For today, an excerpt from William James’ The Principles of Psychology:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Some evolutionary psychologists have pointed out the obvious puzzle: why do humans have nightmares? They seem only to pose costs — namely worsened sleep quality and emotional regulation. Usually, strictly costly traits face evolutionary pressures that eventually get them kicked out of the gene pool. So why are nightmares still nearly ubiquitous?
One theory is that they are a useful form of mental practice for facing stressful situations in real life — especially “edge case” risks that we might only encounter a few times, if ever.
In human prehistory, for example, we might have had nightmares about lions stalking us from the bushes. This would have been a way of providing “mental practice,” allowing us to become familiar with the stressful feelings such an experience would involve, and to hopefully get better at acting under such pressures when our lives depend on it.
Even when our nightmares are outlandish, the general point can still hold: they force our (dreaming) minds to act quickly and with composure in difficult and scary situations.
I think the lessons here extend far beyond nightmares. For example, research suggests that simply imagining playing the piano can provide a large portion of the performance improvements that real, hands-on practice offers.
Our mental cycles and behavioral patterns are a form of practice, and the more we engage them, the more the relevant neural pathways are strengthened, for better or worse.
Our time and our choices are both self-reinforcing.
Insofar as we can guide them, choosing to practice the faculty of effort, as James puts it, isn’t a bad place to start.