I've done this two ways:
thinking about our "free will" vs. our "free won't"
and
laziness
What struck me today is "What can be a cure for laziness?" ... certainly, it's not possible to always say to ourselves, "Don't be lazy!" and that's all it takes to stop it once and for all. The gap is wider than that.
Here's what I started on. It's in a sidebar in my Laziness article, but I'm still chewing on this... it came to me while I was trying to avoid doing my morning dishes. I was about to pass them by ("I won't do them now... I hate doing dishes... I'll just leave them for later...") when I realized that I wouldn't want to do them later, either. So I said to myself, "What would it feel like to do the dishes now?"
Then this part of the article came:
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Experiment for Laziness:Here's something to try, which is easy... when you have a task or activity to do and you feel that "laziness" coming on (you know what that feels like: "I don't want to do it!!"), try doing it anyway. Mindfully --that means, with all thought-- do the activity, and think about it. I'm not suggesting that you love it; you aren't supposed to love everything!
Just think about doing that task: think about the fact that you are doing it anyway, despite every cell in your body wants to go somewhere else or be doing something else, maybe even relaxing! Try not to just grumble negatively about how you hate it; just think about the task and your previous thoughts about not doing it.
Quite possibly, your mind will start calming down. You may start feeling like the task isn't too bad --- or you may be proud of yourself for accomplishing it when you would normally put off the task!
Here's the best part... you might even discover that what you've been doing was DREADING the task - when the activity itself wasn't all that bad! That's a case of perception versus reality : we often perceive something to be worse than it really is. Worse yet, the "dreading" may take more time and negative thoughts than the activity itself.
That's "mindfulness": attention on what you are doing, and what you need to do, instead of the perception of it.
