Currently I’m in a bad cycle with my life where I am consumed by 2 goals of making money and getting out of being broke, and losing weight so my body looks better. But I am in a pattern of self-sabotaging both of these and I can’t get my actions to consistently line up with the person I need to be to reach these goals.
To make money, I need to work hard to increase my business income so that I can pay myself more, and pay off debt and start to fix my situation. But I am stuck in this cycle of wasting time and not working when it’s time to work. I’m just drifting at the moment and I repeat these cycles of doing the bare minimum, waiting for my next meal, or next excuse for not doing work, and getting through the days. Then counting down to the weekend, and once the weekend arrives, acting completely out of align with my goals.
I know I need to make more money and I seemingly know what I need to do to make more money, but I don’t do them. Why do I not act in congruency with my goals? Why do I self-sabotage and stop myself doing the actions that I need to?
I wonder if part of it is because my body and mind is already in pain from a difficult upbringing so I just can’t tolerate any more. I listened to a podcast yesterday about a guy from a privileged upbringing and he said he was always driven, but I imagine it’s easier to be driven when you’re not always in pain because you’re holding on to pain from your past.
But I don’t want to make excuses, I want to find ways to fix this and it’s going to be through my habits. I think these habits are remaining still when I’m in discomfort and not going looking for sweet food, alcohol, gambling, my phone. This is something I need to practice regularly so I get better at it. I need to remove more and more things from my life that give me instant pleasure and keep reminding myself that my life is unmanageable when I’m being controlled by fake dopamine hits.
I must remember that the life I want to life is one where I set hard goals and I do what is necessary to achieve them. I incorporate proper relaxation into my life such as walking, stretching, meditating, writing, and reading. Relaxation for me is not going on my food, getting junk food, having alcohol, or finding other outlets.
If my goals are important to me then I need to make the pursuit of them less arduous and I think a big part of that is reducing the gap in pleasure between the actions required to achieve my goals, and what I do for relaxation. If my relaxation activities give me these massive hits of dopamine, then of course my brain is going to constantly send me back towards them because my mind and body have a certain baseline level of discomfort that it’s trying to avoid. So when I show it some cheap and easy ways to get out of pain, of course it goes looking for them.
I need to get better at planning my weeks and my weekends around the acitivites that are aligned with my goals. Not letting too many activities creep in that go against my goals and give me cheap dopamine because then I struggle to wind myself back in to work time.
I think people who had less chaos in their lifes can allow more pleasure in because they won’t get hooked because the gap between their baseline and the pleasurable activity is smaller. For those of us who are operating at a lower baseline, we get a much bigger rise in happiness from the cheap entertainment.
I’m committed to developing some practices that keep me more level throughout my days and my weeks. This will mean that when I start to see success in my work, the dopamine hit I get from this is where I get my thrills from. I need to get my dopamine from purposeful work, my relationships, and achieving my goals. I need to therefore remove as much cheap and instant dopamine as possible.
To action this, I’m going to stick to a diet which will get me to 89kg by the half marathon in less than a month (currently 95.7kg). Earlier this morning I was craving some food but sitting down and writing these 750 words has allowed the craving to pass. I’m also going to work harder to hit my input goals, and remove all sugar, alcohol, gambling, and cheap phone time. This isn’t about being a hypocrite to anyone else, this is solely so I can find joy in my own life because the comedowns after a cheap thrill are so mentally hard and draining, and they’re not worth the initial high.