Kaj Sotala said:
[I]f you punish yourself for trying and failing, you stop wanting to try in the first place, as it becomes associated with the negative emotions. Also, accepting and being okay with the occasional failure makes you treat it as a genuine choice where you have agency, not something that you're forced to do against your will.
So maybe we should celebrate failed attempts more often ... I for one can't think of anything I've failed at recently, which is probably a sign that I'm not trying enough new things.
So, what specific things have you failed at recently?
I recently decided to stop playing video games (for a week) and to stop fooling around on the internet (for the same week). The first has been fine so far, but the second is troublesome- there are a number of sites that I used to check several times per day, which I had mostly reduced to once per day, and now was trying to reduce to once per week. But the agitation from not checking them is high enough that I've still been checking them once per day, but at night rather than at the start of the day (and then a few times over the course of the day). I have successfully stopped checking webcomics, though, planning to go through a week's backlog at once.
I think this is still an improvement, and an informative failure. I'm getting something out of checking those sites that I wasn't getting out of, say, reading webcomics, and ought to drill down and figure out what that is.
I was thinking about my own repetitive checking of websites recently in the context of lukeprog's post about Behavioral Psychology. It seems to me that the reason it is so easy to become habituated to it is because it offers "Applied Intermittent Reinforcement". Your reward is reading some new nugget of knowledge or some great insight, but you never know for certain when & where you will stumble across it.