Actually, as you noticed -- but didn't notice that you noticed -- no "striving" is actually required. What happened was simply that you had to translate abstract knowledge into concrete knowledge.

In each of the examples you gave, you created a metaphor or context reframe, based on imagining some specific sensory reality.

Because the emotional, "action", or "near" brain doesn't directly "get" conceptual abstractions. They have to be translated back into some kind of sensory representation first, and linked to the specific context where you want to change your (emotional/automatic) expectations.

A great example of one of the methods for doing this, is Byron Katie's book, "Loving What Is" -- which is all about getting people to emotionally accept the facts of a situation, and giving up their "shoulds". Her approach uses four questions that postulate alternative realities, combined with a method of generating counterexamples ("turnarounds", she calls them), which, if done in the same sort of "what if?" way that you imagined your friendly ghosts and probabilistic knife killers, produce emotional acceptance of a given reality -- i.e., "loving what is".

Hers is far from the only such method, though. There's another approach, described by Morty Lefkoe in "Recreate Your Life", which uses a different set of questions designed to elicit and re-interpret your evidence for an existing emotional belief. Robert Fritz's books on the creative process demonstrate yet another set of questioning patterns, although not a formalized one.

And rational-emotive therapy, "learned optimism", and cognitive-behavior therapy all have various questions and challenges of their own. (And I freely borrow from all of them in my client work.)

Of course, it's easy to confuse these questioning patterns with logical arguments, and trying to convince yourself (or others) of something. But that not only misses the point, it doesn't work. The purpose of questions like these is to get you to imagine other possibilities -- other evidential interpretations and predictions -- in a sensory way, in a specific sensory context, to update your emotional brain's sensory prediction database.

In other words, to take abstractions from the "far" brain, and apply them to generate new sensory data for the "near" brain to process.

Viewed in this way, there's no need to "struggle" -- you simply need to know what the hell you're doing. That is, have an "inside view" of the relationship between the "near" and "far" brains.

In other words, something that every rationalist should have. A rationalism that can't fix (or at least efficiently work around) the bugs in its own platform isn't very useful for Winning.

Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.