People who have been addicted to a substance know that it can be incredibly hard to break that addiction. Fundamentally, I think of addiction as a conflict between very strong feelings that shout “DO THIS!” and a “wiser” set of thoughts that says “this is a bad idea in the long run for reasons x, y, and z”.
People who haven’t dealt with substance addiction might think that thank god they don’t have to deal with such a problem. (And of course, they’re right!) But I would argue that *all* of us, in one way or another, have feelings that “push us around” in ways that a wiser part of ourselves suspects is not in our best interest.
For example, I sometimes spend a lot of time trying to get unimportant details “just right”, while neglecting more important things. Tonight I decided to work on this blog, and then proceeded to spend two hours adjusting the arrangement and spacing of some links I’m trying to add, even though I knew that it was much more important to work on adding content to the site through writing posts. But I felt compelled to work on the link positioning.
We all have different areas where our feelings push us in ways contrary to our best interest — it could be losing your temper, or procrastinating, or letting people take advantage of you, or eating unhealthy food. I am guessing that much of the same processes involved in substance addiction are present in these other circumstances, and that it can be extremely difficult to fight these feelings, just as it is extremely difficult to fight cravings for an addictive substance.
This isn’t to say that substance addiction isn’t more serious than some of these other unhealthy tendencies — it often can be. But changing any pattern of behavior (and going against the strong feelings pushing you toward it) can be very challenging.
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For me, I find that I waste inordinate amounts of time doing useless stuff because of fear of or anxiety over doing the task that actually matters. I’m compelled to do the useless stuff because in a way I’m simultaneously compelled to avoid the activity that actually means the most to me…perhaps fear of failure or facing a challenge…
Yes! I do the same thing. And I also suspect that, in an ironic way, some of the very mechanisms that originally evolved to make us more productive, in today’s world actually end up making us less productive. We probably have mechanisms that are constantly evaluating the activities we’re engaged in to determine how “valuable” they are (to our survival and reproduction). When an activity has been determined to be valuable, we get a good feeling about it and enjoy doing it (eating, having sex). But in the same way when an activity is determined to be of low or negative value, we get a bad feeling about it and try to avoid it.
I imagine that our environment now is very different from the one we evolved in, since we have so many very long-term goals (studying so you can “get an A” in a class, doing this for years, so that one day you can “get a good job” so that you can “have money” so that *finally* you can have a good place to live and attract a good mate etc.), and because our everyday tasks are so different from the tasks that were valuable when the “value detectors” evolved. They knew nothing about unloading the dishwasher, or sitting at the computer typing for hours. So in many ways I imagine our “value detectors” aren’t very good at determining what is really valuable in today’s world — hence they sometimes push us away from things we need to do — all in the name of making us more productive!