If Instincts are Wrong, Don't Trust Them

05/21/15

I've started to come upon repeatable patterns where my initial thoughts and decisions, rooted mostly in habit and instinct, are often the wrong thoughts and decisions.

I think the most-relatable of these patterns is the junk food one. There's free candy at work, and thus I always have access to candy. Not too long ago, I decided that hunger justified candy, and from there proceeded to eat way too much candy. I felt ill for a good portion of the day, and was unable to run between various travel points like I like to.

This happens all the time. A state of being causes me to believe an action otherwise poor or at best neutral to be valuable, but execution reveals it to have made things worse. I suppose this is but one of many causes of vicious cycles.

Another thing that happens quite often for me is that I get mentally fatigued from... whatever, really, and I reason that I should take a break. My "break" then consists of my brain doing whatever it feels like. This is often the consumption of content that drains me even more and in no way gets me back in the mood to work.

A break, as it were, should be a task designed specifically for me to get my energy back and make me more productive in the end than if I did not take a break. It is not a "do what I feel like" event. But it seems like a reasonable thing for a break to be, and so countless times I fell into that trap of being tired, doing what I felt like, getting even more tired, and feeling even more that I should do what I feel like.

And so I'm learning that I honestly can not trust myself to feel out what I should do given certain situations. I have to tread carefully and consider the complex consequences of my simple decisions.

I'm not sure if I can ever really trust myself, either. I've gone through all of this before, slightly differently, last year. Eventually I let things go on autopilot and things slid back into their old ways. Perhaps it's like having braces. Once the braces come off, the teeth start sliding back into their old positions, and so a retainer is necessary.

Maybe right now I have braces, and I need to figure out what I can do to retain my good behavior once the braces have done their job.