Don't trust yourself, you are your worst enemy

4 Ways on How You Screw Yourself Over

We are emotional creatures at heart. You may think that the rational mind is the one that is mainly in control, but that is far from the truth.

In fact, it is the opposite, the emotional mind has always been in control, because he decides what is valueable and undesirable for us.

The rational mind job is simply there as a consultant, and as a consultant, it is our duty to provide alternative ways to reach our goals and prevent our emotional mind from doing bad decisions through reasoning.

If we fail to this, then we are much more susceptible to procrastinate. Because of the simple fact that our emotional mind loves the sense of accomplishment and anything that is pleasurable that requires little to no undesirable work.

There are many reasons why one might deny responsibility, it could be the simple fact that you don't think that you are fit to take that responsibility, or you have no time for it, or other reasons.

But my theory is that we tend to despise responsibility because of the restriction it brings. This can be a restriction of time for yourself, restriction of doing certain actions, and many more.

There were and will be times in our life when we are face with a situation where doing actions that we consider vices seems justifiable.

In this moments, we must take a step back and see the situation as it is. Then imagine what will happen in the end if you do this "bad action".

This clarity will hopefully be enough for you to stay away from doing vices.

Hypocrisy is something hard to combat against because of its nature. There is not much you can do aside from cataching yourself being hypocritical or having someone else say it to you.

What we can do about it

How can you hit something you can't see? Before attacking, we must first identify our enemy, which is ourselves.

Once we acknowledge that we ourselves are our own enemy, it will become far easier to be ruthless in criticizing our own actions and lack of actions, and that's the goal.

Your emotional mind might retalliate and promises your monkey brain instant gratification by either procastinating or doing wrong things (vices).

You must not let it. Use every mental tactics that you know of to either trick yourself into doing things you don't want to do that you know you have to do or at the very least trick yourself into not doing evil and foolish things.

You must treat yourself like an actual enemy.

Examples of the mental tactics you can use to trick yourself:

• The 5 second rule: It's where you count to 5 seconds and do your desired action like chores and do them without thinking, basically be a zombie to your work.
• Chunking: It is a mental tactic where you make a large task seem small by breaking the large task into smaller ones. This makes it seem less daunting and more achievable.
• Set a deadline: A sense of of urgency kills procastination.
• Create a Workplace: Designating a specific workspace not only minimize distractions but also increases focus and overall productivity.
• Turning difficult tasks into habits: If this task is something you want or have to do in a daily basis, then be consistent in doing it and in time it will become part of your daily routine, it will become a habit, which will make you less likely to procastinate.
• etc.

We humans are not just social animals but also spiritual ones. We have a deep need to believe on something and something to worship.

We typically satisfy this need by following a religion, but an alternative would be to treat a philosophy like Stoicism as something divine-like.

The good thing about religion or philosophy is that people in your community will keep you in check, making sure you don't stray from the community's values.

Regardless if your activities are evil or good or nature, you should always save time for yourself to pause and imagine what happens in the end if you completed said activities.

Think of all possible outcomes you can think of, bad and good. This new-found clarity will help you deter from bad actions and gives you more incentive to do good actions.