Identity is a crutch.
"I don't like seafood."
What likely was just an unfamiliar food experience as a child warped into something far more sinister.
Our brains love to rationalize. We like to think that what we think determines what we say. But more often, what we say determines what we think. We act, then our internal press secretary comes up with reasons for why we acted.
A series of uncomfortable experiences with seafood became a story I told myself and others. A preference. Preferences become part of our identity. Not liking seafood became part of my identity.
Our brains like to avoid pain. It's the default state. This is useful for survival. But it gets out of control.
Josh Waitzkin in The Art of Learning talks about the entity vs incremental mindset for learning. When your pursuit of intelligence is identity-based, you have an entity-based mindset. In high school, I didn't want to put in the effort to learn physics. So what did my mind do? Instead of doing the work, I created stories in my mind about how "I wasn't good at physics" and how "I didn't want to be an engineer." All identity-based. I thought of myself as smart and my environment reinforced that belief over and over again. I couldn't accept that maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was given my struggles with physics. Cognitive dissonance, promptly but half-heartedly resolved.
We create parts of identity purely to help our brains rationalize actions borne out of their ever-present inclination to avoid pain.
Once we're aware of this, we can watch our brains do this in real time. We can slowly retrain ourselves, but it's not easy. We have two types of thinking: fast and slow. The slow brain is rational, the fast intuitive. Most of the times we rationalize, it's instinctive. We can make a plan of attack with our rational brain, but it's up to the fast brain to execute. And the fast brain always moves faster and less rationally than the slow one. It's why we can always see the answer right in front of us after the fact or when we're just a third-party observer, but when we're in the moment we're blind.
What seems to work for me is to be as present as possible. When you cultivate awareness, you can pay attention to your "inner ripples" as Josh Waitzkin likes to call them. Catch your brain trying to rationalize pain-avoidance by lumping your actions into the bubble of identity. Disconnect yourself from that action by observing it. You cannot be that which you observe.
Identity helps us survive. But it also works against us. Be present so you can have the best of both worlds.