Do You Want Some Help?
I imagine that there's at least one task that you really dislike doing. Perhaps it's a task at work, such as dealing with your email. Unless these disliked tasks are dealt with immediately, they loom in the mental background as things that eventually need to be done, and create mental static.
Or, worse yet, with some tasks you may get away with not doing them at all, such as dealing with your email. I know people who have thousands, even tens of thousands, of undealt-with emails. This creates an ongoing and increasing source of mental static.
Some people feel guilty about not attending to these tasks. Others cover a feeling of guilt with amusement (Ha, ha, I have such a full inbox!), but the feeling of guilt is, nevertheless, still present.
What Can We Do to Deal with Disliked Tasks?
We can anticipate the good feeling, the feeling of satisfaction, we'd have (created by a burst of dopamine) once we'd completed the task.
But, because dealing with them is unpleasant, we tend to procrastinate.
As I thought about this, I had a free association to a musical phenomenon. Tunes typically have sequences of chords that resolve. A typical sequence might go: D7 to G7. D7 to G7 is called a direct resolution.
But sometimes an additional chord is included, such as:
Subsequently, D7 to G7 is called an indirect resolution because D-7 comes between them; D-7 is called an interpolated chord.
While the "dealing with them" action that comes between unread emails and satisfaction tends to be negative (the disliked task), the D-7 that comes between D7 and G7 is pleasurable; it adds interest to the sequence.
Can the Negative be Made into a Positive?
Is there a way that the disliked task could be turned into something pleasurable, like the D-7 chord? Actually, part of the process of dealing with unread emails can be fun. As most of them are either junk or something that you don't need to respond to, go for it. On a Mac, just hold down the command key and click (bang, bang, bang) on each piece of junk mail, and when all have been highlighted, just click on the junk icon up at the top and they're all gone. Good! Similarly, you can hold down the command key and click on each email that isn't junk but that you don't have to do anything about, and when all have been highlighted, just click the delete icon at the top and they're all gone, too. Good! (If there are a lot of emails in a row that you know you don't have to do anything about, hold down the shift key, click the bottom and the top email and click the delete icon.) That leaves only a small number that you have to deal with. The battle is half-won. (I assume that computers that aren't Macs have similar mechanisms for doing the same thing.) (For those with thousands of unread emails, I'd suggest doing this piecemeal.)
As For the Inner Guide
Your Inner Guide can help you find a pleasurable way to deal with the remaining email or whatever disliked task you have identified. If you don't yet have an Inner Guide, you can acquire one, for free, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ4G9VIxS94
