This is a special post for quick takes by koratkar. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Hide and cover clocks to stop procrastinating. There's no five minutes or five years "from now" that's not just "now" – but quantified time creates the illusion you perceive the future. This creates an emotional relationship to approaching deadlines. If you can't see time in your environment (at least when you want to work), the pain of experiencing "the future" immediately subsides but so does the idea you can put things off.
Useful links: Overcoming Bias, Dr. K, J Krishnamurti, Jeffery Kaplan
Emotional or cognitive pain is something we don't treat usually as a learning signal as we treat other sources of pain. This is troublesome since it underpins many self-destructive behaviors and all of our neurotic thinking. Sometimes, gut-wrenching dysphoria is a signal you've touched a hot stove (realizing you said something hurtful), and other times it's a major reaction to what's substantively a small insult.
After having been debilitated for a few days many times following the latter kind of pain, I think the right approach is to run head on into desensitization based on their different causes. Eventually, the logical assessment of "this isn't a threat" will correspond to the perceived reality.
As an example, I used to get offended by a lot of minor politically-charged statements before I read Paul Graham's essay on heresy, then realized the pain of getting offended makes you stronger – it's even fun to seek – and felt it much less intensely after that. The hinge of that phenomenon was the realization that offense comes from things we fear might be true – but what's actually the case can't hurt you since it's always been that way, knowing can only help you make better decisions. In a similar vein, overblown neuroticism comes from the possibility that an insult might be true. Accepting things we don't want to believe about ourselves as data can only help us improve.
Taken at surface-value, I don't like the idea that "desensitization" is good, since it seems to argue that pain is inherently bad rather than a useful signal, but this is wrong, like you're saying. I encounter it quite often when reading about psychology, and it's mostly used to argue that sensitivity is bad in itself.
Of course, things which do not damage the body should not cause pain signals. But if reality causes pain to somebody, it's likely because their internal model of the world is wrong, and because they identify with wrong beliefs. The ego will protect itself against modification, it really thinks we're in danger in these situations. It's likely an old defense mechanism from when ostracization was actually lethal.
Now, it's as you say. All discomfort is a sign that one should work on themselves, and that this process can be highly rewarding and solve internal conflicts and contradictions. We are already living reality, so the truth can't possibly kill us. But these false beliefs may die in our place, and that's often a painful process. But it's less painful in the long run than living those false beliefs and getting scared every time they're threatened, so I think the superior choice is facing reality.
It's a bit sad that "suffering" has been misunderstood like this, and treated like a problem in itself, rather than the symptom of a problem that it actually is. Especially since the truth is so nice and positive compared to this gloomy understanding.
Avoidant behavior is more interesting to think of in reverse: why do people do anything in the first place?
Procrastination (in a serial way, i.e. burnout) is due to a failure to respond to the normal incentives people act on in your situation. It can be solved by finding another motivation for the activity.
I used to get depressed about genetic determinism. It's a two-sentence thought that eliminates your perceived capacity for change.
However, while some predictive models can be built, and many things do revert to the mean – those are tendencies. You only get a pattern from a behavior that repeats. Some things don't. If you're looking for an overarching cause of life-outcomes, you necessarily cancel out individual variation.
No study on demographics that includes a section called "the one-off thing that happened to one guy once in defiance of what usually happens".
Those models don't know what you want. They can't account for your decision to find it.
Most importantly, they can't account for a systematic effort to find it.
Unwanted thoughts are continuous and amorphous processes, and you can lessen their severity by focusing on when the focal point of your attention fluctuates, leaving a sort of "negative space" of the thought's form in your mind's periphery.