Life

The brain is a prediction machine. Its main purpose is to keep you alive and the better it can predict the future, the better it can keep you away from harm. So it will try to conceive all the possible scenarios it can, as to be able to avoid them. And, of course, it will focus on the bad scenarios, since that’s what it has to defend you from.

In theory, at least, because overthinking leads to nowhere good.

The way we think influences the way we feel and act. If we’re lingering on a bad outcome, we’ll begin to feel anxious, we might become fearful and we might act in such a way to avoid it altogether. ”Mission accomplished!”, says the brain.

This evening was ”one of those evenings”. I looked through the number of visitors on the blog, and the new section has almost no traction. The posts have mild success on Medium and I’m happy about it, but I would’ve loved a bit more traffic on here as well.

Ironically enough, today was pretty great, but this single ”bad news” made me soft. It put me down. I’m aware that this is also because I’m tired, but my morale still went down.

Two weeks ago I was writing that what gets measured, gets improved; what is not, gets out of hand. One reader asked about some suggestions on good ways to track and my initial reply was to write things down.

We become so accustomed to our lives, that we can’t truly asses the situation we’re in, be it good or bad. Think of the impostor syndrome: people with great achievements — even extremely famous ones — that still feel like a fraud. But it works the opposite too, of course.

And that’s what I want to focus on. I’m not saying we can’t see that the situation is bad, because we can. It’s just that it’s hard to realise its true amplitude. We most likely think it’s not that bad. And sometimes we’re so far from the truth, we have no intention of fixing anything, because we don’t believe there is anything important to fix.

Last time I was talking about consistency and how it’s one of the most important things after starting. One of the examples I gave was about my eating habits: I stopped being consistent and it slowly went into a down spiral.

But I also mentioned that I got back on track after looking back on my logs: what I ate and how much I weighted. What saved me was the fact that I was tracking.

Tracking brings two benefits:

1. You can go back and review your progress at any time and see what you can improve, what went wrong and how.
2. It makes you more aware of what you’re doing.

The most important thing is to start. But the second most important thing is to continue, even if you don’t feel like it.

The more you quit something when you don’t feel like it, the more you’ll get used to it. Quitting is a habit, like any other. The more you do it, the more engrained it becomes.

The reverse is just as true: continue doing something, even when you don’t feel like it. It will make the quitting habit fade away, if it was present, or build resilience. You’ll get over the feeling of quitting easier. You’ll start feeling like quitting less and less.

One day you may find yourself realising that you have a lot of changes to do in your life. It seems like there’s so many. They feel overwhelming. They feel intimidating.

Truth be told, they might be all of the above. Be it your discipline, your determination, your perseverance, a project you can’t seem to make progress on, or start reading. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, the same rules apply. If you think about it as a whole every time you want to make a move, it will paralyse you.

The last two weeks I managed to build myself a pretty stable sleeping cycle, from ~10pm to ~6:30am. All without using an alarm.

But last night I went to bed to ~11:45pm and woke up at ~8:20am. Still with no alarm, which means the body is rested enough.

But today was so hard. I felt exhausted. I was in no mood to do anything. I didn’t feel like writing today. I had no idea what to write (although I have quite a few ideas stashed) and I didn’t feel like working. This is the reason I’m posting so late …

But I finally sat down. I finally started writing. I still didn’t feel like it. I knew it’s not going to be one of my best posts, but I still went for it.

Continuing from last time, I’d like to explore the idea that nothing is too unimportant, which is another way of saying that anything and everything affects everything else.

What does that actually mean? Well, it has no hidden or deeper meaning, it means that how you do one thing, you do everything. It means that any activity you have or you adopt influences both your current ones and the ones you’ll adopt in the future; both for the positives and the negatives.

What are the chores/tasks with the highest chance of success? The small ones, the easy ones, those that need minimal effort, willpower and/or time.

What are the chores/tasks with the highest chance of failure? The big ones, the complicated ones, the ones that need a lot of effort, willpower and/or time.

Don’t fear the amount of change that needs to happen, that’s one of the worst thing you can do. Chances are it will paralyse you and you’ll remain stuck.

Sure, be honest with yourself; you have to be. Become aware of everything wrong and everything that needs fixing. But don’t focus on the whole change at once, don't focus on the big things right from the start.