I’m going to come at this from a different angle than the others, I think. I don’t claim it will work or be easy as I really identify with you question—changing myself should be easy (I control my brain, right? I make my decisions, right?) but find that reinventing me int the person I’d rather be than who I am is a real challenge.
We can all try making our selves to X and though effort and repetition make it something of a habit. I think that works better for the young (no idea of your age). But at some point in life the habits, and especially the mental and emotional (which probably means physiological chemical processes that drive these states) hae become near hardwired. So, what I’ll call the brute force approach—just keep practicing—faces the problem of relative proportions. Behavoural characteristics we’ve developed over 20, 30 40 years (or more) will have a lot more weigh than the efforts to act differently for a few years (assuming one keeps up at the change myself routine).
Maybe at some point more effort in looking at “why am I acting like X” is as important just the effort to act differently. Perhaps to develop a new habbit will be easier than changing old habits. But if the new habbit then serves as a feedback into the old habit we setup a type of interupt for the initial impulse to behave in a way we would rather change. That might help break the old habits we don’t want but have reinforced to the point they are no longer just habits we display but actually more “who we are”.
So, this is off the cuff thinking to so very likely has some gapping holes!
I’m going to come at this from a different angle than the others, I think. I don’t claim it will work or be easy as I really identify with you question—changing myself should be easy (I control my brain, right? I make my decisions, right?) but find that reinventing me int the person I’d rather be than who I am is a real challenge.
There was another post here on LW, http://kajsotala.fi/2017/09/debiasing-by-rationalizing-your-own-motives/ that I think might have value in this contex as well as the one it takes for the post.
We can all try making our selves to X and though effort and repetition make it something of a habit. I think that works better for the young (no idea of your age). But at some point in life the habits, and especially the mental and emotional (which probably means physiological chemical processes that drive these states) hae become near hardwired. So, what I’ll call the brute force approach—just keep practicing—faces the problem of relative proportions. Behavoural characteristics we’ve developed over 20, 30 40 years (or more) will have a lot more weigh than the efforts to act differently for a few years (assuming one keeps up at the change myself routine).
Maybe at some point more effort in looking at “why am I acting like X” is as important just the effort to act differently. Perhaps to develop a new habbit will be easier than changing old habits. But if the new habbit then serves as a feedback into the old habit we setup a type of interupt for the initial impulse to behave in a way we would rather change. That might help break the old habits we don’t want but have reinforced to the point they are no longer just habits we display but actually more “who we are”.
So, this is off the cuff thinking to so very likely has some gapping holes!