True thinking is rare — just like true listening. - Jordan Peterson

I had to force myself to concentrate, and to breathe, and to keep from saying and meaning “to hell with it” during the endless months that I was possessed by dread and terror. And I was barely able to do it. More than half the time I believed that I was going to die in one of the many hospitals in which I resided. And I believe that if I had fallen prey to resentment, for example, I would have perished once and for all—and that I am fortunate to have avoided such a fate.

If you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections. It's why — well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now. Maybe you should be doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube. Or 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, because you're doing something else useful. And if you give in to 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 — it doesn't get to have its way.

So that's another thing really to remember: don't practise what you do not want to become. And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man. 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. And the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up. So you've got to be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.

Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.