Self-Control
What the mind?
I’ve been eating a ton of pizza for the past 2 months like literally a ton if I count it, it would be exactly 37 pizza.
I’ve lost self-control and pizza is a comforting food so, I can’t say no!.
I knew that too much of anything is not good but every-time I tried not to order, I ordered.
I wanted to find out why this happened and why I failed to control it.
I even procrastinated to search and then one fine day I stumbled upon one of Bo Burnham’s music video — Left Brain Right Brain (FYI — he is the best comedian ever).
After this song/comedy I also happen to read “Everything is fucked” by Mark Manson and this blew my mind 🤯 (kaboom).
BTW you have to read the book, go buy it now cause I ain’t gifting you.
So, here’s how it goes -
We have two monkeys inside our brain one is responsible for our feelings the other for logic.
Our Feeling monkey is responsible for emotions, impulses, and instincts. While our Logic monkey is responsible for reasoning, calculations, analytical and objective.
Logical Monkey is Efficient and a Prick.
Feelings Monkey is Emotional and an Idiot.
These two monkeys don’t work, talk and walk well together.
Let’s say our brain is the vehicle and these two are inside it, and when it comes to some kind of decision making we generally assume that logical monkey is driving and feelings monkey is in the passengers seat shouting where it wants to go and also he wants you to stop for a quick pizza on the way. This is the general assumption, the belief that our logical monkey is in control.
But, it doesn’t work that way. Feelings monkey is always in the driver seat. Ultimately we are moved to action by emotion, emotion inspires action.
This answers our simplest question why don’t we do things we know we should? Because we don’t feel like it.
Self-control is not a problem of discipline or reason but rather an emotion. Self Control, Procrastination, Laziness all are emotional problems.
Meanwhile, our Logical monkey is sitting in the passenger seat imagining it has control over the brain. But, the truth is that the Logical monkey is just a navigator it can weigh the pros and cons of road that it’s traveling, it can only suggest which way to go but in the end it’s the feelings monkey that does what it feels like i.e order pizza.
A famous Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman once said that Feelings is like the supporting character who imagines itself to be the hero.
So how do we solve this problem? Kill the Feelings Monkey? No that’s bad because we need emotions to drive our action.
Logical monkey can’t control the feelings one but it can influence him.
So how to influence the feelings monkey? It’s simple by negotiating. We need both of these monkeys to talk together and workaround something reasonable.
Offer feelings monkey some bananas, like say wake up a bit early because who remembers the day when they slept the most, or maybe something more easy or simple such as feeling good after a workout. Feelings monkey will take the banana and react either positively or negatively.
If the response is negative simply acknowledge that and offer another compromise and repeat this process but remember to start small.
Let’s say you want to wake up at 5 AM, negotiate with the feelings monkey to wake up at 6 AM and slowly improvise.
But for whatever reason don’t fight with the feelings monkey, you can never win over feelings.
This is tough, we need our logical monkey to start talking and negotiating smartly instead of fighting.
This is the fundamental problem of self-control, not an uneducated logical monkey but a uneducated feeling monkey.
