I remember a poster that hung on the wall of my seventh grade classroom. It went like this:

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

It was as a competitive swimmer that these words were the most meaningful to me. Most sports are ultimately about the practice, about repeating an action over and over and over again, so that actions become habits and habits become character. The fleeting thought that I really hate getting up at 5:00 am for swim practice is just that: a fleeting thought. But if I justified it with words, speaking it aloud to my parents or siblings or friends, it became a fact that others knew about me, much realer than just a wispy thought. The action of forgetting-on-purpose to set my alarm, or faking sick, was a logical next step. And one missed practice might not be huge, in the long run, but it led easily to a habit of missing practice, say, once a week. A year of this, and I would start to think of myself as the kind of person who missed practice once a week, because after all, isn’t it silly of anyone to expect a twelve-year-old to get up at 5:00 three times a week? And that attitude could very easily have led, over a couple of years, to quitting the team. 

tl;dr: Strong aversions don't always originate from strong feelings (see Ugh fields). It's useful to measure the strength of an aversion by how effectively it averts your thoughts/behavior instead of how saliently you can feel it, or even remember feeling it. If there's a low cost behaviour that you somehow always "end up not doing", there's evidence for a mechanism steering you away from it. Try to find it, and defy it.

Story

Right after writing Break your habits: be more empirical, someone asked me to a live music show, and I declined, with some explanation about being busy. This felt a little forced, and I realized: I always decline live music shows. This counts as a habit. The interesting thing was that I declined them for many different, unrelated reasons. This was evidence for something more systemic, because it would be a coincidence if random, unrelated reasons always came up to prevent me from attending live music.

So I asked myself if I really disliked live music. Emotions returned: "Not really. It's not awesome, but it's not terrible." Now, there was a time when I would have stopped thinking there. My time is valuable, and mediocrity is enough to stop me from doing anything, right?

But wait... is it? Is it enough to always stop me? If it was only mediocre, and not terrible, than surely on one of the many occasions I could have seen live music, there would have been sufficient justification to go... a particularly good composer, a particularly interesting group of people go with, a particular need to get out and do something different... but no, somehow I always didn't go.

And that's when I realized I probably had an aversion to live music: some brain mechanism that consistently and effectively averted me from seeing it, and in this case, not something I could feel. In particular, it wasn't accompanied by any sense of "Ugh". So since I couldn't feel the aversion, I took an outside view to ask what could have caused it, if it indeed exists...