Moral licensing.
The mind glitch that no doubt has fucked up some of your commitments. A pitfall that has less to do with lack of character and more to do with a lack of understanding of how the mind works.
What is the tl;dr of moral licensing?
It's basically when you do an action that you'd consider good and you'd use that good to justify doing something bad, often without even realizing it.
An unfortunate but common example is this:
>Person works out hard in the gym to lose weight
>Reward themselves with junk food
>The junk food cancels out their workout and they still end up gaining weight
>Probably don't even realize why
Or
>Big test coming up
>Study for a few hours
>Give yourself a day or few off because you studied for a few hours
>Lose a few days worth of study
There can be many variations of the above examples, usually the rewards are things that sabotage your goals.
How and why it works:
When you make progress and rejoice about the fact that you're doing great, your mind takes it as a sign that work is done. It does so because the brain looks for ways to preserve energy and taking shortcuts is one way of doing that. When your brain assumes you have your work done, it goes into chillout mode, your defense against instant gratifications weakens, and it becomes harder to stay on track.
How do you prevent moral licensing?
One way of preventing it is focusing on commitment. When you see you've made progress, look at it as evidence that your commitment is important. I mean, why would you work so hard for something you don't care about, right? If you're making progress in it, you care about enough about it to reach the end goal. Focusing on committment prevents your brain from going "work is done, time to party" whenever Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
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