At the end of each year, I spend about a week reflecting about my state of happiness, my ambitions, and the state of my life.
Every time, I succeed in evoking a clarity which then turns into equanamity, allowing me to dedicate my time to problems which are
100% aligned with my goals. Each year, about at the end of january, this equanamity seems to scrumble.
In general, I found that the dopaminic compensation of pain, followed by the lack of revision and execution of one's goals
lead to a downward spiral of setting up and developing self-damaging habits.
So what can you do to prevent this? At its core, this is a problem of agency, and agency is not easy to solve.
But what I recognised is that meditation helps. Meditation helps in recognizing thoughts (and ultimately behavior)
in a way that completely robs their power. You will not be able to control the thoughts. But you will be able
to control if you act upon them.