6  Balanced self-control

Emotion

You may only try to resist feelings or attachment to a person in these cases:

• The feeling doesn’t flow or connect well enough to a desire for the other person being happy.
• You feel uncomfortable with the possibility of the person not being available for your goal.
• You feel dependent on any pleasure that’s involved.
• Resistance is proven to be necessary for another reason.

Feel free to try to make a tiny positive feeling become huge, which can do things like shifting focus and indirectly resisting exclusive attention. Only do this to negative feelings if it would oppose feelings that need to be resisted.

Reason

Don’t treat uncertain information as very likely to be true.

Problem solving

Unless you need to rest, don’t reduce your ambition. Instead, modify the mental system that your ambition is applied to.

After discovering a severe negative reaction to your behavior:

• Think just a little bit about how to behave in the future. (the only moral obligation)
• Don’t make a change that isn’t an improvement in every way.
• Focus on the future instead of the past.