Some remarkable things I suspect are true of nearly all adults: 

1) We each hold some beliefs that are almost totally non-responsive to evidence involving some combination of our identity (who we are), our group, the nature of reality (e.g., God), or the nature of what’s good.

Examples:

• Many have an unshakable belief that they are good even as they harm the world (or believe they’re insufficient even though they’re altruistic and productive)

• Most have an unshakable belief that their in-group is good and any group opposing their group is bad

2) We assume that other people’s internal experiences are more similar to our internal experiences than they really are. Consequently, we tend to predict they’ll behave more like us than they really will.

Example:

• You’re an anxious person who avoids situations you’re afraid of, so you predict other people will be more afraid of similar situations than they really will be and that they’ll be more avoidant than they really will be

3) Emotions alter our behaviors and thoughts (increasing the likelihood of some behaviors and thoughts, decreasing the likelihood of others) in emotion-dependent ways.

Examples: 

• Physical disgust increases the chance of backing away and reduces the chance of eating soon

• Feelings of depression increase the chance of thinking thoughts about situations being hopeless or actions being pointless

4) How good or bad we feel about something happening depends on the difference between our expectations about what will happen and the reality of what actually happened.

Examples: 

• If you think someone with a gun is about to shoot, but instead, they take your wallet and run, you might feel relief (whereas normally wallet theft would be highly distressing) 

• If you expect to make $300k on a deal, you might feel bad if you “only” get $200k

5) We have multiple “drives” encoded in our brains that want different things (e.g., they have different values or goals), and these often come into conflict. Our behavior is influenced by which drives are activated and how strongly each is activated.

Examples: 

• If we smell delicious popcorn right in front of us, most of us will eat it, whereas if it’s a few feet away and we can’t smell it, we’re less likely to 

• If we’re exhausted but also slightly hungry, we may delay making food until we are more hungry or less tired

6) We are influenced by the behavioral norms and patterns demonstrated by the people around us, especially when they are people who we identify as being part of our group or similar to us.

Example: 

• If it’s common to dress or talk a certain way in a place we move to, it will increase the chance we start to dress and talk similarly

This piece was first written on October 20, 2023, and first appeared on my website on February 7, 2024.

Ethical force 1: Emotion 

The vast majority of us experience empathy and compassion. We tend to feel happy when seeing others happy and feel bad when we see others suffering. These feelings guide our ethical behavior at an interpersonal level, causing prosocial behavior. For instance, people who behave kindly tend to have more compassion than average.

Ethical force 2: Mimicry 

Most of the time, most of us copy the behaviors of our social peers without even thinking. If everyone stands up, we’ll stand up. If everyone dangles a funny piece of fabric around their necks, we’ll do it too. Copying seems to be deeply rooted in us.

Social mimicry limits bad behaviors that aren’t the sort of thing that our peers do. For instance, in most subcultures in the US, punching someone when you feel angry is considered wildly inappropriate. So mimicry, in this case, can reduce violence.

Ethical force 3: Punishment 

Most of us have a strong desire to belong. We don’t want to be ostracized, which encourages avoiding unethical actions that our social group condemns. If we hurt someone, they may personally take revenge on us. And nobody wants to go to jail, which helps reduce the frequency of people committing crimes.

Some unethical behavior is avoided just to avoid punishment.

Ethical force 4: Belief 

Many people believe in specific ethical systems. Examples include Christians who adopt God’s commandments and the subset of Effective Altruists who adopt a flavor of utilitarianism. Belief can guide ethical behavior even in the absence of the other forces.

Individual Differences

People differ in how strongly they experience each of these four ethical forces. For instance, sociopaths (by definition) have a diminished capacity to experience #1 (especially empathy and compassion). From my observations, they also seem to be less influenced than usual by #2 (mimicry) and #3 (punishment). Hence, unless they have a strong #4 (belief system) or are especially fearful of punishment, they can be at a greatly elevated risk of unethical actions.

When someone engages in unethical behavior, we can return to this Four Forces framework to help make sense of their action. Most people would avoid that behavior due to some combination of the four forces described above. So, which of those forces were missing in this person’s case?

These Forces Can Also Promote Unethical Behavior

It’s also worth noting that each of these four forces can work in reverse. Whereas compassion discourages unethical behavior, emotions like anger can cause it. 

Whereas mimicry encourages good behavior in some ways, in an unjust society, it can encourage bad behavior (e.g., you may harm the outgroup because your ingroup normalizes it).

In a society with highly unjust laws, punishment can actually promote unethical behavior (e.g., requiring that you discriminate against a certain group).

And some belief systems lead to unethical behavior as well (e.g., if you join a cult whose leader teaches you that you must commit mass murder to become a martyr). 

Situational Factors

Some situations have little to no influence on one’s moral behavior, whereas other situations tend to create a strong pull toward or away from ethical behavior.

For example, there are some situations that would cause a substantial percentage of normal people to behave unethically. For instance:

• When there is a very strong social mimicry force in favor of unethical behavior (e.g., everyone you know thinks it’s good to hurt people from group X)

• When there is an extremely large personal gain to be made from behaving unethically, with no risk of punishment and with no identifiable victim (e.g., you have a chance to steal ten million dollars by taking pennies each from lots of people and it’s almost impossible for you to be caught)

• When there is an extremely large punishment for not behaving unethically (e.g., you’ll be tortured if you don’t commit a heinous act) 

So when we’re considering whether a person will behave unethically, we need to consider both personal factors (e.g., do they experience strong compassion for others) and situational factors (such as those described above).

This piece was first written on December 9, 2022, and first appeared on this site on January 7, 2023.

So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as INHERENTLY immoral, that is, acts they would still think of as immoral even if no other consequences of that behavior were to occur?

Here’s my attempt so far at making a comprehensive list of things that at least some cultures view as intrinsically wrong. Note that many of these items are related or overlapping. What am I missing from the list?

—

1. UNFAIRNESS

• Injustice (e.g., helping a bad person avoid punishment, or undermining someone’s just reward)

• Inequality (e.g., causing society’s resources to be concentrated among just a few while everyone else is poor, or treating people differently based on gender or skin color)

• Abuse of authority (e.g., nepotism, or favoritism, or those in power giving rewards to those they like best instead of those who deserve it, or those who are given a certain position of authority not carrying out the duties of that position, or carrying out the duties poorly or in a self-interested manner)

—

2. HARM

• Harm (e.g., causing others suffering or purposely reducing the happiness of others)

• Murder (e.g., ending the life of another person, including in some cultures, animals, or allowing others to die needlessly)

• Genocide (e.g., the harming or killing of a specific, targeted group)

• Stealing (e.g., taking something that belongs to someone else or that should be no one’s property)

• Destruction (e.g., damaging or annihilating things of value, like ruining the environment, destroying ancient or beautiful artifacts, instigating societal collapse, or hunting a species to extinction)

• Slander (e.g., speaking ill of others, or gossiping by spreading true but negative or harmful information about other people)

• Subjugation (e.g., controlling the body, mind, or choices of others, or restricting freedom)

—

3. DISRESPECT

• Disrespect of authority (e.g., being rude to your parents or disobeying your leaders)

• Disrespect of the vulnerable (e.g., treating people badly or not showing respect for members of a subjugated or vulnerable or oppressed group, or not paying proper respect to those who are victims, or disrespecting people living under hard conditions)

• Disrespect of the dead (e.g., digging up a grave, selling a dead body, necrophilia, cannibalism, speaking badly of the dead)

• Disrespect of god or gods (e.g., blasphemy, taking God’s name in vain, desecrating a place of worship, violating a commandment such as doing work on a day when work is forbidden, worshiping a carved idol instead of worshiping God, not engaging in prayer or thanks, questioning God’s nature, or God’s choices, or God’s existence)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., worshipping alternative gods, engaging in superstitions, engaging in practices or rituals of other religions)

• Rule-breaking (e.g., violating the laws of your country or the rules of your culture, even if those laws are arbitrary or pointless)

• Violating tradition (e.g., non-conformity, or refusing to engage in the traditions of your culture, or flouting traditional roles or norms)

• Disrespect of opinions (e.g., not taking into account the opinions or desires of other people, falsely believing you know more or are wiser than others)

• Defiling (e.g., causing others to be impure, or causing others to take immoral actions, or causing others to leave your religion)

—

4. IMPURITY

• Food impurity (e.g., eating certain “forbidden”, “impure” or “disgusting” foods)

• Sexual impurity (e.g., sex before marriage, bestiality, incest, sex with forbidden people, or performing forbidden sexual acts)

• Bodily impurity (e.g., uncleanliness, or making certain disallowed alterations to the body, face, or hair, or taking drugs or intoxicants)

• Social impurity (e.g., spending time with others who are thought to be bad or impure, such as murderers or members of an outcast group)

• Unnaturalness (e.g., engaging in behaviors or social relationships that are viewed as unnatural or in violation of the natural order, or “playing god”, such as by trying to modify natural things)

—

5. DISLOYALITY

• Betrayal (e.g., refusing to help someone who has often helped you or with whom you have a long history)

• Familial rejection (e.g., disowning a family member or refusing to help a family member in need or choosing to benefit a non-family member over a family member)

• Infidelity (e.g., to cheat on a romantic partner when in a monogamous relationship)

• Treason (e.g., rejecting your in-group, or bad mouthing your in-group, or harming your in-group, or leaving your in-group for another group, running away in battle)

—

6. DISHONESTY

• Lying (e.g., being dishonest, or spreading false information, or allowing others to come to false conclusions)

• Perjury (e.g., claiming that someone did something they didn’t do in order to help yourself)

• Promise breaking (e.g., to violate a contract or go back on a promise)

• Cheating (e.g., getting an unfair advantage, violating rules that everyone else has to follow, or giving what one person has earned to a different person instead)

—

7. BAD CHARACTER

• Irresponsibility (e.g., failing to take care of your children, or do your job, or keep your promises)

• Inaction (e.g., not intervening when something bad is happening and you have the power to stop it)

• Wastefulness (e.g., letting food or resources go to waste, using more than is needed, or not making use of your talent or potential)

• Faithlessness (e.g., not believing in God or gods, not believing in the existence of good and evil, not believing that there is such a thing as moral being morality)

• Ignorance (e.g., stupidity, irrationality, lack of knowledge, narrow-mindedness, intolerance of other opinions)

• Selfishness (e.g., not caring about other people, or choosing the benefit of oneself over the benefit of one’s community, or refusing to help others who are in need when you have a lot of resources, or rejecting being part of any community, excessively promoting oneself, or bragging)

• Recklessness (e.g., allowing things of value to come into danger due to lack of forethought or caring, taking excessive risks)

• Sinful emotion (e.g., excessive anger, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, laziness, arrogance, materialistic desire)

—

EXAMPLES OF MORAL SYSTEMS

—

The Ten Commandments forbid items from 8 of these sub-categories:

• Practicing other faiths (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”)

• Disrespect of God (“thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images…not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain…remember the sabbath day”)

• Disrespect of authority (“honor thy father and thy mother”)

• Murder (“thou shalt not kill”)

• Infidelity (“thou shalt not commit adultery”)

• Stealing (“thou shalt not steal”)

• Perjury (“thou shalt not bear false witness”)

• Sinful emotion (“thou shalt not covet”)

—

The golden rule (“Do to others what you want them to do to you”) doesn’t directly forbid any of these items, but making reasonable guesses for what most people would want done to them, it likely ends up forbidding at least some items from every one of the high-level categories above.

—

The “Five Precepts” for lay followers of some traditions of Buddhism ask you to refrain from these sub-categories:

• Murder (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing.”)

• Stealing (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.”)

• Sexual impurity (“I undertake the training rule to avoid sexual misconduct.”)

• Lying and Perjury (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.”)

• Bodily impurity (“I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.”)

—

As I understand it, for some (but not all) Sikhs, the main sub-categories of religious prohibitions are:

• Bodily impurity (cutting hair, taking intoxicants)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., eating meat of animals killed in a ritualistic manner, engaging in superstitious rituals, and animal sacrifice)

• Sinful emotion (obsessive greed/materialistic desire)

• Selfishness (living a life disconnected from society as a recluse or non-family oriented living, bragging)

• Slander

• Lying

• Infidelity

This piece was first written on April 18, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 15, 2025.

Usually, these involve assuming that someone did something that you don’t like on purpose when it would be more accurate to say they did the thing automatically (and they may need significant practice to change that automatic behavior). Of course, it’s still up to that person (with your help, ideally) to recognize the mistake and work on improving it.

What makes this all the more tricky is that just caring a lot or being motivated to be a better person/friend/partner, or deeply valuing the relationship at stake, often isn’t enough to cause the problem to go away on its own. What the offender really may need is to consciously start using specific strategies that are tuned to that particular kind of automatic cognitive mistake, so that they can successfully adjust a subconscious tendency or behavior.

It, of course, COULD be that the person doesn’t care about you, or doesn’t want to make an effort to improve for you, but the problem is that even if the person really does care and feels motivated to improve they may need explicit strategies to help them do so (and continuing to make certain classes of mistakes is not necessarily a strong indicator that they don’t care).

Some examples:

(1) Forgetting Important Things
e.g., Your friend forgot that you are vegetarian and tried to serve you meat.
e.g., Your friend forgot that important story you told them about a critical moment in your childhood.
e.g., Your partner forgot that today is your anniversary.

If a person forgets something that was important to you, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that they didn’t really care about that thing or don’t really value you. But the human brain is such that we forget nearly everything. It can take purposeful work to get something to stay in memory; otherwise, it’s a crapshoot. To make matters worse, people’s natural tendency to remember different types of information varies a lot, so people who naturally have better memories around a particular type of information may think that those with worse memories just don’t care, and those with worse memories can feel like they are unfairly being held responsible for transgressions that they don’t remember ever occurring (or that they don’t know how to get themselves to remember).

strategies: To improve memory it can really help to start using conscious encoding strategies (e.g., repeating something to yourself multiple times on purpose, writing the thing down so you can look it up when needed, putting it in your calendar to remind you of it when you will need it, using visualization techniques to leverage the strong visual memory system in even non-visual memory tasks, using spaced repetition systems, etc.)

(2) Annoying Routine Behaviors
e.g., Your friend talks too much when you’re together instead of asking you questions.
e.g., Your friend laughs sometimes when you say something that is meant to be serious.
e.g., Your partner keeps leaving their pants on the floor instead of in the hamper.

If you know that a person knows you don’t like it when they do a certain behavior, yet they keep doing the behavior, it can be very natural to assume the other person has made a choice to annoy or hurt you. But grooves in the mind really occur in a meaningful sense, and when someone has done a certain set of behaviors in reaction to a certain set of stimuli for a long time, it can take a lot of work to stop. Even if they manage to suppress the behavior some of the time, it can then reoccur as soon as they have less willpower or are distracted.

strategies: To improve undesirable habits it helps to have regular, fast and accurate feedback whenever we slip up (e.g., the other person nicely reminding us each time we do the thing wrong) and to practice replacing these negative habits with more positive behaviors (whenever the stimulus that typically precedes the negative habit occurs, we consciously do some different thing instead; that we’ve chosen in advance).

(3) Avoiding Important Topics or Situations
e.g., Your friend seems anxious about something, but they say it’s nothing when you ask.
e.g., Your partner doesn’t want to go out dancing together.
e.g., Your partner doesn’t proactively bring it up when they are upset about something in your relationship.
If a person avoids a situation that is meaningful (e.g., attending a certain event or being proactive about having a certain difficult conversation), it’s again easy to assume they don’t value that thing or don’t value you. On the other hand, if the other person has high levels of anxiety, it’s worth noting that avoidance is a very common symptom of anxiety and in fact the more the person cares about that thing, the more anxious they may feel about it (hence valuing the thing a lot may make them feel less capable of being able to handle doing it).

strategies: To improve anxious avoidance it can really help to undergo Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with a therapist, or to use self-guided exposure therapy with a “fear hierarchy” where we practice facing fears of increasing intensity, or to use self-administered rejection therapy, or to learn coping techniques like progressive muscle relaxation and diaphragmatic breathing, or to take anti-depressants which help some people who have high anxiety.

(4) Not Preempting Your Needs
e.g., You want your friend to validate how you feel when you’re upset, but instead, they tell you not to worry about what’s bothering you.
e.g., You want your partner to make more time for you on the weekend.
e.g., You want your friend to ask you about the important things going on in your life.
If a person doesn’t preempt your needs when you really want them to, or when think they should be able to, it is easy to feel frustrated or angry or at least let down due to them not being more “thoughtful.” But people’s minds (and needs) can be very different from each other, and the more different two minds are, the harder it is for one to predict or preempt the needs of another. For instance, if when you are sad, you really like it if people do X, but when your friend is sad, they hate it when people do X, you are very likely to keep making the error of doing X when your friend is sad. And even if the friend tells you they don’t like X and want Y, you may struggle to do Y, or be very bad at it at first, because it feels to your brain like the wrong thing to do in the situation (and your brain’s simulation of their brain, in fact, still says that it is bad).

strategies: To improve it can help a lot to ask others to spell out their needs for you as explicitly as they are able and willing to do (ideally not just what they desire from you, but also why they desire it), since if your needs are different from theirs, or your brain works differently from theirs, you may do a bad job of guessing their needs. And without knowing the “why” behind the needs they do express, you may have trouble generalizing specific instances of what they want to other new cases that you haven’t seen before.

(5) Not Reacting To Your Emotions
e.g., Your are angry at your friend and are showing it blatantly, but they don’t address it or apologize.
e.g., You feel sad, but your partner doesn’t seem to notice.
e.g., You tell your friend you had a terrible day, and they only minimally respond.

If a person doesn’t respond to the emotions we feel, it can be frustrating or saddening or make us think they don’t care about us. The trouble is that people differ in (a) how good they are at reading the emotions of others (e.g., they may literally not have noticed your emotion because they are bad at reading emotions generally, or noticed that something was off but not been able to pinpoint what emotion you were experiencing), (b) how savvy they are at giving the right response to the emotions of other people (e.g., they may have noticed we were experiencing a certain emotion but not known the right way to respond and so didn’t react at all) and (c) how much they assume others want them to respond to their emotions (e.g., they may have noticed your emotion but assumed you wouldn’t want them to do something that would call attention to it or make it obvious that they identified it).

strategies: We can improve by practicing reading emotions generally (e.g., emotion recognition training online that Ekman offers), and by asking people how they’d prefer we respond when they’re feeling different emotions (e.g., some people want a hug when they are sad without talking about it too much, others want us to be upbeat; still others want us to ask why they are sad and validate their explanation).

(6) Reacting Emotionally In Ways That Bother You
e.g., You are telling your partner about something they do that bothers you, and they have an angry response.
e.g., You tell your friend about something bad that happened to you that you want to talk to them about, but they become sad and redirect the conversation to a problem they are having instead.
e.g., You tell a friend that they did something you didn’t like and they suddenly become very upset.

If there is a situation where a friend or partner has an emotional response that seems to you to be unfair, unjustified, inappropriate or insulting, it’s only natural that you may feel bothered by it. But be careful about holding someone’s automatic emotional response against them too much, since there is a good chance they don’t have control of it, and couldn’t change it easily if they wanted to. Automatic emotional responses can be changed, but generally, it takes a lot of work, and not everyone knows how to do it. Furthermore, emotional responses often happen so fast that we don’t have time to stop them in real-time before the emotion is out there. What is fairer to hold a person responsible for, is how they respond once their initial emotional response has occurred (rather than for what that initial emotional response is). The other issue is that the fact that the person had an emotional response that caught you off guard means there is probably something you can learn about them (and perhaps that they can learn about themselves), and so rather than blaming them for having this reaction it can be a lot healthier to discuss it while trying to avoid judging them for it.

strategies: To change an emotional response you have that seems destructive, try to actively reframe that kind of situation in a manner that evokes the sort of emotional response that you think is ideal, or to increase your control over emotional responses that have just occurred, consider learning techniques from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or learning to excuse yourself momentarily when you feel an emotion coming on that would be destructive in the given context.

Here are simple defaults in four complex domains that can be surprisingly hard to outperform:

1. Charity: give money to the poorest non-drug addicted people you can find, and let them do whatever they want with the money.

GiveWell, which has spent years looking for the most effective, evidence-based giving opportunities, has concluded that Give Directly is among the best options it can find. But all it does is use smart ways to locate and give money to really poor people internationally.

And yet, a tremendous amount of effort goes into developing clever interventions that provide goods or services that people struggle to provide for themselves. Yet most of these don’t seem to perform that well when in terms of outcomes compared to simply giving money to very poor people.

2. Investing: put some money in long-term government bonds and the rest in the stock market (the ratio determined by risk tolerance and need for liquidity).

The significant majority of people who attempt to do better than this historically have underperformed this simple strategy (due largely to trading commissions, taxes, management fees, the existence of a small number of highly skilled players, and the fact that the average performance of market participants is the same as the average return of the market).

Yet, the market is not perfectly “efficient,” and there are many other asset classes beyond stocks and long-term government bonds that one could mix.

3. Predictions: train a simple linear regression model based on historical data to predict the variable of interest.

Evidence suggests that linear regression models (ordinary “least squares” regression) beat human experts at many types of forecasting (e.g., see Paul Meehl’s work on statistical prediction). Additionally, quite often, a simple linear regression does as well (or close to it) as attempts to use complex models on data-driven prediction problems.

And yet, linear regression is not anywhere close to the cutting-edge methods for making predictions.

4. Behavior: align people’s monetary incentives with the behavior that is desirable.

It’s remarkable how often the way people in a field behave seems to end up aligning with their monetary incentives (e.g., think about cases where employees at banks create tons of fake accounts on behalf of unsuspecting clients because of a monetary incentive to do so). As famed investor Charlie Munger put it, “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes, but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” Part of the power of monetary incentives is from people directly responding to the money itself, but another part is because those who aren’t responsive to the existing monetary incentives tend to be squeezed out of a field, advance less quickly, or don’t like the environment and so quit on their own accord. And since monetary incentives are usually more tangible than other forms of rewards, there is often a more reliable feedback loop for those trying to optimize for money than for other goods.

And yet, clearly, there are many motivators that people have beyond just money and work achievement, and money is sometimes a problematic or counterproductive motivator.

Sometimes, simple methods work almost unbelievably well.

This piece was first written on June 10, 2017, and first appeared on my website on March 12, 2025.

So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here’s my list of reasons we so often fail to act in our own self-interest. As you can see, the reasons are numerous.

Note: the items listed are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. Some reasons are connected, and sometimes multiple reasons apply in the same scenario.

(1) Misinformation – believing an action is in your self-interest when it isn’t, or that an action isn’t in your self-interest when it is (e.g., taking useless nutritional supplements daily, because you’ve heard they are helpful but are unaware of the significant risk they pose to your liver)

(2) Temptation – choosing a tempting, short-term benefit over a larger long-term benefit (e.g., eating the chocolate cake that you know you’ll regret tomorrow)

(3) Avoidance – avoiding a certain choice based on its short-term consequences, even though it could be better for you long-term (e.g., staying in an unhealthy relationship to avoid a painful breakup)

(4) Anxiety – avoiding a beneficial action out of fear of possible consequences (e.g., avoiding public speaking opportunities because they cause anxiety despite enjoying public speaking overall) [This is similar to Avoidance, but different because Avoidance is based on a real consequence, as opposed to irrational fear.]

(5) Altruism – acting in a way that is beneficial to a person or cause but harmful to you in some way (e.g., donating a substantial portion of your income to an effective charity) [this is a positive reason but included for comprehensiveness] 

(6) Forgetting – simply not remembering to act on something that is beneficial (e.g., forgetting to take your medicine)

(7) Confusion – not knowing how to carry out a beneficial action properly (e.g., you want to lift weights weekly to be healthier, but do not have sufficient training on the correct form to avoid injury)

(8) Distraction – intending to carry out a beneficial action but getting sidetracked during the process (e.g., sitting down at 6 pm for daily journaling but being called away to help your child)

(9) Delaying – pushing a beneficial action into the future since it has no clear deadline (e.g., you know you really should get treatment for your sleep problems that are ruining your happiness, but you’re busy and plan to address it next month)

(10) Helplessness – you’re convinced that attempts to take a beneficial action will inevitably fail, so lack the motivation to try (e.g., you feel that you’re dumb and will get bad grades no matter what, so you feel unmotivated to try in school)

(11) Unmotivated – knowing a certain action is good for you, in theory, but not feeling driven to do it (e.g., you know your current job is not a good fit for you but never feel motivated to search for a different one)

(12) Habits – you fall into harmful, subconsciously triggered routines of behavior or perpetually behave in a way that inhibits beneficial outcomes (e.g., you have a habit of fixating on negative traits of other people, and this makes it hard to develop deep friendships)

(13) Unequipped – you lack the ability or resources to carry out a beneficial action due to a lack of practice or training (e.g., you know it’s important to communicate honestly with your romantic partner, but struggle to put your thoughts and challenges into words)

(14) Love – making a sacrifice for a person with whom you have a close personal relationship (e.g., a parent who works an extra job so as to send their child to a better school they couldn’t otherwise afford) [similar to altruism, but more personal than acting out of general goodwill]

(15) Punishment – you punish yourself because you feel you deserve it, or to harm others indirectly (e.g., a teenager who engages in self-harm because they believe they are worthless or because they know it upsets their parents)

(16) Overwhelm – you have too many choices or too much information related to a certain action, so you shutdown or stick with the first or easiest choice (e.g., you know you should carefully select details of your 401(k) plan but, after reviewing three dozen options, you get frustrated and leave it at the default setting)

(17) Reactance – you resist outside efforts to control you (e.g., an employee who intentionally takes three cups of coffee per day in order to flout the two cup limit)

(18) Freedom – you choose to act contrary to your self-interest solely to demonstrate (to yourself or others) your freedom to choose (e.g., a person who makes a minor bad decision to show they could do so any time, if desired)

(19) Impulse – you feel a strong, subconscious-rooted urge to carry out certain harmful actions (e.g., a person who feels a strong urge to curse constantly)

(20) Expectations – you are expected to or pressured to act a certain way, and you are either used to satisfying expectations or desire social acceptance (e.g., an unbelieving person attends weekly religious services long-term solely because the community views them as devout) 

(21) Over-optimizing – you expend so much time, attention, or effort toward improving on a process or decision that you end up losing more than you gained (e.g., someone who changes projects every year because they want to find the very “best” project but actually accomplishes little because the projects are all left unfinished)

(22) Fatigue – you do not have the cognitive resources to make a good judgment at that moment [resulting from lack of sleep, burnout, drugs, etc.]

(23) Misjudgment – you misjudge the relevant probabilities or values involved in a choice and so choose the wrong one (e.g., making a bad stock market investment because of misanalysis of the relevant factors) 

(24) Uncertainty – you avoid options that are uncertain or ambiguous because certainty makes you more comfortable (e.g., someone who passes on a new interactive theatre experience, something they have no previous experience with, to instead watch a movie they’ve seen fifteen times)

(25) Inertia – you stick to the decision you previously made, or the path you’re already going down, even though it is clearly no longer beneficial (e.g., you’ve finished the first year of law school and, even though you don’t like it or want to be a lawyer anymore, you don’t withdraw) 

(26) Haste – you make a decision under time pressure and therefore don’t consider all the options or don’t consider the options thoroughly enough (e.g., a deer runs into the road, and you decide to swerve left even though it would have been a lot safer to swerve right)

(27) Prioritization – you expend effort or resources to make good decisions in some areas but not in those that are less important to you (e.g., a person chooses to focus their entire energy on getting healthy but neglects interpersonal relationships)

(28) Morality – you think it would be immoral to take the action that is most in your self-interest, or you feel guilty thinking about taking it (e.g., you really want a stereo and know you wouldn’t be caught stealing it, but you won’t take it anyway) 

(29) Emotion – you are experiencing intense emotions that alter your perception of what a good decision would be (e.g., you are really pissed off, so you punch the person that you’re talking to)

(30) Complexity – the decision is too complex for you to reason about effectively or too different from previous decisions you’ve made for your intuition to be reliable (e.g., you’ve just been elected president, and now you have to make decisions involving hundreds of factors and hard to predict second-order effects in areas that you’re not an expert in)

(31) Identity – you think of yourself as the sort of person who does X, so you choose to do X to maintain this self-identity or as a shortcut in decision-making (e.g., a person who thinks of themselves as a non-drinker and so doesn’t even consider the option of drinking in cases where they could potentially benefit)

(32) Attention – you make self-harming decisions because you want others to notice you, step in to help you or show that they care (e.g., a person who burns themselves with cigarettes so that others will notice the burns and feel concerned)

(33) Myopia – you think that your options are more limited than they are or you fail to fully consider what your best option is (e.g., you quit your job because you think of your options as either “stay” or “quit,” whereas you would have actually been better off renegotiating your role without quitting)

(34) Normality – you don’t want to take any action that may be considered strange, odd or weird (e.g., even though you are confident you would be better off having an open relationship rather than a monogamous one, you would not consider it because in your culture that would be a “strange” lifestyle)

Let’s dissect what’s going on here. An event triggers an upsetting thought, and the thought causes negative emotion. With your mood now lowered, upsetting thoughts are more likely to come to mind. Soon, another upsetting thought does occur, which causes more negative emotion, and further upsetting thoughts. Anxiety provokes worried thoughts, which themselves produce further anxiety. Sadness leads to despairing thoughts, which provoke greater sadness.

But negative emotions don’t just cause negative thoughts, they cause excessively negative thoughts, that reflect a distorted picture of reality. Anxiety causes us to overestimate how dangerous things are, depression makes our situation seem hopeless, and anger makes small slights seem like major attacks. In other words, negative emotions cause us to think in distorted ways that make these same emotions grow.

One way out of this downward emotional spiral is to use reason to reduce the mood lowering effect of negative thoughts by challenging any irrational or exaggerated content lurking in them. The earlier in the process you can apply reasoning, the better, because the more upset you are, the more difficult it is to reason effectively, and the more your thoughts are likely to be distorted.

A useful approach to reasoning yourself into a better mood is to pinpoint the negative distortions in thought that your emotions are causing, and then rephrase your thoughts more realistically. If you do this successfully your thoughts won’t lower your emotional state, and in this less negative mood state, further negative thoughts will be less likely to occur. This realization and those mentioned above are some of the powerful insights to come out of the field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

But how do you go about finding distortions in your thinking? Psychologists like David Burns have made it easy for us by categorizing the most common cognitive distortions that occur when people are upset. These are listed at the bottom of this page in an easy to consume form, and you can also download a quick reference here. Not only does this list of common distortions provide a fascinating glimpse into the content of the depressed and anxious mind, it serves as a useful tool that we can leverage when emotional.

So when you’re feeling upset, apply the following procedure:

1. Notice the upsetting thoughts that are running through your mind, and write them down.
2. Search the list of common cognitive distortions for any distortions that are lingering in these thoughts.
3. For each thought, generate a more realistic and productive one. These new thoughts should address or refute any distortions in the originals. Say these new thoughts to yourself, and confirm that you believe them.

Click here for a worksheet to help you do this exercise.

There is a good chance that just carrying out the exercise will immediately improve your mood. Even better, repeated practice may start to permanently alter your thinking, so that you’re less likely to produce cognitive distortions in the first place. Methods like this one are commonly employed by psychologists when treating severely anxious and depressed people, with good effect, but this technique also works well for milder forms of negative emotion.

So the next time you’re suffering from negative emotions and want to reduce your pain, you’ll now have an exercise you can apply to do something about it.

Below is the list of common cognitive distortions.

1. All or nothing thinking

Seeing things in extreme, black or white categories.

Since I’ve never had a girlfriend, I must be a loser.

If I fail this exam, I’m worthless.

If was actually good, I wouldn’t have made that mistake.

2. Overgeneralization

Seeing bad things as being part of a pattern that will inevitably repeat.

Just my luck! Bad things are always happening to me.

There I go again, screwing up another good lead.

Turned yet down again. I’m never going to have a girlfriend.

3. Focusing on the negative

Paying attention to the bad parts of a thing while ignoring the good.

I may have done well on my other exams, but I got a B in math.

This war proves that humanity is fundamentally evil.

The wedding would have been nice, but the waiters were rude.

4. Disqualifying the positive

Discrediting positive aspects or turning them into negatives.

The special effects were good, but not as good as I hoped.

He said he admired my intelligence, but was only being nice.

It’s true I got an A in that class, but that one was easy.

5. Jumping to conclusions

Making negative guesses about the future or what others think.

If they cared about me they would have come to my party.

He must be angry at me since he didn’t return my phone call.

I just know that they are going to reject my paper submission.

6. Magnification

Exaggerating the scale or significance of an event.

I’m never going to be happy again without her.

I can’t believe I’m filing for bankruptcy. My life is over.

If I don’t get this job, I’m going to be completely screwed.

7. Emotional Reasoning

Using your feeling about things as proof they really are that way.

Feel ashamed  ->  Assume you’ve done wrong  ->  “I shouldn’t have done that”

Feel angry  ->  Assume the other person was in the wrong  ->  “You asshole”

Feel rejected  ->  Assume no one wants to see you  ->  “No one likes me”

8. Should and Must statements

Telling yourself that you/things should be a certain way.

I can’t make mistakes like this again!

She shouldn’t treat me that way.

Waiters should always show respect to their customers.

9. Labeling

Oversimplifying the traits of yourself or others using emotional wording. 

I’m such a pig for eating all that ice cream!

That bitch at the movie theatre was so rude.

Only an idiot would make that mistake.

10. Blaming

Placing blame on yourself or others when the blamed person isn’t really responsible.

If I were a good mother, my daughter would be happier.

If you had been more careful, I wouldn’t have biked into you!

Still jobless after a month of searching. What’s wrong with me?

• Tell yourself you’ll eat just a few chips, then eat the whole bag?
• Watch funny YouTube videos “for a few minutes”, and then notice that an hour has passed?
• Choose to have “one drink”, and end up having five?
• Decide to play video games “for an hour” and then later discover you’ve been at it the entire night?
• Tell yourself you’ll check your stock portfolio “just once more” today, and then check it three more times?

Regardless of whether an activity is considered physically addictive, if you can’t stop doing it when you know you should, that activity is addictive (to you) in a meaningful sense.

Wikipedia’s description of addiction is enlightening:

Classic hallmarks of addiction include: impaired control over the behavior, preoccupation with the behavior, continuation despite consequences, and denial. Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).

The way some people drink coffee, read wikipedia, refresh email, post to comment threads, eat unhealthy foods, and check Facebook satisfy most of these criteria.

Suppose someone tells you that the last five times he’s gone to McDonald’s he’s eaten more food than intended. He says that even noticing his overeating didn’t curb this behavior. What do you think will happen the next time he goes to McDonald’s? If willpower, and a conscious desire to eat less didn’t work for him the last five times, why would it work for him the next time?

Now suppose that this person who overeats at McDonald’s is you. You may be convinced that you have a choice as to whether to eat too much at McDonald’s, that you are in control of yourself. But if every time you’ve been placed in that situation you failed to stop, why should next time be any different? If your willpower failed before, why would it succeed this time? As long as you are not different than you were, and the environment is not different either, you should not expect to get different results.

The ideal rate of an activity that is addictive to you is not necessarily zero. Just because you can’t stop when you start doesn’t mean you should never start. Perhaps spending an entire saturday playing video games once every three months is actually worth it to you. But the fact that you find an activity addictive implies that you should be much more cautious about starting in the first place. The choice you are making is not between eating zero chips and eating five. It is between eating zero chips and eating the entire bag. Stop telling yourself lies: if you couldn’t stop at five chips in the past, you very likely can’t stop at five this time either.

Once you accept that if you buy the chips you’ll be eating the whole bag, then you’re more likely to buy them at a more appropriate rate. If you cling to the idea that you are in control, and can stop whenever you want, then you’ll buy as though you can stop at five chips, even though you’ll eat as though you can’t.

There are certain cases where the right rate of a pleasurable activity is actually zero. If five chips is worth it, but an entire bag never is, and you always end up eating the entire bag, you probably shouldn’t ever be buying chips. Fortunately, cravings tend to fade. Cutting something out of your life may at first lead to increased cravings, but for most things those cravings will diminish. As long as you can avoid situations which re-trigger your desire, you may even forget that the object of your addiction exists. So you definitely shouldn’t hang around smokers when you’re trying to quit smoking.

Sometimes, the right choice is not cutting an activity out, but changing its form. Perhaps you can’t stop playing World of Warcraft once you log on, but there may be other games you enjoy that you don’t have nearly as much trouble stopping. So switch to one of those. Or maybe there is a certain type of chip that you find you always over consume, but another snack you enjoy almost as much that you can eat in reasonable quantities.

Most people in America are addicted to something. Food, TV, drugs, the internet, and games are common culprits. Companies have a profit motive to make these products addictive. They balance the fat, sugar, and salt in foods to try to make them maximally delicious, maximally difficult to stop eating. Foods today are far more difficult to stop eating than anything your ancestors from a hundred thousand years ago would have encountered. Likewise, online gaming companies fine tune game parameters to maximize the time that you play. They know that if you find treasure chests too often the game lacks excitement, and if you find them too infrequently, the game is frustrating. So they experiment on millions of users to figure out the optimal rate of treasure chests to keep people playing.

Want to reduce your addictions? Start right now by answering these four questions:

1. What activities do you have trouble stopping once you’ve started (or start more frequently than you should), even past the point when you know you should stop?

Examples:

• Checking Facebook
• Playing console games
• Drinking alcohol
• Eating too much bread

2. What situations lead to you engaging in these activities?

Examples:

• While surfing the internet you find yourself logging into Facebook
• You feel bored and sit down in font of your game console
• Friends invite you to a bar, or you remember the bottle of vodka in your freezer and open the freezer door
• You’re at a restaurant and the server brings bread to the table

3. What could you do to avoid getting into these situations where your addictions are activated?

Examples:

• Lock yourself out of Facebook or other time-wasting sites during certain hours of the day (or limit your usage to a certain amount of time per day) using software such as WasteNoTime (Safari & Chrome), Nanny (Chrome),  LeechBlock (Firefox), Eclipse (Windows), Freedom (Mac & Windows), Anti-Social (Mac), or Concentrate (Mac).
• Sell your game console (or cancel your World of Warcraft subscription). Only play at friend’s houses, which will put a natural cap on how much gaming you can do.
• Suggest to your friends that you meet at a coffee shop instead of a bar. Don’t keep alcohol in your house, for any reason (even if you resist drinking 95% of the times you notice the alcohol in your fridge, you’ll still find yourself drinking the other times).
• As soon as you sit down at the restaurant, tell the server you don’t want bread (if the bread is sitting in front of you, you’re probably going to eat it).

4. What can you do right now to help make sure you carry out these strategies?

Examples:

• Download and setup one of the previously mentioned website blockers
• Immediately go post your game console on ebay
• Add repeated weekly reminders to your calendar to remind you never to keep alcohol at home
• Set a timer that will go off just before you reach the restaurant tomorrow, reminding you to tell the server you don’t want bread

You’ve got strategies now. Go implement them!

In an environment with little criticism, it’s easy to forget about your flaws. But the more aware of them you are, the better position you will be in to correct them. So when you get really serious about self-improvement, being in a position to regularly receive criticism becomes a hugely valuable resource.

Other people see things about us that we ourselves can’t see. In part, this is because they tend to be less biased, but also because they watch us act from a third party perspective, which leads to different observations than occur from inside our own minds. For instance, others are more likely to notice if we do inconsiderate things, or if we have a goofy looking smile, than we are ourselves.

When I started to actively seek criticism from those who knew me well, I made many discoveries. It was incredible to me that I’d been so oblivious for such a long time about some of my undesirable behaviors, and that no one had ever mentioned them before. It became clear that most people (even those who care a lot) wouldn’t risk upsetting you or annoying you, even to tell you something that you really should hear. Fortunately, in many cases, merely becoming aware of a flaw was enough to get me to correct it.

To get honest feedback you shouldn’t ask “How would you say I’m flawed?” That may just be perceived as fishing for complements. What worked for me is making it clear that I’d gotten serious about improving myself, but that I needed help discovering more ways that I could improve further. When people realized that I truly did want to know my flaws, and that I wouldn’t get angry or defensive at what they said, the process went smoothly. Of course, it helps a lot if you really aren’t going to get angry or defensive. If you’re not at that point, hearing criticism from a friend could damage your relationship. Also, you should choose your sources of criticism wisely. Pick someone who is likely to give thoughtful comments, rather than use the opportunity as an excuse to attack you.

When you learn about a flaw for the first time, you’re probably going to wince. It hurts when you realize you’ve been doing something wrong for so long, and that people may have been judging you for it. This is one of the big reasons that so few people actually seek criticism. But if you set the goal of being a great person rather than just thinking you are great person, then criticism is less difficult to hear. It may also help to think about what an advantage it is to be the sort of person who finds flaws and then demolishes them, rather than taking the standard course of pretending they aren’t there. Flaws become opportunities the moment you learn about them, and you can improve at almost anything once you’ve figured out your weak points.

When you do receive criticism, it takes some skill to get the most out of it without feeling too bad. It’s useful to learn to dissect it into its basic types. There are three types of criticism, which often come mixed together:

1. Accurate criticism. This is a criticism that is warranted, and relates to one or more of your flaws.
2. Ignorant criticism. This is criticism based on a confusion or misunderstanding, and it does not actually relate to your flaws.
3. Emotive criticism. This is criticism designed to express emotion or evoke emotion in the person hearing it.

To see how dissecting criticism works in practice, let’s consider a hypothetical example. Suppose that the last three times your friend called you forgot to call him back. You kept intending to do so, but then it would slip your mind. One day, you bumped into this friend on the street. He came up to you and said:

“I just have to tell you, you’ve been an asshole lately. You’re so busy with your new girlfriend that you don’t even call me back anymore. You’re going to lose friends if you keep treating people like this.”

Ouch! Let’s dissect this criticism:

‘You’ve been an asshole lately’ is an example of Emotive criticism. Your friend is simultaneously expressing his negative emotion, and trying to make you feel bad. Although this part of the criticism doesn’t actually tell you much of anything about your flaws, it shows how angry your friend is which is important to know.

The second part, “You’re so busy with your new girlfriend” is Ignorant criticism. In this case, it has nothing to do with what you’re being criticized for, and is merely your friends misperception of the situation, since your girlfriend had nothing to do with you not calling back. Though this doesn’t relate to your flaws, it presents an opportunity to correct your friend’s misunderstanding, and explain what really happened.

The last part, “You don’t even call me back anymore. You’re going to lose friends if you keep treating people like this.” is Accurate criticism. It represents a useful call to action. You need to figure out a system for reminding yourself when you need to return a call, or you might actually lose friends. It can be upsetting to think of yourself as having been flaky, but in this case it’s a fact that you have been. Now that you’re aware of it, you can do something about it.

Breaking criticism into these three parts (Accurate, Ignorant, Emotive) will streamline the process of extracting useful information.

Criticism is easier to hear when you have sought it out than when it is thrust on you. And most people won’t volunteer it, until they are quite annoyed. So don’t wait until criticism comes your way. Seek criticism from your friends, your boss, and your spouse. Even acquaintances can provide an interesting perspective. Break down this criticism into the Accurate, Ignorant, and Emotive components. Know your flaws so you can correct them. Become greater.

So why don’t we always do what we know we should?

1. Habit. Have you ever tried to correct bad posture? At some point you’ll notice that your shoulders are hunched and you’ll make a correction, only to notice them hunched again two minutes later. Habits are behaviors that are done automatically. Frequently, we’re not aware of doing them as they occur, so our conscious mind doesn’t have the chance to stop them in action. Intellectually knowing what you should do won’t help if you aren’t consciously aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

To permanently correct a bad habit, it often takes a large number of repetitions of a different behavior, in the context where you would normally engage in the habit. Eventually the old habit will be replaced with a new one. Ideally, you want it to be the case that the context automatically triggers the good habit.

Suppose that you are using an ineffective tennis swing. You would ideally practice a better swing a large number of times (starting without a ball, and then eventually doing it with a ball, and finally doing it while hitting back and forth with another player). Eventually, the correct motion would feel more natural than the incorrect one.

To give another example, suppose that you’d like to correct a habit of pronounce certain words incorrectly. Ideally, you would make a list of these words and the correction pronunciations, and practice saying each correctly a few times a day (to yourself, and then eventually in conversation) until the correct pronunciations no longer required thought.

An approach like this requires a lot of effort, and the willingness to put time into repetitive practice, but it can really pay off. Think about what habit you’d like to instill instead of the one you currently have. Now think about what you could practice to instill this new habit. For complex actions, the practice should be simple to start, and then grown in complexity as you master the basic components (e.g. practice your tennis swing without a ball before doing it with a ball). Finally, schedule time on your calendar to actually perform the practice. Note that one practice session very likely won’t be enough (you may need quite a lot of practice to overcome strongly ingrained habits).

Note that even if you don’t currently have a bad habit, it may be well worth it making an effort to install a good habit. Practice doing what you’d like yourself to do, in the context you’d like yourself to do it. Try to do this good behavior as consistently as possible, to make the new habit form faster.

2. Conflicting desires. You may want to lose weight, but you also want to eat that cupcake. To say you know you shouldn’t eat that cupcake, is to imply that overall, the weight loss is more valuable to you than the pleasure you’ll get from the cupcake. The problem is that when these two desires come into conflict at the moment while that cupcake is sitting in front of you, your desire for the pleasurable taste may win out. Since our desires shift due to context, it may well be the case that 5 minutes prior, when the cupcake hadn’t yet been placed in front of you yet, your desire to lose weight was in fact stronger than your desire to eat a tasty treat. But when you start to salivate at the sight of cupcake, your desires change in magnitude.

If conflicting desires cause you to do things that are not in your own long term interest, there are a few strategies you can try. First, you can try making your desire stronger for the good behavior. For instance, try vividly imagining yourself after having lost the weight and mentally basking in how good that will feel, and the benefits you will get from it. Immediately follow this visualization by a second one where you mentally contrast that desired state with how things currently stand. This second part is critical to help build motivation (rather than just basking in wishful thinking).

A second approach is to try to make your desire for the bad behavior weaker, for instance by imagining yourself gaining weight as you eat unhealthy food. The idea is to build a stronger association between your desire and the negative consequences associated with it, so that when the desire is triggered, the negative thought is triggered simultaneously, reducing your overall desire. One way to carry this out is to make a list of the negative consequences of the bad behavior, and then imagine each of these negative consequences occurring.

A third approach to dealing with conflicting desires is to try to arrange your environment so that your desires are unlikely to shift in a way that will yield behaviors that aren’t what you want. For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight, don’t keep unhealthy foods around your house, and don’t go to cupcake shops.

It’s worth noting, that sometimes we have conflicting desires that we aren’t consciously aware of. For instance, you might know that you should start searching for a job, but without having acknowledged it explicitly, be terribly afraid of rejection. Hence, you may find that you mysteriously become anxious every time you start looking at job postings, which leads you to procrastinate.

To better understand whether conflicting desires are involved in causing you to avoid what you know you should do, try the following exercise: Ask yourself “what are the benefits that I get out of NOT doing this good behavior?” Make a list of whatever you can think of. Doing this may make you realize that you have reasons for not acting that you weren’t even aware of. Now, make a list of the costs of not doing the desired behavior. Reflect on this list of costs and benefits, and reflect whether those benefits are really worth the costs.

3. Lack of motivation. Sometimes you’ll know intellectually that something would be a good idea to do, but for some reason feel an utter lack of motivation to actually do it. For instance, you may be aware that it is much more efficient from a learning perspective to take notes on articles and non-fiction books you read, and review those notes later (or better yet, make flashcards from them), than to merely read passively. But there’s a good chance that you don’t feel any significant motivation to actually take notes while you’re reading.

When lack of motivation strikes, it may help to perform a cost benefit analysis. Make a list of the benefits and costs of doing that action (compared to the baseline state of not doing it). Read this list over again. If the action really is worth doing, this list of reasons why you should do it may give you greater motivation.

You also might find it helpful to try to boost your desire through visualization (as in the conflicting desires case above). Visualize your future after you have done the desired behavior, and imagine the benefits that you are likely to get out of it. Now, remind yourself of how things currently stand, and mentally contrast this with the desired future.

4. Forgetting. You might know what is good for you, but simply forget to do it. For instance, for the last two months you may have been in desperate need of a haircut, but what with your busy life, you never think to make an appointment. Or maybe you made an appointment, but forgot to show up for it.

There are at least four strategies you can use to combat forgetfulness. First, write down whatever you want to remember, and put that note somewhere that you’ll be forced to notice it (e.g. stick it on your sock drawer).

Second, put the thing you need to remember in your calendar. So if you think to yourself that you need a haircut, but right now its after business hours, put a reminder in your calendar to book one tomorrow at 10am.

Third, for important things that you keep forgetting to do (especially major things that you really aren’t looking forward to doing), you can ask a friend to act as an enforcer. Tell them how important it is for you to do this thing, and when you want to have it done by. Ask for their help with making sure you get it done, giving them free reign to nag you as much as is necessary. This social pressure can be very effective for some people.

The fourth, and best strategy, is to (whenever possible) act immediately at the moment when you do remember what you should do. So when you happen to recall that you need a haircut, don’t assume that you’ll remember to make an appointment tomorrow, just pick up the phone immediately and book it. You’ll likely be better at getting yourself to act immediately if you start viewing your brain as a buggy machine, which occasionally forgets important things for long periods (I know mine does, at least). Taking this perspective means that when you remember something important that you should do, you can’t just assume that your brain will eventually take care of it. If you don’t act now, who knows when you’ll remember to do it again, if you ever even remember to act at all. So act now, to save yourself from your buggy brain later!

5. Lack of knowledge. Even if you know what you should do to improve your life, you may not know how to do it. For instance, you might want people to view you as being more confident, but have little idea how to get yourself to act in a more confident manner. If you keep telling yourself what you “should” do, but you don’t know the steps to carry it out, you’re unlikely to change your behavior for the better.

When you lack sufficient knowledge as to how to achieve a behavior, take steps to correct your lack of knowledge. Ask someone who knows more, or do some research online, or try breaking down the action by taking twenty minutes to write down the small, simple components that make up whatever you’re trying to do. Even very complex actions can usually be broken into simple steps, each of which is fairly straightforward. For instance, suppose you want to learn to write computer programs, but you don’t know the first thing about programming. You might break this task up as follows: Step 1. Talk to friends who are knowledgable about computer programming, and ask them what programming language you should learn based on your goals. Step 2. Install the required software on your computer in order to be able to write programs in the language that your friends suggested. Step 3. Google to find a few tutorials on the language. Run them by your knowledgable friends to see which tutorial they think looks best. Step 4. Complete one of these tutorials on the language. etc.

To get yourself to do what you know is good for you, the first step is to diagnose what is holding you back form acting. Are you trying to break a bad, sticky habit? In that case, you may need to devote time to practicing a better habit to replace it. Are you dealing with a case of conflicting desires? If so, use visualization to increase your desire for the good action and reduce your desire for the bad action, while you try to avoid contexts that cause your desires to flip in a way that is counterproductive. Are you feeling a lack of motivation to behave how you know you should? Write down a list of pros and cons for the good action, and try visualization to increase motivation. Do you keep forgetting to do the desired behavior? Put notes in places where you’ll be forced to see them, use your calendar to schedule when you’re going to do your helpful behaviors, and try to build a habit of acting immediately when you remember something important to do. Know what you want to do, but lack the knowledge how to do it? Ask those who know more than you do how to start, do some research, and try to break the task down into simple, easy steps.

Unfortunately, all of this advice is problematic: what if you don’t feel like taking the advice, or you do want to take it but will likely forget to do so? What if you have existing habits that will make taking this advice difficult? In other words, how do you get yourself to do what this article says you should? The solution is to set the stage right now for following this advice in the future. Namely, apply the advice of this article, right now, to get yourself to take this article’s advice in the future.
Perform the following steps (right now!) so that you can benefit later:

Step 1. Consider the following reasons for not acting. Which of these do you think is most likely to prevent you from acting on the advice from this article?

(1) Habit (you have existing habits that may stand in the way).
(2) Conflicting desires (you have desires that conflict with your desire to take this advice).
(3) Lack of motivation (you don’t feel motivation to do what this article says).
(4) Forgetting (you are likely to forget to follow the advice of this article).
(5) Lack of knowledge (you don’t know how to follow this article’s advice).

Step 2. Go and reread the section of this article corresponding to whatever you selected in Step 1.

Step 3. Schedule at least two different times on your calendar for when you are going to do what that section you reread suggests.

Step 4. Schedule a time on your calendar when you are going to reread this entire article.

Step 5. When the scheduled events come up on your calendar, actually do them!