Treating Yourself Like a Dog

We're both dogs really

I learned this concept from one of my philosophy professors and it stuck with me much more easily than, say, deriving baye's theorem ever did. Treating yourself like a dog is a self-discipline heuristic that allows you to be disciplined about something without the actual energy of exerting one's will. Some people seem to have iron wills and can face any temptation with spartan-like steadfastness. As for myself, I tend to fail quite often after a long, exhausting effort throughout most of the day. The idea is this: it makes no sense to punish a dog for eating all the food in the cupboard while you are away if you left the food out. The dog has the natural instinct to eat everything in sight and we don't expect it to have the "willpower" to be disciplined and just not eat all that easily accessible food. The smart thing for us to do is not allow the dog to have access to the food by making sure it's all packed away before we leave. This simple step requires zero willpower from the dog. 

So to treat ourselves like a dog we have to set things up so it is impossible to fail. I don't have a chocolate cake addiction because it's never around the house, my housemate's are all generally pretty healthy eaters (though one of them did just buy cherry pie). I can't help but eat apples because that's the only other sweet food that I have access to. I can't help but do some deadlifts every time I walk into the backyard because I left the thing right next to the entrance. I don't do it every time but I do it more often than I would if it had not been there. I just find it's so much easier to set myself up than to declare "I will do deadlifts 3-4 times this week!" and then find myself never getting around to it. Now, most of the time our environment is not set up nicely for us to make better decisions regarding our mental and physical health but I say that's all the better reason to manipulate the things you can control so that you can exert that little bit of self discipline when it is required. For another example, I've been experimenting with mild cold stress lately by sleeping without blankets every few nights. I found that if I leave a blanket out next to my sleeping mat, I will inevitably wake up covered in blankets. So the solution is to put all possible blankets in the closet to make it that much harder for my natural instinct to win out.

Another thing that seems to help me to focus is to try to only allow myself to do one task at a time. When you're playing fetch with your dog and you throw two balls at once, you often won't get either of them back, and if you had a dog like mine, he would lose interest altogether out of decision fatigue and just go chase a butterfly. It seems that most of the time people are doing 10 things at once which is really just splitting up one's progress. It works for some things, but a lot of time can just lead to plateaus. One thing at a time. Unfortunately, it seems we have a small "rationality window" of time where we can do some meta-thinking to actually set ourselves up. Perhaps most of us are floating around carried by the currents of the wind bouncing off this pleasure and narrowly avoiding that pain. People that are caught up like this are severely lacking in time wealth as they cannot take the time to consider and self reflect. I only know about this because I've experienced it myself though I now have an abundance of time wealth. It's only because of being caught up in all the daily struggles of life, work, traffic, children,training, deadlines, and relationships that there was a breakdown which forced me to take a big step back and focus on rebuilding one thing at a time.

Finally, I find the specific phrase, "treat yourself like a dog" has one important psychological effect: it breeds (pun intended) humility. No one wants to be thought of as a dog, at least I know I didn't. I'm a rational human being who can reflect and dream deeply! As much as I try to be as rational as possible, it's still pretty clear that my psychology is closer to that of a dog than a divine perfect being thingy. Recognizing this aligns my thought processes a little more closely with the reality of being human. Of course, this is all just a meta-scheme to result in seemingly "inhuman" discipline.