Jordan Peterson on why you must never give yourself an "easier" task to avoid the hard one: Peterson explains a psychological trap that almost everyone falls into when facing something difficult. "Don't practice what you do not want to become." He describes what happens inside your brain when you're... avoiding a hard task: "If you're really sneaky when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to 'cause you're doing something else useful." This is the trap. You feel productive. You're busy. But you're not doing the thing. And every time you give in, you make it worse: "If you give into that temptation which you often will, then it wins. And because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows. And anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished." This is Peterson describing neurology: "Those are neurological circuits. You build those things in there. They're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them. That's the best you can do. Once they're in there, you can't get them out." Even the circuits you build to resist the bad habit aren't permanent: "The ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress and the old habits will come back up." So what's the actual lesson? Every time you dodge the hard thing, you're casting a vote for the version of yourself that avoids hard things. You're wiring that pattern deeper into your brain.show more

Big Brain Psychology

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