You need a good behavioral model to understand why you do the things you do. It’s best if you create your own, based on your particular strengths and tendencies, by researching about behavior and keeping a journal to accelerate your learning like a field scientist.

But here’s a quick general model to get started:

1. Consider 4 drivers of behavior: Need Levels (serotonin/oxytocin), Activation Level (norepinephrine/stress vs relaxation rest), Energy Level (glucose/glycogen vs insulin spikes and energy conservation), Drive/Learned Behavior (dopamine/learned reward behavior vs helplessness).

2. If you have big needs, ie you are needy because of say chronically low serotonin levels, you will be more desperate to seek pleasure, even if that runs counter to your stated goals (stay up late binging, even though it will lower your ability to perform at work).

3. You need energy to mentally process, so to be a high performer at work, you need to pattern your life to have max energy at work. So exercise and eat well to be energetic between 9-5. This might mean addressing general neediness, otherwise you will keep doing destructive behavior outside work, that will harm your performance. You won’t go to the gym, won’t eat the healthy food because you are too busy addressing desperate pleasure.

4. If you don’t improve your general energy level, you will tend to overuse stress elevators, like caffeine and harsh self-talk, but over the long run that will impair your health, make you physically weaker, while also impairing accurate self-awareness (because it becomes too necessary for you to believe good things about yourself even if false).

5. Your learned approaches to solving problems, aka getting rewards, have to be trained by you. Dopaminergenic systems that deliver ‘drive’ when you are confident the outcome will result in success. You need to learn how to approach challenges at work to get immediate rewards of serotonin and oxytocin. For example, how to approach your work to get approval from colleagues, or how to approach your work to receive intrinsic reward like problem simplification (which rewards by lowering the mental burden of the problem), or aesthetic beauty creation etc...

You might see in your life several problem behaviors through this model, but one that stands out to me is related to #5, you don’t have effective strategies to get more immediate reward out of hard problems. That’s typical, especially in people with high standards. When training people to be more effective, I teach them to break up hard problems into steps, but also to appreciate the process of working on problems from different angles. Because then they start to see short term rewards that they can achieve in the process of working toward their goals... What is your process for analyzing the problem? What is your process for collaborating on the problem with others? What tools do you use? This way you will find that a hard problem, that initially looks like a barren forest with a single reward after a 100 miles of journey, is transformed into many pockets of orchards where you can look for trees with low hanging fruits of short term pleasure... Each day you get up and look for fruit, you can sustain yourself on a single hard problem for years like this, speaking from personal experience.