20 minutes. He said he wasn't going to listen to any more of her bullshit. Damn, this guy just doesn’t care.”
How many people do you know who, at a certain point in their lives, gave up on everything, and despite this achieved excellent results? Perhaps you yourself once scored and, nevertheless, rose to unprecedented heights of your capabilities? As for me, I myself left a pretty decent job after only being there for six weeks. I told my boss that I intended to start my own business selling dating advice online, which was pretty close to the concept of “getting it” in my own “not giving a fuck” hierarchy. It was the same story with my decision to sell most of my belongings and move to South America. Was I worried about this? Nope. I just took it and did it.
Well, the art of scoring may seem quite simple and understandable at first glance. However, if we dig a little deeper, it turns out that this is a brand new bag of burritos under the lid of our pot. To be honest, I have no idea what this sentence means, but I don't really care. A burrito bag sounds cool, so we'll just leave it as is.
The point is that most of us live our lives in struggle, too often pushing ourselves into situations where it's not worth it at all. We fuss over the rude gas station cashier who gave us change with a handful of change. We get upset when our favorite TV series gets cancelled. We get stressed out when our co-workers don't bother to ask how great we had our weekend. We get stressed out when it rains in the morning and we were going for a run.
Everywhere is a complete mess. We scatter our feelings like seeds in the spring. And for what? For what purpose? Convenience? Comfort? Or maybe to hear praise?
That's the problem, my friend.
If we worry about everything, if we choose not to bother about much, it means we feel like every minute of our life we simply have to be happy and content - that’s when life starts to hit us over the head.
And indeed, the moment we decide that we will only bother ourselves in the most worthwhile situations, at that very moment our life will become a quadrillion times easier. Failures will become less scary. Rejections are less painful. Unpleasant necessities will become more pleasant, and the hopeless black stripes will become a little lighter. This is what I mean: if we could bother ourselves less, or bother ourselves only in deliberate situations, then life would become much simpler.
We don't understand that there is a higher art of "scoring." We are not just born without the skill of “scoring”, in fact, we are born precisely in order to bother. You've probably seen a child throwing a tantrum because his hat is the wrong shade of blue? That's what I mean. Forget about the child.
Developing the skill of scoring, the ability to control and manage this skill makes us strong and whole. Over the years and decades, we must develop and hone our scoring skills. Over the years, our troubles should turn into vintage ones, just like the most expensive wines; and like wines, they should be uncorked and served only on special occasions.
It may sound simple, but it really isn't. Most of us are sucked into life by our mediocre routine little things, imposed by absolutely meaningless dramas. We live our whole lives and die just writing notes in the margins instead of confidently writing our book; we live and die, distracted from really important goals by routine troubles that suck our precious nerves out of us, as Sasha Gray does in well-known films.
Dude, this isn't life. So stop bothering. Get yourself together. And let me show you the way out.
Willpower is a myth. She doesn't exist.
But you can do just fine without it.
I wanted to talk about this today after reading the article “How to develop willpower.” I may not even tell you anything new. I'll just pour it from empty to empty so that you can see that in reality there is nothing .
As usual, I want to make a reservation right away: there is no single correct opinion in this area, because we are talking about intangible concepts. There are different worldview models, and they may work for different people.
Everyone ultimately chooses what suits them personally.
However, different worldviews are not equally close to objective reality.
The further our idea is from reality, the more difficult it is to arrange all the models so that they do not contradict and work flawlessly in most cases.
For this reason, I choose points of view that find as much confirmation as possible in real life, and not only for me, but also for others. I will share one of these points of view with you today.
I am sure that there will be much more educated and well-read people who will complement and correct me, and we all, as always, enjoy reading the comments. But someone needs to start the topic... So, let's begin.
I believe that this problem will be relevant for people of mental work for a long time , and therefore there will be both demand and supply.
Why are such questions rarely asked by the working class?
Subscribe to our INSTAGRAM account!
Mental work is much harder than physical work, and there is a lot of justification and evidence for this.
Firstly, this has been repeatedly stated by scientists who have calculated the amount of energy burned by the brain during intense work.
Secondly, a simple analysis of human behavior confirms that most people prefer physical work. When asked to think, they ooh and ahh, sigh heavily and respond in the style of: “Oh, this is very difficult for me!”
Thirdly, every person who has ever seriously and for a long time strained their brains will confirm that it is very exhausting.
Fourthly, fate gave me a wonderful opportunity to compare mental work with physical work, and I responsibly declare that working physically is a piece of cake, as long as you don’t ruin your health!
I have always been amazed how people can physically work all day long, it’s so painfully boring and uninteresting! True, it turned out that working mentally was even more painful, but that would come later.
So, I had the opportunity to try myself in such wonderful professions as builder, carpenter, salesman and taxi driver.
A work from the “don’t hit someone who’s lying down” series! Physically it’s hard, of course. But mentally, such work is not very stressful if the conditions are acceptable. When you do routine work, your brain seems to go into a trance, at this moment you can mentally be anywhere and do anything.
In this mode, workdays fly by unnoticed and stress-free. All that is required of you is to show up for work, i.e. The hardest thing about this job is getting up on the alarm clock. If it were possible to earn in a taxi comparable to programming, without deceiving passengers, I would work as a part-time taxi driver with much more pleasure than as a programmer.
Many working class people envy office workers who get more money without having to physically strain themselves at all. It is clear that they have no idea what we are dealing with.
Try teaching a carpenter how to code, and you'll likely see how quickly he'll give up. I had the same experience.
In my case, everyone around me was to blame, including me, except for himself, who did not want to work independently for his own “happiness.”
What's going on?
Work is, in general, a form of slavery.
Slavery is bondage, akin to imprisonment.
Physical imprisonment is imprisonment of the body.
But the mind is still free to do whatever it wants, albeit somewhat cut off from the external source of information. Therefore they say that the body can be imprisoned, but not the mind . The same thing happens at work.
Physical work consumes the body, but not the mind . Therefore, a person can easily withstand it. And she doesn’t worry about procrastination, doesn’t cultivate the willpower to carry more bags of cement, and doesn’t write stupid questions on forums like “how to force yourself to work 8 hours a day.”
In the worst case, he just gets drunk after work, and again doesn’t care about anything. It is much more difficult for people with mental work.
If a hobby has turned into a job, interest has disappeared, but we still need to do it, we are faced with a kind of imprisonment of the mind.
If thinking was prohibited in prisons, it would be like a death penalty.
So it turns out that many people go to another small execution every day.
In such a situation, it becomes very difficult with motivation. This is where all this rubbish with laziness and willpower begins.
Enjoy every moment
It's easy to say, "Let's love the little things and enjoy them." There is little pleasure in routine tasks; most often they are performed automatically and only bring boredom. So our task is to paint them in bright colors and live them consciously. Don't like the commute to work? Put your headphones in your ears and listen to great music, an audiobook, or a funny podcast. Bored of doing homework? Get creative and turn it into a fun game. For example, after cleaning, play “Revisorro” with yourself after purchasing white gloves. Or turn on a fiery rumba and dance.
Pleasure lies in every moment of our life. Try not to disconnect from it and feel these moments. Feel the taste of every bite of food in your mouth. Eagerly inhale the smell of rain and wet grass. Touch icicles and snow figures if you want. In general, if you learn to be aware of every step you take, you will gradually be able to switch to a healthier lifestyle. For example, it’s so nice to feel every muscle in your running body. And how delicious it is to savor fresh and healthy food... Fast food was specially invented for those who are in a hurry and eat quickly, not paying attention to the sensations. That’s why the taste of fast food is always very strong and exaggerated. If you can enjoy the subtler shades of taste, then you simply will not want to eat fatty and coarse foods.
Willpower doesn't exist.
Not really. There is still such a concept. Moreover, it works. But not as an internal mechanism, but as an external instrument of influence on us.
Well, look, I’ll explain it with my fingers.
We think that we have some kind of force inside us - something like a muscle that produces will. The will allows us to make (volitional) decisions. There is a will, of course.
We call our decision, which determines our further behavior, will. It is our will to do something or not to do it.
Well, where is the power (of will)?
There is no muscle as such.
There is an explanation of willpower as a collection of strong synaptic connections in the brain, or a large amount of “gray matter”. But this is all, excuse me, nonsense.
Scientists have only just begun to thoroughly study the functioning of the brain and have just begun attempts to model it.
Current knowledge about the brain is at the level of “here we see some bursts of activity when we shine a light bulb into the eye, so it means it’s somehow connected.”
It is not surprising to find a correlation between the intensity of the manifestation of will and the presence of “gray matter” in the cranium. But the entire human body, and the brain in particular, is much more complex than the amoebas studied far and wide (and even with those there are still open questions). Our knowledge of the brain is still weak. Therefore, “willpower” is exclusively a model that has only indirect evidence of its plausibility . And if so, then it is worth questioning the existence of such a force.
Willpower was invented long before scientists began to understand the secrets of the brain. Those. it has always been a rather philosophical concept.
And only now, when we began to have an idea of what was inside the box, more or less clear attempts appeared to link theory to practice.
But these, mind you, are violent attempts.
There is an idea of willpower, and there is an idea of the brain. Both work.
What does a person do in this case?
Trying to find an explanation of how this is connected. And he finds it, of course. By and large, anything can be explained in any way. For example, ancient people explained the origin of natural phenomena by linking them with gods.
Everything seems to be harmonious and beautiful: God is riding a chariot across the sky. But such a theory gives us nothing but reassurance, which means it is unsuitable.
Who needs to invent a non-existent force?
If power is invented, it means someone needs it. To understand who needs it, you need to find who benefits from it.
And this is beneficial for anyone who intends to manipulate someone in an openly coercive manner.
Let's take a child as an example.
Try to force him to eat something he doesn't want to eat. Usually in this situation many people face a problem. We understand that this “must” be done, but the child does not want and does not do it.
Here, getting ahead of myself, I will say that, generally speaking, we still need to ask the question “who needs this.”
First of all, we need this, because we do not want to face health problems for the child in the future, and we do not want him to face them, which is why we are active.
Why does this situation even arise?
After all, a child’s instincts tell him very well when he needs to eat and what he needs to eat.
The problem may be that we put the child in unnatural conditions for him: we fed him candy (where have you seen candy trees in nature?), forced him to eat not at the moment when he was hungry, but strictly according to a schedule (have you ever seen so that they tell the dog “you won’t go out until you finish everything”?), etc. and so on.
The problem, in general, is not in the child at all, but in us: we have an attitude that we need to feed the child, but our need does not coincide with his own.
This is called “conflict” (of interests, desires), this is the very basis of the problem , and I will return to it later.
Ok, what about our child who doesn't want to eat?
Usually some tricks save you: motivation, talking your teeth, compromises.
But the child is growing, getting closer and closer to adulthood, where he NEEDS to study, work, take care of his neighbors, and much more, and we all understand perfectly why (at least we think so).
In the end, you need to make the child independent, so as not to live his life instead of him, and so that he himself does everything that he does not want.
How to do it?
Here is the answer: cultivate “willpower”!
More precisely, to convince him that it exists, that it needs to be developed, and that it needs to be actively used.
This is a very convenient and simple way to answer the “why” and “why” questions that children love to ask. After all, adults often don’t know the answers themselves. Thus, the complex process of finding motivation is replaced by a simple pattern of “you have to have willpower.” Look at dad and mom, they don’t want to, but they work, they work.
For what?
It’s clear, because it’s necessary for survival and existence.
Why don’t they want to, but do it anyway???
Because they have willpower!
Dad is strong (obviously) and has great willpower. Thus, “willpower” is passed on as a stereotype, often through imitation, and acts as a universal solution to a problem.
And the problem, remember what it’s called?
CONFLICT!
It turned out great.
We resolved the conflict with an effort of will!
That is, in fact, we have not resolved it, we are simply doing something contrary to it, neglecting one of the desires.
The desire we neglect is our own.
And what we are guided by can be anyone’s, not only ours, but more often even public, including the opinion of parents, wives, children and all other close and not so close people.
But if we neglect someone else’s desire in favor of our own, this is also a manifestation of the will, but they call it selfishness.
What we received:
neglecting your desires in favor of public ones is a manifestation of willpower (good), on the contrary - selfishness (bad).
Who benefits from this?
To the society!
Who is he, what does he want from us?
Some scientists who study society consider it as an organism and give analogies. Indeed, society is also growing and developing. And he needs to survive.
And we are its building blocks.
It is beneficial for society that we work not only for ourselves, but also for it, otherwise it will crumble, and other more viable types of societies will take its place, because in society, people are much more likely to survive than alone.
It's not there, but it still works?
How is it that something that doesn’t work works?
As I said, “willpower” is missing as an organ that can be pumped up. But there is such a concept.
A concept is information.
All our lives we are guided by information coming from outside and from within. One phrase that establishes a logical connection between key concepts in our lives can radically change our behavior.
The simple belief “willpower is good” leads us to act according to the pattern of willpower to make us feel good.
And if we achieve a positive result, this connection between “willpower” and “good” will strengthen, and we will begin to more often practice neglecting some desires in order to realize others.
This is, in general, a typical learning mechanism.
But in reality there is no willpower here.
There is a motivation to make things good, and it is this that makes us neglect the lesser good..
In this particular case, this concept will work perfectly and flawlessly.
It would seem to work - well, wonderful!
But there is great significance in how we call things, whether we call them by their proper names.
The concept of willpower confuses completely different goals:
meeting personal and public needs.
Often both are woven into the same action, which makes it much more difficult to figure out what we really need and what we don’t.
The same work is an excellent example, both we and society seem to need it.
And society may thank us in return, which means we need it again. Or maybe he won’t thank you.
It becomes very difficult to figure out whether we want it or not, or whether we want it, but not us.
Erroneous decisions appear that do not serve us well, the connection weakens, we begin to intuitively doubt that willpower is a good thing. In such cases they say that willpower is lost.
In general, many of you know that a large number of failures weaken willpower, and successes strengthen it.
But this is not like how muscles are trained.
The latter, on the contrary, train to the limit, sometimes even to failure. It is the lack of strength and the inability or difficulty to perform the required amount of work that stimulates muscle development.
But an unsuccessful manifestation of willpower will not strengthen it in any way. And even working willpower to the limit, when you give it your all, but get meager results, is unlikely to have a positive effect on its growth.
After all, increasing willpower does not mean so much a potential increase in reward, but a guaranteed increase in the size of your sacrifices.
If you have been feeding your dog on cue and suddenly stop doing so, he will no longer have the willpower to lift his butt off the rug and drag it into the kitchen. In general, our “willpower” also works. But there are also other factors.
Psychologists (including Eric Berne) divide our mental states into different types:
child, adult, parent, sage, etc.
Our behavior, of course, depends on the state we are in.
A capricious child is repelled by “I want,” and a strict parent says “I must.”
If a person is in the right state, then he can easily force himself to do what he does not want to do.
Not because it benefits him, but because that’s the mood he’s in.
In this case, the motivation will be to develop the desired behavioral pattern, the desire to feel in a certain role in relation to oneself. And these patterns, again, are usually laid down for us in childhood.
If an adult dad and mom showed an effort of will, then this is how we will imagine what it means to be an adult.
In the end, even a banal desire to feel like a full-fledged individual will push us to develop those patterns that we associate with the word “full”.
As with any intangible concept (love, friendship), it is quite difficult to clearly define what willpower is. But if there is a manifestation (if not of strength, then at least of will), then, if desired, you can get to the bottom of its sources. I am sure you will find other cases of manifestation of this mythical power.
How do people become suckers?
In any society there is always a division of people into groups and clans. Starting from school, a hierarchy is formed in which everyone has their own position. There is a leader or alpha male, and there are his comrades or beta males. At the very bottom of the food chain there are the omega males, or suckers. These are the weakest and most unviable individuals.
Hierarchy is formed after a conflict or fight, where a dominant and subordinate state arises. This is how a simple, kind, naive, gullible and slightly ridiculous person becomes a sucker. At one point he behaved in the wrong way, and society threw him off a cliff among the losers. This is Sparta! Ridicule, punches, bullying, harassment, bullying, threats, slander, isolation.
People are suckers not only in their early years of school and university, but also after. A man reacted incorrectly in an unusual situation and was mistaken for a weakling. How do suckers differ from ordinary people, and even more so from leaders? In manners, behavior, thinking and lifestyle. Sucker behavior is clearly visible from the outside, but the victim herself may not notice it.
How to change your environment? Who are you friends with? You are like those around you
As a result, a person goes through life with the label “sucker” all his life. All his life he will be offended, branded, deceived, used and ridiculed. This will happen in school, university, army, work community and everyday life. This situation turns life into an endless nightmare when you are always on the edge. Often people around you can talk to you politely, but laugh behind your back and call you a sucker.
Umur Batur Kocak, Unsplash
Is life possible without willpower?
How can we live without her, because we have to do something, otherwise it’s a mess!
Let's start with the fact that (of course, according to my personal, albeit deep, conviction) we are not only not strong creatures, but generally very weak-willed.
Perhaps not everyone has yet gotten used to the idea that there is no willpower, but I am already asserting that there is no will as such.
Will as a human quality is the ability to make choices and take actions.
Quality interests us primarily when we look at other people, or at ourselves through the eyes of other people. Or on objects.
Now, if there is a strong pillar, its quality tells us that it will not fall.
If a pillar has cracked, it is a weak pillar that can harm us by falling from above, caused by the influence of external wind and the reaction of a weak internal structure.
The presence of certain qualities, of course, does not make this pillar strong-willed.
Everything that happens to him depends solely on external and internal factors, which are relatively easy to calculate.
It’s more difficult with a person, due to the complexity of his internal state. It is difficult for us to evaluate it, and therefore it is difficult to predict a person’s reaction to external events.
However, his actions are also a reaction to external and internal factors.
Under the same conditions, having the same thoughts, a person will almost certainly perform the same actions.
If there is a possibility of choice, then what should cause a change in decision under completely identical conditions?
Is it just a random component?
Thus, according to the modern understanding of physics and psyche, a person is essentially not much different from a pillar.
We do not take into account the still unexplained phenomenon of the sensation of one’s own “I”, since esoteric explanations will not give us practical benefit, and the very fact of the presence of this sensation also does not give us anything useful in practice.
When it comes to the difficulty of predicting human behavior, difficult does not mean impossible.
In fact, you and I all make such predictions many times every day, and quite successfully.
And the better we know a person, the better we predict his behavior.
In general, it turns out that will is the same myth as willpower, just an abstract concept that describes a set of decision-making actions, but has nothing to do with freedom of choice.
How can we live with the idea that we have no control over anything in our lives?
Firstly, do not forget that lack of will does not mean inaction, and lack of willpower does not mean lack of ability to achieve your goals.
If you are already thinking about influencing yourself, this means that the most important idea has entered your head: control over yourself and your life.
We have no influence on whether such a thought appears or not. And not everyone is lucky in life, really.
But such a thought has already come to us - we are saved, because... this thought automatically attracts all other useful thoughts, which entails the desired behavior aimed at improving one’s own life.
We just continue to play the game “I make a volitional decision,” but remember that ideas come under the influence of external factors, so you need to draw as much as possible from the outside, and not delve within yourself.
This is another idea that automatically follows from the first, and begins to attract even more useful ideas.
Some people understand lack of will to mean lying on the bed and doing nothing.
Their problem is not a lack of will, but a lack of a useful idea, or rather a harmful idea.
The mechanism of action is the same, only a different fundamental idea.
Secondly , treat yourself like other people.
We are not much different from others, why would we make an exception for ourselves?
And other people need to be perceived as they are, remember that everyone has their own unique experience, everyone has their own idea of the world, their own strengths and weaknesses, and so on.
And most importantly, re-educating a person without his desire is a thankless task.
Learn to get along with the people around you, and apply exactly the same approaches to yourself, and then you will get along with yourself. Or it can be the other way around - it doesn’t matter.
The best publications in the Econet.ru Telegram channel. Subscribe!
Well, how can you still solve the problem of doing what you don’t want to do?
At one time I tortured several psychologists on the topic of combating my own laziness.
The answers were frustratingly unhelpful. In general, the essence came down to the fact that if I don’t do something, then I simply don’t want to do it.
Attempts to prove that I really really want it, but for some reason I just can’t, led the conversation to a dead end.
It was very strange because it seemed like they couldn't hear me. And it was completely unclear why all this psychology was needed at all.
In the end, I also came to the conclusion that I simply didn’t want to.
It’s just that the concept of “I don’t want” has become much broader.
In general, psychologists are strange and completely irresponsible people. Contrary to my preconceptions, not one of several psychologists ever gave me simple but working advice.
But, as it turned out, they can do very funny tricks: with the help of very standard procedures, they are able to bring you to a state where you understand everything yourself, answer all your questions, thank them and leave satisfied.
And the psychologist may not understand what you have in mind there. Helped - oh well.
In general, you really just need to figure out what you want and what you don’t want.
If you want to, but don’t do it, then there is some kind of opposite desire or reluctance.
The same conflict that we forget to resolve, stepping over ourselves through “force of will.”
We can solve the problem by stepping over the opposite desire.
However, this can create another, even larger problem..
The ideal option would be to find a compromise to satisfy all your needs. To do this, you need to resolve the conflict. And to resolve it, you must first see it.
Where do conflicts come from?
You and I (mostly, probably) are already adults who have embarked on an independent path, and conflicts with parents should be kept to a minimum. Therefore, I will only talk about internal conflicts that arise within ourselves.
The difficulty is that the conflicts are not obvious.
Otherwise, there would be no problem of willpower at all.
We have a desire, often primitive and simple, and we are aware of it and want to achieve it.
For example, a lot of money, good health - many people want this.
But I can’t work hard or play sports; something seems to be stopping me.
What do not you understand.
Why is this happening?
In addition to consciousness, people also have a subconscious mind.
Consciousness allows you to build very long chains of inferences and very accurately calculate options. But it's terribly slow.
Is it the subconscious ?
They say it is capable of processing a huge amount of information in moments and producing results. Only the accuracy is poor.
But the subconscious uses the maximum of incoming information to make a decision.
Using our intuition, we may often not be aware of why we made the decision we did.
As a result, we get a decision without justification.
On the one hand , there is consciousness, trying to justify, on the other , the subconscious, which simply wants or does not want, but does not comment on it in any way.
When the conscious and subconscious have different desires, an internal conflict results.
This can happen simply because the conscious and subconscious use different sources of information and a different approach to analysis.
One such case deserves special attention - this is when your desires are imposed on you by society, and in fact are not yours.
They wished us money and health for our birthday, year after year. We begin to believe in this, we even find an explanation for this desire (after all, people tend to look for explanations) and we convince ourselves even more.
The problem is that the desire is not really ours, we are simply led to believe that we want it.
Consciousness is easy to deceive.
It is more difficult to pull off this trick with the subconscious , it is primitive and clearly knows that we, for example, just want to eat, sleep, drink beer and watch TV.
You can have “higher” subconscious desires, but they just often get stuck at the first stage.
I don't want to say that money and health are bad.
But if no one told you about it year after year, where would you know about it?
Probably from my own experience, comparing my condition with and without money, with and without health.
And those who are smarter would analyze other people's experience.
This process of comprehension is very important for a real conscious desire to be born.
For example, the experience of visiting hospitals is much more eloquent than the warning of parents that “you can’t buy health.”
Here, of course, the ability to learn and draw conclusions plays an even greater role, and preferably from the mistakes of others, and not from your own.
Many people are simply not taught to learn and draw conclusions on their own; then only the “willpower” program works for them.
The second example is that the experience of owning a large amount of money and the experience of complete lack of money is much clearer than talking about money between people who know nothing about it.
The opportunity to gain experience, even someone else’s, is not always available to us. In this case, fantasy plays an important role.
An experience can be lived through by thinking about how it will be.
There is even this self-motivation technique:
imagine the result as clearly and in detail as possible.
In the end, you need to figure out for yourself very thoroughly why you need it or not.
The more justifications, the stronger the desire.
What this gives in the end is that our subconscious can be imbued with the idea of consciousness and agree with it.
We seem to bring the conscious desire to the level of the subconscious, which now, having the opportunity to compare both desires, tends to the same thought as the consciousness.
Everyone agrees, everyone is happy.
But this, in general, is not such a problem, because... In any case, we often think about what we want, visualize the goal, and the subconscious has every chance to evaluate it.
And it happens that you want it very much, but the subconscious still resists.
This, as I see it, is the most difficult problem, which is mostly fought with incredible efforts.
The subconscious can also have good reasons for wanting or not wanting something, and you shouldn’t forget about it.
If very simple techniques allow you to transfer a conscious thought into the subconscious, then transferring a desire from the subconscious to consciousness is much more problematic.
And this is very useful to do to find out the nature of resistance.
There is a high probability of agreeing with your subconscious, including discovering an imposed desire.
Psychologists, in particular, are engaged in extracting information from the subconscious, using various methods and techniques.
There are very different approaches, from simple dialogues to immersion in a hypnotic state in order to pull out your stumbling block from the subconscious.
If you are seriously tormented by some kind of indecision, I advise you to turn to such practices, and very preferably with the help of a psychologist.
True, psychologists say that we need to be very careful, and in general, delving into the subconscious is a very dangerous thing, since it is unknown what we will pull out from there and how it will turn out in the future.
My opinion is that this should not stop a person striving for self-knowledge. The main thing is that there is no risk of harm to health.
As for simpler cases , generally speaking, it is worth training the habit of analyzing yourself, studying yourself as some kind of third-party organism.
Trying to look at yourself from the outside, as a subject of research, is very helpful in looking at yourself unbiasedly and objectively assessing the motives of your unconscious behavior.
Mistakes and unpleasant patterns of behavior are easily admitted, and recognition is the first and most important step towards change. The vast majority of our actions are controlled directly by the subconscious, and only a few actions we carefully consider. Therefore, the ability to analyze the result of the work of your subconscious is an important thing in general, and not just for resolving conflicts in your desires.
Personal experience
Willpower has never helped me, except in physical activity.
Only through careful awareness I was able to:
- quit smoking,
- stop drinking,
- give up junk food,
- workout,
- change a job to one that you like and brings the desired result,
- make a lot of other, large and small, pleasant changes in life.
The bonus is that such changes do not bother you at all.
No conflict - no problem.
There is only satisfaction. Of course, not everything is perfect, and there is always room for improvement.
I don't know a single person who would do any of the above through sheer force of will. But there are many examples of failures on all counts.
At best, there are enough people for several months.
Disconnect from the world
It may seem to us that some parts of the universe rest only on our shoulders. In fact, this is not at all true - and if we fall out of our usual life for some time, the world will not collapse or even be scratched. But during this time you will be able to do something that has no place in a successful and effective paradigm. For example, schedule time in your schedule specifically for “nonsense.” Turn off all means of communication during this time and do something useless, but enjoyable for you personally. Buy stickers and decorate a notebook with them in which you will someday draw or write something. Take a walk and window-shop—no purpose, just for fun. Take up a hobby that has little practical use. Watch the cartoon alone. So what if it’s for children? After all, I want to.
