Consider the quote:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein

Of course, that’s not the definition of insanity, and Einstein didn’t say it (despite the quote often being attributed to him). For those reasons, it sounds pretty stupid. But I would argue there is something wise about the quote and that it’s worth paying attention to.

If we are in a situation that’s deterministic and static – that is, nothing is changing, and nothing is random – then it’s absolutely true that doing the same thing over and over again won’t lead to different results. And, while real life is never perfectly static, and there’s an element of uncertainty in much of what we do, we sometimes do find ourselves in situations that are static and deterministic enough that trying the same thing we’ve always tried would be foolish.

And yet, it’s not so uncommon for people to continue using the same failed strategies over and over again. Let’s call these situations “Futility Loops” – where we try the same strategy over and over even though it has failed every time, and we have ample evidence to suggest it will continue to fail.

Here are a few examples I’ve witnessed myself:

•Someone trying to get a family member to change a harmful behavior by nudging them in the same way, year after year, even though it never works. For instance, by making the same kind of remarks that bother the other person but never get them to alter their behavior.

• Someone who is depressed and stuck in a bad life situation, making the same life choices again and again that leave him stuck in that same spot. For instance, by not taking any actions that could plausibly improve his depression.

• Someone who makes the same sort of bad relationship decisions again and again with each new relationship. For instance, getting into relationships with a certain type of personality that they are attracted to inevitably badly hurts them.

These are fairly obvious examples of Futility Loops, but I also see much more subtle examples (which I’ve engaged in myself): where your behavior isn’t exactly the same, and the situation isn’t exactly the same, so it is easy to miss the fact that it’s a Futility Loop. But the situations and your behaviors rhyme each time – effectively, you keep trying to apply a strategy that the world keeps telling you doesn’t work, but you don’t realize the pattern because each situation feels different enough not to notice.

In Futility Loops, whether the more obvious kind or the more subtle kind, a person repeatedly does the same behaviors that have never worked before, and of course, it doesn’t work this time either, leaving the bad situations to endlessly repeat – there does seem to be something insane about the behavior like the fake Einstein quote suggests.

But if we adopt another frame, where we view the person involved as part of the situation itself, the behavior is understandable and not really insane at all. The person themself hasn’t changed, so when they are thrust into the same bad situation, they engage in the same useless behavior. They have static habits, instincts, emotions, reactions, and so on, so when the same situation arises, their behavior is just what it was before – they are static, and the situation is static, so their behavior is static.

From this point of view, we see that they will be stuck in the Futility Loop until something changes: either something in the situation or something within themselves. But if they aren’t willing to wait until the situation luckily changes on its own, that leaves only one option: self-change.

Thankfully, the self-change doesn’t have to be profound to break out of this sort of loop. All you really need to do is recognize that:

(a) what you have been trying so far hasn’t worked

(b) if you try the same thing again, it’s likely to lead to the same outcome, and

(c) as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it: “Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change; you can’t do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY.”

Then you just need to try a different strategy. And if that strategy proves itself not to work, don’t get stuck on that one either – try yet another strategy. And so on.

It may be worth taking a moment to reflect: which situations may be a Futility Loop for you? Is there a type of bad situation that keeps repeating – and could it be that you’re trying to solve it each time with a strategy that doesn’t work? For instance, is there a person whose behavior you keep trying to nudge in the same way, even though it never helps? Is there a kind of person you keep being drawn with predictably bad outcomes? Is there a type of decision you routinely have to make where you apply the same ineffective approach?

The first step to breaking out of our Futility Loops is to identify them.

This piece was first written on September 18, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 3, 2024.

The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we’ve summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today. 

How do you think about being truly happy?

You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine your own views of happiness and understand the perspectives that other people take towards living a good life!

For each of these theories, there are lots of different variants with subtle differences – we’ve aimed to capture some central representative ideas that many variants have in common. 

We’ve also included some resources you can use to try and increase your happiness levels by applying these different methodologies!

Positive Psychology

A growing scientific field, positive psychology applies the tools of psychology to the question of what makes life most worth living.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present-oriented.”

-Sonja Lyubomirsky

How to achieve true happiness: Keep a gratitude list, cultivate positive relationships, find ways to use your strengths/virtues, do activities that get you into a flow state, savor pleasurable things in the moment, anticipate fun things in your future, reminisce about meaningful things in your past, buy more experiences and fewer things, avoid the hedonic treadmill.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools: 

• Building Happiness Habits
• Tactics for Happier Living
• Savor Your Life
• Become a Great Listener

Other resources:

• To be successful, should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? (Podcast episode)

Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophical thought from 3rd Century BC Greece and Rome, which is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” 

– Marcus Aurelius

How to achieve true happiness: Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow, only try to control what you’re actually able to, remember you’re not entitled to anything, learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing, seek value in all that happens. Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Reframing Negative Emotions
• Resolving Harmful Situations

Books:

• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Donald Robertson

Christianity

Based on biblical scripture and church traditions, many practitioners of Christianity view it as including rules and guidelines for living a good and happy life.

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

– C.S. Lewis

How to achieve true happiness: Be humble, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor, accept Jesus Christ as your savior, worship God, pray, have faith, be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you, be a devoted wife/husband/father/mother/child, obey the Ten Commandments, don’t cast the first stone, avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride, avoid hell at all costs, live for eternity in heaven with God.

Books:

• Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life – Craig Groeschel

Insight Meditation

Vipassanā, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist practice popular before the 10th Century AD, which gained widespread popularity in the late 20th Century, including in the USA. This practice emphasizes mindfulness meditation as a path to gaining insights into the nature of reality.

“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”

– Buddha

How to achieve true happiness: Follow the eightfold path, train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath), use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self, realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self), learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion.

Books:

• The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka – William Hart
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book – Daniel M Ingram

Other resources:

• Waking Up (meditation app)

Traditional

This set of values may strike you as a familiar blueprint to a traditionally good life.

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”

– Edmund Burke

How to achieve true happiness: Work hard, marry a good person, have multiple children, spend time with family, fit into your role, remember that many others have it worse than you, don’t complain, avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs), don’t waste money, achieve stability in life.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• The Relationship Review
• Managing Arguments in Relationships

Common sense

A common-sense approach to happiness focuses on meeting all your needs and making sure you have stable sources of fulfillment. No surprises here!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

– James Madison

How to achieve true happiness: Sleep enough, eat healthy food, exercise, spend your time with people you like, have a pet, seek work that’s enjoyable/challenging/meaningful, make sure your basic needs are met, try to make enough money to achieve financial security, save for retirement, marry someone you love who treats you well, have a fun hobby.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy
• Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure
• Career Fulfilment Diagnostic

Other resources:

• Choose a fulfilling life path using these five exercises from “Designing Your Life”

Introspection

Introspective theories say that the path to true happiness is through truly understanding yourself, healing your past trauma, and being authentic with others.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– C.G. Jung

How to achieve true happiness: Use psychedelics for self-exploration, listen to and get in touch with your body, engage in self-care and self-compassion, investigate and heal your trauma, find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer), be vulnerable around the people that you trust, share your true feelings, explore and have compassion for the different “parts” of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things, investigate your “true self” and be true to it, learn to pay attention to your intuition, find a way to look at the world that resonates with you. 

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Life-Changing Questions
• Your Primal World Beliefs
• Defining Emotions

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself – Kristin Neff

Other resources:

• How many minds do you have? (Podcast episode)
• The 10 Most Important Components of Self-Compassion
• Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps?
• How to Communicate Better with the People in Your Life (podcast episode)
• Exploring your Shadow and Healing your Traumas (podcast episode)

Self-help books

Books advocating techniques for self-improvement have exploded in popularity since the mid 20th Century. Each takes a different angle on how to be happy – here, we have collected some common themes.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

-Thomas Edison

How to achieve true happiness: Repeat affirmations that motivate you, form healthy daily habits, always work on becoming a better version of yourself, try new things, figure out what you really want and then plan to get it, prioritize, set ambitious goals, keep your home organized, think positive thoughts, believe you can do anything that you put your mind to, wake up early, make at least a little progress towards your goals each day, don’t let fear stop you, don’t give up, avoid negative people, surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System
• Design Your Own Self-Experiment
• Achieve Your Goals
• Get Going: Overcome Procrastination

Books:

• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The Motivation Hacker – Nick Winter

Other resources:

• How to Achieve Self-Control Without Self-Control
• How to Hack Your Own Brain (podcast episode)
• The Secrets of Effective Learning (podcast episode)
• By the Book (podcast)

Hedonism

As an approach to life, hedonism is all about doing whatever you can to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Bobby McFerrin

How to achieve true happiness: Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it, live in the moment (don’t worry about the future), dance, party, seek out cool experiences, do exactly what you feel like, ignore societal pressure, have sex, eat tasty food, do fun drugs, spend money on fun things, don’t let others tell you what to do.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 2 Minute Mood Boosters

Other resources:

• Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wondrous Destinations
• Happiness and Hedonic Adaptation (podcast episode)
• When is Suffering Good? (podcast episode)

Altruism

An altruistic approach to happiness is about devoting yourself to helping others and making the world a better place – the theory says you can gain fulfillment through knowing that other people are better off thanks to your efforts.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson

How to achieve true happiness: Give to charity, volunteer your time, choose a career that lets you help others, become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself, work hard to be kind, generous, and thoughtful, think hard about how you can do good, help strangers, build communities and projects to improve the world.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Leaving Your Mark on the World
• Charity Effectiveness Test
• Change Behaviour for the Better
• What Causes Match Your Values?

Books:

• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help – Larissa MacFarquhar
• Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Other resources:

• Four ways to have a positive impact on the world right now

Which of these theories resonates most with you?

It might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. An experimental approach could be useful – you could explore the resources we’ve linked above, try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you. 

We hope that exploring these theories has helped you conceptualize your own approach to happiness. Which theories of happiness have you lived by previously? How did you choose them, or did you pick them up unconsciously from your environment? How could you tweak these theories, combine them with other schools of thought, or replace parts that are unhelpful for you? What other theories of happiness do people live by?

A big thank you goes to Adam Binks for his help with this post!

Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy a book using the links in this article, you’ll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

(1) Noticing: paying close attention to your negative thoughts instead of pushing them away or trying to ignore the bad feelings. What are the EXACT words running through your mind? How does it feel right now to be you? What do your body and mind feel like?

(2) Allowing: letting go of negative thoughts or feelings ABOUT your emotional response. Be loving to yourself, like you would a friend. Remember, emotions are there to help you. It’s not bad to feel sad. You don’t have to be anxious (or angry at yourself) for these emotions.

(3) Observing: making observations about your thoughts (rather than only noticing them). Which of these upsetting thoughts are true and helpful? Which are false or unhelpful? It may help to write out upsetting thoughts you’re having, which you can then read later (when feeling a little better).

(4) Explaining: trying to clarify why, precisely, you are experiencing what you are feeling. Of course, a person is sad when their pet dies – but why, precisely, are you sad that Snowball died? Can you explain what is now lost that is making you so sad? What will you miss?

(5) Understanding: trying to make sense of the event (especially when it was a surprise or shock). What exactly occurred? How much was due to chance? What caused it? What role did you play, and what should you take responsibility for? What role did others play? What can you learn from it?

(6) Accepting: accepting that the event has happened and acknowledging the new state the world is in – not denying the way things are now or mentally rebelling against reality. This involves filling in mental details about what’s true from now on instead of refusing to update your mental map.

(7) Concluding: [eventually] taking actions that help give a sense of closure. This might be saying “goodbye,” performing a ritual, severing a tie, taking a symbolic action, etc. What can help you recover or move on?

This piece was first written on December 20, 2020, and first appeared on this site on March 11, 2022.

Health

1. If you don’t like exercise, instead of forcing or avoiding it, find ways to make it fun so that you actually want to do it (e.g., find a different type , such as a sport that engages you, or allow yourself to watch your favorite TV show or listen to your favorite podcast only while you’re exercising, etc.).
2. Sleep is invaluable to our health and worth improving! Through experimentation, find the best combination of conditions ( e.g. eye mask/no eye mask, earplugs/no earplugs, blackout curtains/no blackout curtains, pillow thickness, room temperature, pre-sleep routine, and mattress type) that are best for you.
3. When you’re considering taking medicine or undergoing an important treatment, combine your own research with that of a doctor (in other words, don’t assume that you can figure out more than your doctor knows, you probably can’t, but also don’t assume your doctor will tell you everything you would want to know, or that your doctor has read all the latest randomized controlled trials). Read scientific papers on your own, but be sure to discuss the information with your doctor to gain a full understanding.
4. It’s a lot easier to eat healthy if you incorporate it into your routine (e.g., every day for lunch, eat a salad and only stock healthy snacks at home) than if you have to make a decision each day between the healthy option and unhealthy option

Socializing

1. Avoid spending time with bad people (whether bad influences, immoral people, or destructive people).
2. Organize group activities (at least occasionally) so that you can still see friends when life gets busy, and so that your friends get to know each other.
3. Channel your warm feelings for those you care about when you greet them so that they can viscerally tell you value them.
4. Be warm and friendly at the start of emails (even really short emails), because otherwise, some people will think you’re curt or demanding.
5. If you meet someone at an event who you’d like to see again, show initiative in following up with them, rather than waiting for them to follow up with you. Relatedly, it’s better to ask for business cards for valuable contacts so you can initiate follow up communication, rather than to just to give your card and hope they get in touch.
6. Be conscious about how you allocate time between social events with strangers and quality time with current friends or acquaintances. Try to figure out what your own ideal balance is, between the two.
7. It’s possible to find something of mutual interest in almost any interaction. The key skill is to ask questions to discover which of the things you’d enjoy talking about or hearing about that would be interesting or exciting to the other person as well.
8. When someone makes a great point or says something really interesting or funny, tell them that you enjoyed what they said!

Fun

1. Adventure is more often intentional than accidental. They typically involve adopting a mindset of openness and being on the lookout for novel opportunities that present a challenge.
2. Try new things regularly and shake up your routine, even if you’re not sure what to expect. It could lead to amazing experiences or a new life long hobby. Either way, you learn more about yourself, make your life richer, and avoid ruts.
3. It’s easy as an adult to stop having “play” where you do something creative or wacky or funny just for the joy of it, but forgetting how to play is actually a huge loss.

Work (much of this list applies mainly for work done at a computer since that’s the sort of work I do)

1. If you are serious about making a long term project succeed, get another person involved in some capacity (this could be a cofounder, but not necessarily). You should involve someone else even if the other person has a more limited role than you.
2. Figure out how to make your work environment as comfortable and non-distracting as you can; it is well worth the investment (e.g., get the right headphones, office chair or standing desk, computer, beverage access, room temperature, and internet setup, set expectations with colleagues for how often you’ll be available, turn off the distracting computer and phone notifications, etc.).
3. Each week, schedule at least a few uninterrupted blocks of free work time (>2 hours per block ideally) to use to work on those “high context” projects that can’t be effectively worked on in 30-minute increments.
4. Ask the people you work with what you can do to improve (and emphasize your determination to improve and need for honest feedback) even if there is no formal review process at your job.
5. Always invest time in learning new skills or knowledge related to your work (and beware when you’ve been at a job for a year and feel like you’ve scarcely learned a new thing).
6. If you manage people, ask them periodically how you could help them more or support them more in their work, and what is most frustrating to them or blocking them.
7. When networking (e.g., at an event), there are lots of people to meet, so if you’re not naturally connecting with someone, just move on to someone else that you connect with more naturally, don’t force connection.
8. The way to really make a positive impression when networking is to add genuine value to the people you meet, so be on the lookout for how to you can create value (sometimes a low effort action on your part can really help another person).
9. Be wary of introducing people to each other just because they work in the same industry (or have some other surface-level commonality); usually, people in an industry know a lot of others in that industry already, so that kind of introduction is not usually valuable and in fact can waste everyone’s time.

• 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!

These circumstances can be explained, at least partially, in terms of desires changing and conflicting with each other. What we want when we consciously reflect on a situation sometimes differs from what we want when we are actually in that situation. And our desires can oppose each other, either simultaneously, or at different times. Desires push our actions in one direction for a while, only to push them in the opposite direction later on.

Tourette Syndrome can provide a particularly striking example of simultaneously wanting and not wanting. A small fraction of people with this syndrome have an extremely strong urge to yell obscenities (which apparently can feel almost like the desire to scratch an itch). In some cases they are able to learn to hold off the impulse (for instance when the social context makes it particularly inappropriate), but the desire to curse may still win out a few seconds later. The conscious desire not to offend people by cursing is at war with another, very powerful desire.

Let’s consider the case of a woman who eats excessively and hates this about herself. When she’s full, but good tasting food is sitting in front of her, does she actually want to keep eating? When she thinks about it consciously she probably experiences a strong feeling of “not wanting” associated with the idea of eating large quantities. At the same time, when she looks at the food, there is likely an intense desire to keep consuming it. She also may have habits which promote overeating: going to restaurants that serve large portions, selecting foods with high calorie density, eating quickly, eating the entire amount on her plate, eating while distracted by other activities, and so forth.

If we consider the fact that desires change from moment to moment and can come into conflict with each other, it is not hard to see why people get stuck in loops of oscillating desires. You don’t want to do X when you reflect on it, then end up doing X anyway because a new desire arises at the moment of action, then you regret it afterwards when you reflect further. This cycle can repeat for months or years.

Let’s again consider the case of the woman who overeats. Her experience might be as follows. When reflecting consciously, she doesn’t want to overeat, but when food is in front of her, a new desire springs to life. The desire to eat more is now suddenly greater than the reflective desire to not overeat, so she eats too much. In fact, if she is not actively thinking about her desire to not be someone who overeats, that desire to eat less may not be engaged at all. And if she is consciously reflecting at the time, she may start to make excuses for herself, such as “I’ll eat whatever I want now, and just eat less tomorrow to make up for it.” Afterwards, the desire to eat has diminished or disappeared, so when she consciously reflects again she regrets the fact that she eat too much and vows not to do it again. Then the entire pattern repeats because the vow is not enough to make her reflective desire win out over those momentary urges to eat.

Why is it that at times your conscious, reflective desires beat out your momentary desires, and other times they get trumped? A variety of factors likely affect the outcome, including:

• The relative “strengths” of the two desires
• Your present mental state (including level of hunger, fatigue, discomfort, emotional arousal, and so forth)
• The frequency with which you engages in conscious reflection, and whether you happen to apply it during the current situation
• Your propensity towards delaying gratification
• The number of times (and how recently) you let this momentary desire trump your reflective desire (i.e. the strength of the habits you’ve formed)
• Your overall ability to override impulses with conscious thought

Why do our actions conflict with our conscious desires in the first place? It’s a necessary consequence of the fact that many different forces compel us to act. These forces include:

• Primal drives. We yearn for food, sex, social status, etc.
• Emotional responses. We want to avoid situations that makes us anxious, and attack people that make us angry.
• Instinctual and automatic responses. We pull our hand away from a hot stove, turn to look when a loud noise occurs, and scratch our skin when it itches.
• Habit. When we’ve taken the same route to work twenty times in a row, we continue taking that route without even thinking about it.
• Conscious reflection. We may long for a world where people don’t starve, and so volunteer at a non-profit organization, or want to be a person who exercises more often, and so buy a gym membership.

Our conscious reflections about what we want can conflict with each of these forces, and with each other. For instance:

• You want to think of yourself as a good person who doesn’t steal but also want to download music files without paying for them.
• You don’t want to cheat on your girlfriend, but you feel strongly attracted to a particular woman.
• You want to make more friends, but it stresses you out being in social situations with new people.
• You want to be a great boxer, but you flinch whenever your opponent feints a punch.
• You want to walk with better posture, but you keep falling into your habit of slouching.

What can we do when we find ourselves stuck in a loop where we don’t want to do X, then do X anyway due to momentary desires, then regret it? In other words, how do we get our actions to more closely align with what our conscious, reflective mind wants? Here are some techniques that can be useful:

• Social reinforcement. Tell someone else how you want to act, and get them to check on you regularly to make sure that you act that way. This can be especially effective if you have a strong desire not to let this person down. This creates a secondary desire (pleasing another person) that works in the same direction as your conscious, reflective desire.
• Avoid acting while in fragile mental states. When you’re feeling tired, uncomfortable, hungry, stressed, or emotional try to avoid those situations where your conscious mind will need to override strong conflicting desires. In these delicate states it may be harder to get your thinking to control your actions.
• Activate your conscious mind more often. The more frequently you can get yourself to engage your conscious mind during an action and reflect on what you value and why you value it, the better chance you’ll have of overriding momentary desires that come up. One strategy is as follows: If there are times when you expect to experience strong momentary desires, you can setup phone alerts/reminders to snap you into a conscious state. For instance, if you’re going to a business meeting at a restaurant where the wine will be flowing, and you’re worried you might drink too much, set your phone to vibrate with a message ten minutes into the dinner to remind your conscious mind that you shouldn’t have more than a glass or two. You might even include in the phone reminder the reasons why drinking more would be a bad idea (to increase your motivation).
• Positive reinforcement. Reward yourself for acting in ways that are in closer alignment to what your conscious mind values. To boost effectiveness, try to make these rewards come as quickly as possible after you do your good behavior. For instance, if you know that you should get to work right away every morning, but have trouble doing so, take that first sip of delicious morning coffee right when you sit down to begin you’re work (and don’t let yourself drink any before then).
• Break old habits. During times when your conscious mind happens to be in particularly strong control, start to break bad habits by putting yourself in the situation where your momentary desires typically take over, and purposely override them. So, if you’re feeling powerful, go to the store that sells those amazing cupcakes you usually can’t resist. Look at one closely, take a whiff of its delicious smell, and feel yourself salivating. Now walk out without buying one!
• Build new habits. Sometimes undesirable habits can be subverted without fighting them directly by simply forming new habits to replace them. If you’re accustomed to spending two hours watching TV every night starting at 8pm, and this is something you don’t like about yourself, try to create a habit of sitting down to read a useful book at 7:45pm. After you’ve done this for enough nights in a row you will have replaced your watching habit with a reading one, and it will no longer be difficult to avoid watching two hours of TV a night .

Our actions can substantially deviate from what our conscious, reflective desires imply we should do. But our conscious mind doesn’t have to take this lying down. By planning ahead, and applying techniques like those mentioned, you can give your conscious desires an improved chance of trumping competing forces that compel you to act. While your conscious mind is in control, you can make arrangements to handle situations where it most likely won’t be.

Suppose that you know a friend who always eats chocolate cake when he has the opportunity, even when he forcefully wills himself not to. Naturally, you would predict that this person would eat chocolate cake the next time he has the opportunity. But we often fail to apply this sort of simple reasoning when assessing our own behavior. We believe that we have “free will”, and are in control of our decisions.  So on issues of willpower, we believe that our past behavior does not determine our present or future behavior. We say to ourselves, “It didn’t work before, but this time I will simply choose not to eat the cake,” or “I’ll just exert more willpower this time.” But unless you or your motivation have changed significantly since your past chocolate cake encounter, why should you expect yourself to behave any differently now than you did before? If you previously had good reason not to eat the cake, and you ate it anyway, why should that same reason stop you from eating it next time? If there is nothing substantially different about you, your motivation, your willpower, or the situation in which you are being placed, then there is no good reason why you will behave differently this time.

If resisting the cake is obviously the correct action to take in the future, it is natural to expect oneself to be capable of making that correct choice.  From the current vantage point, that is, one without cake in sight, it is easy to see that you should not eat lots of empty cake calories. The problem occurs though when the cake is in front of you, and you are salivating. Now, it is difficult to remember why you shouldn’t eat the cake. When you are planning ahead, you are not quite the same person as you are in front of cake. You are wrong to assume that you would make the same decisions in front of the cake that you had planned to make before encountering it. If a certain strategy for solving our problems has never worked before, and we still believe it might work, we may be failing to model ourselves accurately.

The big danger of viewing ourselves as being too much in control of our actions, or not being subject to our past decisions, is that we tend to try the same thing over and over again. We think, “Next time I’ll just choose to do things differently,” or “Next time I will try harder,” ignoring the fact that we never seem to be able to actually do that. We fall into a routine, trying to solve the same problem using the same method, and continue with that method long after it becomes clear that it is not helping us. We continue trying this method merely because we are used to trying it, or because we keep thinking, “Maybe now I can get it to work for me,” even when there is no indication that anything has changed since the last attempt.

If you have been trying to will yourself out of depression for the past year, it’s time to try something else. If you have been in psychotherapy for your anxiety for two years, with no noticeable improvement, it’s time to find a new type of therapy or explore other methods. If you have not been able to meet someone you’d like to date in more than a year, you should start meeting different kinds of people in different ways. If you keep trying the same old thing, you will most likely get the same old results.

In light of these considerations, one particularly helpful strategy for self-improvement is to spend a couple of hours coming up with a list of new self-improvement methods you are going to try. After you’ve given one item on the list a fair trial, move onto the next one. Make the list long enough that you won’t get to the end of it easily. Keep working until you’ve achieved your goal. The fact that there are many things on your list that you have not tried yet can be motivating, as it reminds you that, even if a few potential solutions to your problems don’t work out, there are lots of things left to try. Hopefully you will not have to go through the entire list, but only work through it progressively until you see sufficient improvement.  At that point, you are ready to move on and improve a different area of your life.

Here are some sample lists of things to try to help achieve some common self-improvement goals:

Anxiety/Stress

1. Read When Panic Attacks.

2. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying exercises from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

3. Read The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety.

4. Read The Worry Cure (if your anxiety comes in the form of frequent worrying).

5. Find a cognitive behavioral therapist in your area, and begin weekly sessions with him or her. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most evidence-based treatment for anxiety.)

1. For eight weeks, make a routine to exercise for 20 minutes every morning.

2. For two weeks, practice doing diaphragmatic breathing for 5 minutes each morning, Then, for six weeks, practice immediately doing this sort of breathing whenever you notice your anxiety level rising.

8. Setup an appointment with a psychiatrist to discuss anti-anxiety medication.

9. Sign up for local meditation classes and go for eight weeks. During this period, meditate for 15 minutes each morning just after you get out of bed.

Depression

1. Read Feeling Good (skipping the section on medication, which is a bit out of date).

2. Read The Happiness Trap.

3. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying exercises from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

4. Read Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time.

5. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying suggestions from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

6.  Find a cognitive behavioral therapist in your area, and begin weekly sessions with him or her. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most evidence-based treatment for depression.)

7. For eight weeks, make it a routine to exercise for 20 minutes every morning.

8. Each morning, make a list of three things you are grateful for. Ideally, get a friend to do the same, and email each other these lists each morning. Try to vary the list from day-to-day.

9. Each morning, make a list of three things you are looking forward to. If you can’t think of three things, then immediately try to schedule some things to look forward to so that you can complete the list every day.

10. Setup an appointment with a psychiatrist, and discuss anti-depression medication.

Difficulty finding someone you’d like to date

1. Sign up for an online dating website, such as OKCupid. As you write your profile, remember that it is an advertisement trying to attract people you’d like to get to know.

2. Ask your friends (of the attractive gender) for feedback on your profile, to see if they think it is likely to attract the sort of people you’d like to meet.

3. Schedule at least an hour each week to search for new people on the site and send messages to the people you find.

4. Ask fashionable friends how you could change your appearance to be more attractive, and implement those changes.

5. Ask your most socially savvy friends (and people you used to date, if possible) if they can pinpoint any behaviors you have that others might find unattractive, and particularly attractive features that you could work to highlight. Make a list of such behaviors, and work actively on correcting them. Review this list of corrections for 5 minutes each morning for 6 weeks.

6. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

7. Sign up for speed dating in your area, and attend sessions once a month. Speed dating events are often themed, so try to select events that will be likely to attract the type of people you are interested in meeting.

8. Ask a few of your friends if they can set you up with someone they think you might like. Repeat this process as often as you can without becoming a nuisance.

9. Join groups, take classes, or do activities in your area where you are likely to meet many new people. Choose these groups and activities strategically: think about which activities will also attract people you may like.

10. Make an effort to attend every social gathering you can where there are likely to be people you don’t know. At each of these events, make sure that you speak to every attractive person for at least a few minutes.

It is common that people will live with big problems and allocate very little time to trying to fix them. They will spend 50 hours a week working, 10 hours surfing the internet, 5 hours watching TV, and won’t even put 1 hour per week into resolving their biggest source of unhappiness. They become so used to living with their biggest problem that they stop trying to even generate solutions. Or they come to believe that their major problem is unsolvable. Or they somehow become convinced that the same method they always use to try to solve their problem will work this time, even though it’s never worked before. Or they come to believe that their negative thinking and emotions occur as a necessary consequence of the things that have happened to them, and therefore convince themselves that there is nothing for them to solve. Or the fact that they have this problem so bothers them that they refuse to even think about it.

Consider A, a typical example. A has been depressed for years, and his depression is quite obviously the worst thing in his life. But he does approximately nothing to try to improve it. He doesn’t read books on overcoming depression. He doesn’t read articles on how to manage living with depression, or try to any significant degree to understand why he has thoughts that make him depressed. He doesn’t look into what types of therapy have the best track record for curing depression. He doesn’t take medication to treat his very unpleasant emotions. He doesn’t talk to people who have overcome depression and ask for their advice. If you buy him a book on depression, he probably won’t even read it.

Or take the example of B, who feels guilty on a near constant basis and has for years, but he does nothing to try to fix it. Or the example of C who avoids meeting new people because of crippling anxiety, but he has never read a book about social anxiety. Or the example of D who is constantly lonely, but doesn’t restructure her life to make sure she meets a lot more people. Or the example of E who is constantly being hurt by guys she dates, but hasn’t made any changes to the way she dates, who she dates, or the way she thinks about dating. Or F who knows he drinks too much, but has never looked into strategies to help a person in his situation drink less. Or G, who hates her job, and has for six months, but isn’t even looking for another one.

Putting a few hours a week into solving the biggest problem in your life does not come naturally to most people. Most people don’t set aside time to just think and brainstorm solutions. Or create reading lists of books and articles related to their personal challenges. Most people don’t make a point to talk to five smart friends to get their advice on the biggest issue in their lives, write down the proposed solutions, and carefully evaluate them. Most people don’t keep a list of all the things they plan on trying in order to improve their major problem.

If your biggest problem has been your biggest problem for a long time, it will probably take a lot of effort to solve. Your first attempt likely will fail. You may have to spend many hours brainstorming a solution. You may have to discuss the problem with a number of people to get their ideas. You likely will have to do research on how similar problems have gotten solved by others, and look at the best evidence you can find for how well the different approaches work.

Ask yourself right now:

• What is the biggest problem in your life?
• What are you doing now to solve it?
• What articles or books might help you figure out solutions?
• What techniques have been proven to work for this sort of problem?
• Who could you talk to that may have good ideas to help you solve it?
• Can you set-aside some time right now to work on thinking up solutions?

If, for a long time, you’ve been using the same approach (or no approach at all) to fix this problem, and it doesn’t seem to be helping, you probably will need to try new things. Go read some relevant articles, read some relevant books, schedule time in your calendar for serious thinking and problem solving, talk to people who tend to generate good ideas, and make a list of at least five new potentially helpful things that you are going to try. Actually resolving the biggest problem in your life is very likely worth this effort.