The Benefits of Lying to Yourself

I’ve written in the past (I think—I’m 1000+ posts in here, I don’t really remember what I did or didn’t write) about using the technique of lying to myself for the sake of impulse control. I don’t know if this works for everyone. You may have to be sort of dumb for this to work on you. Or you may just have to believe it will work.

It’s a technique you can use when dealing with a desire for something that your “higher self” doesn’t actually want you to indulge. This can be anything from “eating ice cream” to “strangling prostitutes.” Rather than debating with yourself about whether you’re going to do this thing or not, you just say to yourself, “I’ll do that tomorrow.” This ends the debate and—for me at least—satisfies the part of the brain that is pushing that desire

Of course, the idea is that you satisfy that part of the brain by always saying you’ll do it “tomorrow.” When the next day rolls around you just again tell yourself, “Yeah, we’re definitely going to do this tomorrow.” And what I’ve found is that the dumb part of my brain never catches on. It never says, “Hey, you said that yesterday!” It only looks forward, never back. So it’s satisfied just by thinking that “tomorrow” is coming. It’s like a moronic Annie.

Recently, I’ve found another circumstance where lying to myself seems to work, and that’s when dealing with impatience.

It’s specifically been helpful with household chores, which typically I would rush through and do an adequate job, rather than take my time and do a good job. My mind is always so focused on being done with this thing I have to do, and getting to some other thing that I want to do.

So, for example, imagine there are a bunch of dishes piled up in the sink. My usual feeling upon seeing that would be a low level dread. And I would either spend the 30 minutes it took to clean them feeling restless and wanting to do something else. Or I’d do a rush-job and get the dishes “clean enough” in half the time. Neither situation seemed ideal.

Then I started lying to myself. I’d say, “I’m going to take the next five hours and wash these dishes.” I’d pick up a pan and think, “I’m going to spend 15 minutes getting this pan completely clean.” These would both be wild over-estimates, but I found that going in telling myself it would take an absurdly long time ended up making the time it did take feel much less cumbersome.

I’ve been using this technique when learning new things as well. For example, I like to learn to play different instruments. And what I do when I pick up a new instrument is tell myself, “If I practice this half an hour a day, in five years I’ll be able to play a song. This mindset gets me past the hardest thing about learning something new: the frustration that comes with a lack of skill and progress.

In fact, I have a whole new mindset i use when learning new things. I imagine we live in a world where progress doesn’t exist.

There is no such thing as progress. You just pay your dues by doing something poorly enough times and then you’re gifted the ability to do it well. Like the flip of a switch.

So let’s say I’m learning the second deal. I don’t say to myself, “If I do this 20 minutes a day, I’ll have the basics down in a week. In a month I’ll have something that works well for most circumstance. And in six months I’ll have something that will even fool magicians.”

Instead I tell myself, “I’m going to do this poorly for 20 minutes a day for the next 700 days. And then on day 701, I’ll be able to do it well.”

Learning something is just about repetition and time. So this mindset emphasizes those things while taking the notion of progress off the table.

Of course, it doesn’t take 200+ hours to learn a decent second deal. I’d have a workable version of the second deal in a fraction of that time. But I just tell myself that’s not how it works. It’s not that I don’t want progress, or that there won’t be progress. It’s just that the thing that is most likely to sabotage you efforts when trying to learn something new is feeling a lack of progress. So rather than give progress any weight, I just like to allow it to be the inevitable byproduct of repetition and time.

As always, this is just a way of thinking that has been useful for me. I don’t expect that it’s universal in any way. But perhaps some of you will find some value in it.