In the post Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic, Anna Salamon writes:
...there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:
(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
(c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
(d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
(e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to
There is common tendency in human life to act in ways contrary to what we believe.
The classic example is the German people under Nazi rule, most of whom likely thought of themselves as good people—the kind of people who would help their neighbors even at risk to themselves, but did not do anything about the rounding up of Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals into concentration camps. They didn’t want to give up their self-image as a good person, but they also didn’t want themselves and their family to potentially face the wrath of the SS. So, many convinced themselves that they didn’t care about what was happening. That was far easier, less painful, than admitting that they were not quite as moral and upright as they thought or...
Another method that I have found effective in getting rid of the self-critical brain loop is asking myself "have I already learned the lesson of the mistake here?" If the answer is no, I use the technique you described of trying to figure out what the mistake(s) were that lead to the event and how I could fix them. However, I found that figuring this out alone did not stop the loop, so it is important that whenever the answer to the question becomes 'yes' to the question of whether you learned the lesson to enforce very strongly in your brain tha... (read more)