I love the way you’ve written your blog today. On the topic of self-awareness, I think this is the right thing to do. At the very least, it is the right thing to do; it’s a great tool for getting a better understanding of how our body works, and how we react.
I read your blog every day, and I think it is a great tool for me to understand how many things I am doing which are not what I want, but which I know will help me out in the long run. I have also read the book, and I think your ideas about self-awareness are great. I think we need to get our bodies working in order, and I think that this is what I am doing with my own blog.
Your body being a tool, I think all of us have been programmed to react in ways we wouldn’t like. It is a natural human tendency to seek pleasure, to seek out any distraction that’ll make us feel good. But the problem is that our bodies are not programmed to enjoy what we are doing, they want to be doing what we want, and if we don’t want to do a certain activity, we may not want to do it.
The problem with pleasure and pleasure seeking is that when they get going we forget that we are in control of our own lives.
A good example of this is the ability to remember to get your butt to class, to take a shower, or to go to the gym. You cant force these things on yourself because you are not programmed to enjoy them, and if you dont enjoy them, you are not programmed to enjoy them.
Our brains are actually really good at remembering to do things that we enjoy. Just like we can remember to wash our hands, we can remember to get to class, we can remember to go to the gym, we can remember to take a shower, we can remember to eat a meal. But not everything we can remember to do is something we enjoy. It’s when we get really bored and we forget what we enjoy doing that these habits of pleasure and pleasure seeking become troublesome.
So it would seem that when we get bored, we don’t want to do anything. And that makes it hard to stay on top of our habits. Why? Because the more we pay attention to our habits, the more likely it is that we’re going to get bored. The same is true of our goals.
We would be far more likely to choose to do something if the goal we set out to achieve was something we enjoy. But there are times when we are bored and we just want to do something we dont enjoy. There are times when we want to do something we dont enjoy but we cant think of anything better. And then we get frustrated and start searching for things we enjoy doing.
When you think about it, you actually need to think about what you enjoy and what you DON’T enjoy. And it is difficult, because we are always on autopilot to some degree. But if we do something we don’t enjoy, we usually know it. There are times when we just can’t think of any other way to do something else, and that is when we resort to the “what if?” thinking.
The trouble is that what if thinking is almost always wrong. We all have these times when we just cant think of any other way to do something. We may have an idea of how to do something, but we dont actually know how to do it. Or we dont know what to do. Or something is just too hard for us to figure out. We always have a tendency to think we can figure it out, and then we realize that we cant.