Today I would like to share with you a short note - about building yourself. Building your character, habits, passions, building what kind of person you are. Not about building muscles. But remember that for the ancient greeks ideal man was taking care both of his body and mind :)

This is quite a major topic I believe because it lets you think about your everyday deeds, habits, and if they have positive contribution into building you a person that you want to be, or not. For some, it will be obvious, for some not, and even if obvious - sometimes we need to be reminded about obvious.

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^{Building yourself might be hard work, as hard as building a house}

Below are three quotes of C.G. Jung, Kurt Vonnegut and from the book Power of Habit, that I deeply recommend to you. Those are only quotes, but they could be considered a very important, great quotes that have basics in psychology and neurobiology. What do those quotes tell us?

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do
~Carl Gustav Jung

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be
~Kurt Vonnegut

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it
~Charles Duhigg, Power of Habit

First

They tell us that everything that we do have some influence on what kind of people we are - not what we say we will do, but what we actually do. That's because what we do is creating habits, determines what is our experience and what we are good at. All those things are preserved in our brain. There is also a second aspect to it - people judge us based on our deeds, what we do, not what is in our heads or what we want to do. And the same people will be treating us as people that they think we are, so it is a feedback loop that further strengthens "who we are". If we wear clothes that look like "nerd/geek" clothes, and we act like a geek then people will treat as a geek, as someone who is good with technology and not good with people. They will maybe unconsciously encourage us to act like a geek because in their eyes we will be geeks so we ourselves will start acting like that. And maybe we don't want to be considered a nerd or geek, but nobody cares what we want, but what we actually do.

Second

Kurt Vonnegut warn us from pretending to be someone (something), because then we can become the thing that we were pretending we are. Pretending is doing things that are characteristic to this something/someone that we pretend we are. So again, people will judge us based on what we are doing. Even if they know that we only pretend, then anyway on some subconsciously level they will feel that we are the person that we pretend we are. You can't say to your friends "listen, I will pretend to be aggressive person right now" and start yelling and hitting everything, and then expecting that your friends will not feel as if there is someone aggressive next to them, just because we said, "hey, I am pretending". Our lizard brain doesn't care. On some level they will act as if they met aggressive person, their body will release stress hormones. We can not 100% control our emotions, hormones, mind, and body. We are closer to wild animals than robots. Same goes not only about our friends but also about ourselves - we ourselves will develop some habits if for a longer time we will pretend that we are X or Y. Pretending will gradually change into becoming someone else.

Third

It's hard to change what we already built in ourselves. When we are building a house, we do it by with a plan. If we want to change something after we finished the building, for example, remove some wall, add another wall, it is not so easy. There might be some electrical installation, another wall might be a supporting wall and removing it would cause our building to collapse. Renovation usually needs removing some part of the house from use. Charles Duhigg in his book shows us that the same goes about changing habits, it's hard to make a habit go away. It is easier to change bad habit to another habit, preferably a good habit than remove it. That's why you need to be careful about what kind of habits you are creating, who you are becoming. Because we are not so easily programmed like a computer, if we decide to play a womanizer thinking "it's just for some time, for 2 years, then I will become a good husband material" then you are lying to yourself.

^{Find me a person that would fix this house and make it not stand on its head. Building house like that and thinking that "we will fix it later" could be as naive as our thinking that we can curse, smoke some cigarette and in about a week we will be a healthy, nonsmoking, not-cursing-person. We think that "It's just for the now that we are cursing and smoking"}

Ok, so we have 3 points. Now it's time for a short excerpt from Jordan Peterson. I believe that this statement joins all 3 ideas that I presented and I hope that it will make those ideas more interesting for you. Just another point of view, maybe Jordan Peterson put it into words better than me.

The fragment that I am talking about is in this video, starting at 18:52 to 20:07. But I will write the transcription below if you don't want to play the video or can not while reading this.

If you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are gonna throw up objections. It's like, "well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now, maybe you should be doing the dishes or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube". If you're really sneaky, when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that 's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to 'cause you're doing something else useful.

And if you give in to that temptation, which you often will, then it wins, and because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick, and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows and anything you let be defeated, shrinks, 'cause it's punished, it doesn't get to have its way. So that's another thing really to remember, don't practice what you do not wanna become

And because those are... they're neurological circuits, you build those things in there man, and they're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them, that's the best you can do once they're in there, you can't get them out, so... and then the ones you built to inhibit can be taken out by stress and the old habits will come back up, so you gotta be careful what you say and what you do because you build yourself that way [...]

Now from 2:22:08 to 2:26:50. Peterson talks about people that are addicted

[...] but let's talk about addiction. So there's a series of actions that occur before you take your cocaine, some of those are local, they are the things that happen immediately before, and some of those are distant, they're farther back in the chain of events; And when you have a hit of cocaine, it produces a dopaminergic burst and that feels really good, but it also makes the circuits that were immediately active before that grow that's what reinforcement is, and then the growth is proportionate, not linearly but it's proportionate to how long before that event occurred, the closer it is, the stronger they're gonna get but even the ones that are somewhat distal get some reinforcement

[...] If you take that person (addicted person) out of the normal environment and you put them into a treatment center, they're off they're a physical addiction. Which is a weird thing in the case of cocaine, but... like not that long, a week will do it, two weeks for sure, even heroin, and alcohol for sure if you can get them through the seizure part without dying; and so they're done, they're not physiologically dependent anymore. But you let that person go, and the first thing that happens is his old friend who is always doing drugs with shows up and BANG! he's craving (drugs) like mad, and that's because that thing in there (Jordan is pointing at the head) is not dead at all and it's activated by the cue, and it's a circuit... it's not, it's a personality, it only wants one thing, it wants cocaine, it's gonna suppress any non-related thoughts and it'll use lies, that's no problem, especially if lies have been reinforced [...]

[...] maybe you try to quit, you think: "to hell with it!" and every time, 10 minutes before you take your drug, you think "to hell with it", and you do that a 1000 times. And well, believe me, that "to hell with it" circuit, that sucker is strong, it's alive and it's not like it just disappears, it can't, it's you, it's grown in there now. So you can build another circuit to shut it down, and you can help it decompose across time by not giving it what it wants but you're gonna have to not give it what it wants in all of the multiple contexts that you've already associated with the drug

Some of you have probably smoked, and then tried to quit smoking, and what you see is you get a craving when you have a cup of coffee or when you finish dinner, when you're done having a phone call when you first get up in the morning, or whenever you regularly had the drug, whatever you had the drug in relationship to even complex things, like ending a conversation, will produce a cue of craving. That can extinguish over time if you punish it by either punishing it or not letting it get what it wants, but a lot you have to build another circuit to just shut it down and then that circuit's kinda fragile and stress can often disrupt it

(student asks some question)

You may have to rebuild your whole personality in order to get that thing cornered. Religious conversion, for example, is a really effective treatment for alcoholism that's partly why alcoholics anonymous works for the people for whom it does work. But religious conversion, which is total personality conversion, is actually one of the few things that we know of that's an effective treatment for alcoholism we don't know how to induce it, although that's not exactly true either because of the early work with LSD... LSD was quite promising as a treatment for alcohol addiction and there's recent work with psilocybin showing that if people have a mystical experience when given psilocybin their success rate of quitting smoking is about 80% which is way higher than any pharmacological intervention for smoking has ever been

So let's be careful when it comes to building ourselves, and think from time to time if we are going in the direction that we want to if we are becoming a person that we would want to see in ourselves. Or maybe we are just pretending to be someone else, hoping that it's temporary? It's not, it's time to build yourself now! Not this evening, tomorrow or starting next month. Now.

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And the last thought - some time ago I read a book called "Slight Edge". It is not some kind of revolutionary material, but it shows maybe obvious idea about small steps, something like "you save the pennies and dollars will grow". But it shows us in elegant way how we should play by the "you save the pennies and dollars will grow" rule in everyday life, what benefits we will get if we will regularly make small positive steps (and what loss you will have if you will make regular small negative steps!). It fits into the idea of building yourself because we're building ourselves every day by small steps. Let's make sure that those steps are good, for example, some exercise, not bad like eating unhealthy food, because "it's only today, tomorrow I will eat healthy".

^{sources of images: main one, a house, separator}