Sublime

This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things.

System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior—the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night. System 2 is mobilized to increased effort when it detects an error about to be made.

Social Sharing and Defusion

I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

While this yearning is healthy, many of the ways our minds try to satisfy it cause us psychic pain. We lie about ourselves to defend our ego; we play the victim; we berate ourselves for failing to meet inflated standards that might please others; and we become consumed by worries about rejection and perceived slights. The harm caused can be

We may plan to do something, but our inner life takes over and we become distracted.

One of the most harmful ways in which our minds become trapped in our thought processes is by learning, or inferring, problem-solving rules that we convince ourselves we must follow.

One was a brief exercise in which we asked participants to notice their thoughts while not allowing them to control their actions,8 such as by having them think “I can’t pick up this pen” while picking it up.