Inertia: A tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.
"Past behavior is the best predicator of future behavior" is one of the greatest truths I've come across in a long time. The New Year is approaching. As a general rule I don't make New Year's resolutions, correctly believing that if you want to change something you should just change it today. I bet the success rate of New Year's resolutions is under 10%. If I want to change something then today's the day.
Dissonance: Mental discomfort that comes from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.
Another great truth in my life is that I'm enlarged when I make thinking about others my main priority. This truth has the greatest cognitive dissonance for me. It doesn't make sense intellectually that putting my own self-interest behind that of another is going to be helpful in the long run.
Anxiety: A mental condition caused by excessive apprehensiveness about real or perceived threats, typically leading to advoidance behaviors.
Then there's this truth: anxiety is part of my make-up. Anxiety is never going to leave me. Anxiety is a burden under which I've always had to labor and anxiety has been the great motivator in my life. I'm vaguely worried that something crappy is going to happen so I take the steps to prevent the crap from actually happening. Today, I'm pleased to report, the anxiety has receded into the background as sort of an mildly annoying distraction. It's no longer a shrieking dissonance that demands my attention and distracts me from living a normal life. When I'm tempted to worry I can almost hear a well-practiced mechanism inside my head click into action. There's an electrical snapping noise and the sound of well-oiled gears starting up. I find myself moving in a practiced way through the anxiety and into the solution. So often I find the anxiety to be mostly bullshit, stuff that is unlikely to happen or stuff that's the naked result of me failing to take care of a matter that needs to be taken care of.
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