Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [55]
Procrastination is nothing more than resistance to the new when we’re not committed to any other definite enterprise. Thus it can’t really occur during thought-watching itself. However, it’s often observed before we start to thought-watch. Before we can settle down to our exercise, we feel the need to “clear the boards” of various outstanding obligations that might otherwise interrupt us. We check the rest of the day’s schedule to make certain that nothing needs immediate attention, order up the house, and review the fundamental principles and aims of our existence. The same sequence of events might precede any new enterprise. Because it occurs prior to an undertaking, procrastination is the only trap that doesn’t reveal a new face when we watch our thoughts.
Any extraneous topic taken up during thought-watching may be amplified ad nauseam. We catch ourselves anticipating what we’re going to say at an important interview tomorrow, and we try to accelerate to the end of the task in order to return to thought-watching. But the complete and absolute end never seems to come. There’s always another possible question to find a reply for. Even when the task is clearly finite, we become uncertain about our earlier findings before we reach the end, and then we have to repeat. Having finally come up with the seventh dwarf, we forget who the first one was and we must start all over again.
All this, however, is garden-variety amplification. There’s also an exotic variety rarely seen outside the steamy environment of thought-watching. We’ve noted again and again that the very attempt to preserve thought-watching is responsible for calling these exotic types into being. The attempt to order ourselves back to thought-watching catapults us into regulation; the rescheduling of extraneous projects for a later time results in anticipation; and so on. Similarly, we fall into an amplification when we try to reason our way back to thought-watching. For example, we may point out to ourselves that we will suffer no disadvantage from dropping the extraneous project at this time. But we can’t know this to be true without a review of all the potential disadvantages. Unfortunately, there’s no end of potential disadvantages to consider. And even if we could establish this premise on unshakable grounds, it wouldn’t yet be enough to permit the ironclad deduction that we should get back to thought-watching. For what if we simply enjoy working on the extraneous project? Well, we’re not enjoying it. We’re not enjoying it, and there are no disadvantages to dropping it—that seems to be the end of the matter. But what if there’s another crucial consideration that presently escapes us? What if we’ve made a mistake in our reasoning? We had best review the argument from the start …
The last refinement of this line of thinking is reached when we realize that we have been amplifying. We then remind ourselves that amplification is a trap—but is it? We had best review the arguments showing that it’s a trap, just to be sure. We try to escape from this new dilemma by reminding ourselves that we’ve already reviewed these arguments, indeed that we’ve done so when we were at our keenest, so that a reconsideration at this time is entirely superfluous. We know that amplification is a trap. But do we? What if our memory is in error?
Division is commonly the last of three successive errors of thought-watching. We fall into a first trap by inappropriately working on some mental project—for example, we persist in the construction of a dwarf list. We fall into a second trap by making a project out of remedying