Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. — Sigmund Freud

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Author: Sigmund Freud

Insight: We spend most of our mental energy convincing ourselves of comfortable lies. Not big obvious ones—but the small, persistent stories we tell about why we procrastinate, why we're annoyed at someone, or why we can't do something we actually want to do. We know we're tired, but really we're avoiding. We know we're "too busy," but really we don't want to admit the thing matters less than we pretend. Freud's point isn't that honesty feels good—it usually feels terrible at first. It's that this exercise, this practice of looking directly at what's actually true about your own mind, is like a muscle you can develop. The surprising part is how much energy honesty actually frees up. When you stop managing the fiction, you stop defending it. You're not unconsciously exhausted from keeping a story straight. You see what's real and suddenly you have actual choices—keep doing it anyway, or change course. Most people think self-deception protects us. But it just keeps us trapped in patterns we're not even admitting we have.

Source: Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (15 October 1897), as quoted in Origins of Psychoanalysis