The difficulty of behavioral goals

The scenario of a life turned upside down can be improved by:

• Monitoring the quality of one’s input.
• Pushing yourself for some exercise, which is sure to beat the blues.
• Reading actual paper newspapers instead of mobile phone articles.
• More fresh food, less processed food.
• Working with work clothes on, not pajamas.
• Bringing a change in routine and scenery.

Solving a problem is very difficult when its cause is hard to trace. You can’t isolate the trouble the same way you would dunk a leaky inner tube into a bathtub to see where the bubbles come out, for example.

What you can do is try to focus on better inputs: i.e, if you're struggling because of the pandemic and its social and health consequences, try pouring more vegetables, books, and exercise into the front end of the system, while reducing the intake of sugar, Netflix, and news.

There are 2 types of feel-better activities:

• Those that immediately improve your mood, but often at the expense of overall well-being. Easy to start doing, and often hard to stop, they tend not to have long-term rewards.
• Those are activities that improve your well-being, and your mood too, but usually not right away. You never regret these activities and they take effort.