| Theres this fundamental idea we have as a society that people are fundamentally able to do as they please at all times, which is pretty much just a lie. Almost the entire time we are awake, our body is doing things without us consciously deciding to do them. Only afterwards our brain spends time rationalising itself and constructing a sort of post-hoc rationalisation. It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where usually you don't notice that you didn't actually decide to do that thing. The only time you might notice is in the case of strong addictions, where people try to go cold turkey and describe literally watching themselves in horror as they go back to the think they are actively trying to avoid. What this leads do is an idea that successful people have which is that less well off people could sort themselves out by doing a particular thing, say, managing their money better. Or maybe its just the people who know many languages and look down on those who know few. Or maybe yourself, trying to stick to a diet plan and not being able to understand how you yourself can want one thing but do another. Turns out, we are pretty much a function of our environment. We have a concept of something called "willpower" which is something where we can carry on despite our body needing respite, but only a little bit. This I think happens when we are using our conscious mind to complete tasks instead of our autopilot mode. This works, but is quickly draining and really doesn't last that long. I think this kind of thing is where some of the stigma around mental health comes from. We have this idea that people are at all times acting according to what they simply want to be doing, whereas they are usually acting on autopilot , which is sometimes sort of close to what we want to be doing, but has a tendency in modern times to get stuck in loops of stuff like eat>sleep>work that make us feel worse which causes us to have less energy which causes us to just want more sleeping and eating rather than fixing the problem by breaking out of the cycle. If we as a society aknowledged better how 99% of our actions are essentially done unconsciously, and then later sort of added together by our self aware part of the brain, I think people would be much more understanding of mental health issues - if someone behaves in a way counter to their own interests, its not because they are stupid, they are literally just unfortunate vitims of a sort of cyclical pattern of their bodies in their local environment. We are kind of along for the ride in our own bodies a lot more than we might like to think, with only a small ability to push buttons to nudge ourselves in the directions we want So you literally can't decide to just stop being in the kind of glitches in the autopilot that cause something as big as depression or as small as getting up early when you're tired. You only have a small amount of influence, and you have to spend it in ways that end up multiplying themselves by your autopilot thingy
like deciding to give yourself good sleep, or food
if you focus your willpower on those kinds of things, you end up with more willpower
but sometimes even things as small as this require a lot more energy than you might be able to muster all at once, so you have to do even smaller things to build that up
for example in the modern day deciding to interrupt yourself in the middle of a task is incredibly hard
you could be working and know that you should be in bed but you just keep going because it takes more mental energy to interrupt yourself than you have
and so you end up tired, and have that same low amount of energy the next day |